Washington,apr 23:
A group of Democratic presidential candidates were divided on Monday over whether Republican President Donald Trump should be impeached, reflecting a broader split in the Democratic Party over how to react to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian election meddling.Answering audience questions at a televised CNN event in the early voting state of New Hampshire, three Democratic 2020 candidates shied away from calling for Trump’s impeachment.Another, California U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, said Congress should “take the steps towards impeachment” but believed such an effort would likely fail.
Only one candidate at the event, Massachusetts U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, issued a full-throated call for Congress to try and remove Trump from office.”If any other human being in this country had done what’s documented in the Mueller report, they would be arrested and put in jail,” Warren said. Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and another 2020 hopeful – who was not at the CNN event – has also called for Trump’s impeachment.In the report released on Thursday, Mueller portrayed a president bent on stopping the probe into Russian meddling. But Mueller stopped short of concluding that a crime was committed, leaving it to Congress to make its own determination as to whether Trump obstructed justice.Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House, and some other Democratic Party leaders have been wary of impeaching Trump before the November 2020 presidential election.They believe there are not enough votes in the Republican-controlled Senate to remove Trump from office, and that such a move could play into his hands. They also remember Republican efforts to impeach former Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, which backfired politically.
