The House is "probably 100%" going to file articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the votes to proceed, but given the time it will take to mount a trial in the Senate, the president "will not be impeached and removed," Rep. Darrell Issa said Monday.
The California Republican also defended Trump against the outcry over his speech before a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol last week, telling Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo on "Mornings With Maria" that many of the people involved came prepared for an attack and Trump's speech didn't incite them.
"Nancy got back to being speaker by going to the left, by appeasing AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY) and the others, so I would assume she has the votes on a purely partisan basis, with one or two Republicans, to impeach the president," Issa said. "Of course, it is a very different story in the Senate, when constitutionally you can't impeach somebody who leaves office."
Pelosi and House Democrats are pushing for impeachment on charges that Trump incited the mob but Issa said the riots didn't happen because of what Trump said.
"Looking at how many of them came with tools and came prepared for violence, that is not the result of something that President Trump said that morning," said Issa. "That's as a result of some bad people who planned to do bad things well before that morning."
Issa also described the push to impeach Trump as liberals seeing an opportunity to "overplay" a misstep by the president. People need to be punished, he said, but Democrats are "trying to use it to imply that there's only one side that has violence and completely ignoring all of last year and the unchecked violence from the left."
Issa on Monday also commented on the push against the social media site Parler after Apple and Google blocked it from their app downloads and Amazon dropped it from its web servers, calling Amazon's move the "most disconcerting one."
"Can you imagine the tens of thousands of businesses that look and say well I've been paying Amazon Web because they were going to be reliable, that they're a utility," said Issa. "Now, suddenly they're a utility that if you say the wrong thing, you're going to get your electricity shut off."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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