With a debate happening just one day after the House voted to impeach Donald Trump, it was sure to be a prominent topic. A number of the people participating in the debate, Elizabeth Warren Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar will be acting as jurors in the upcoming senate trial.
Klobuchar was the first of the candidates to score political points by hitting Trump on impeachment. The Minnesota senator drew significant applause when she described the current presidential predicament as a “Global Watergate.”
The candidates were asked why America should support the impeachment of Trump. Klobuchar answered that the founding fathers, “feared that a president would betray the trust of the American people for a foreign power.”
The Minnesota senator continued, “That is what happened here. This is a global Watergate. In the case of Watergate, a paranoid president facing election looked for political dirt on a political opponent. He did it by getting people to break in. This president did it by calling on a foreign leader to look for dirt on a political opponent.”
Klobuchar then said that Trump should allow members of his administration to testify. “Richard Nixon had his top people testify,” she said. We should be hearing from Mulvaney who is the one under oath, witnesses have said Mulvaney is the one who said okay, we’re going to withhold this aid to a fledgling democracy to get dirt on a political opponent. We should hear from Bolton who said his own staff to go see a lawyer after they met the president…If President Trump thinks he should not be impeached, he should be not scared to put forward his own witnesses.”
Watch a clip of Klobuchar below, courtesy of PBS:
.@amyklobuchar calls the Trump-Ukrainian scandal a "global watergate."
"If the President claims that he is innocent, why doesn't he have all the President's men testify?" pic.twitter.com/0VNC81R5RD
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 20, 2019