U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett is making the case for her run for U.S. Senate in Texas, taking her campaign message across the state to voters. One of her of many selling points in the election is the role she would play in a potential impeachment of President Donald Trump.
“He has stated over and over and over, if the Democrats, get power, they’re gonna impeach me. He knows that he has consistently violated the law, and he knows that he should be impeached,” Crockett told theGrio during a wide-ranging interview.
Days after his controversial military strikes in Venezuela on Jan. 3, Trump warned House Republicans, “You got to win the midterms because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”
“He knows that he should not only be impeached, but he should be removed from office,” said Crockett, a former civil rights attorney and public defender.
Donald Trump made history during his first term in office when he became the first U.S. president to be impeached twice in the U.S. House of Representatives. His first impeachment related to his alleged efforts to pressure Ukraine to aid his 2020 re-election campaign, while his second impeachment came after he sought to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, resulting in thousands of his supporters violently attacking the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. The U.S. Senate failed to convict Trump during both impeachment trials.
“[That] is why it’s so important that we flip this seat. He should have been disqualified from running again,” Crockett told theGrio.
The U.S. congresswoman suggested the reasons to impeach Trump are plentiful if Democrats were to win back majority power in November. Most recently, the Trump administration alarmed Democrats, civil rights leaders and voting rights groups after the FBI seized the 2020 election ballots and other materials in Fulton County, Georgia. The diverse county, which has a majority Black and Brown electorate, played a key role in Trump’s shocking loss in Georgia.
When asked about what she believes is Trump’s ultimate goal with the election data from Fulton, Crockett said, “To stay in power, whatever that means by any means necessary is what I think people should understand about Donald Trump.”
The Trump administration has sought to obtain election-related records and data, including voter registration lists, from every state and Washington, D.C., raising alarm among advocates who point out that the administering and oversight of elections belong to states. While Democratic-controlled states have resisted, resulting in legal battles, Republican-led states have complied.
“He doesn’t care about the law, he doesn’t care about the Constitution, he doesn’t care about the people that he’s supposed to serve. He only cares about his bottom line, and that is staying in power,” she argued.
Crockett explained, “So, it’s not just Fulton County. This is a scheme of his, right? He was able to get Texas to send the voter rolls up to him…He had [U.S. Attorney Pam] Bondi, which is him, tell Minneapolis, ‘Hey, we will leave Minnesota, and stop killing y’all if you just send your voter rolls.’ Can you imagine that?”
The U.S. Senate candidate also called out Trump’s aggressive ICE operations, which have resulted in several alleged cases of abuses and two fatal killings of U.S. citizens.
“They’re killing people in the middle of the street with no accountability. They’re terrorizing these communities, they’re maiming people, they’re incarcerating people against their constitutional rights, and they say, all you gotta do is send us your voter rolls,” said Crockett, who also called out Trump’s presidential actions related to congressional maps in an effort to hold Republican control in Congress.
“For anybody that wants to play crazy and pretend like he is not taking a by-any-means-necessary stance, then you just aren’t paying attention. Because this is after he has decided that he will illegally gerrymander states, as many of them as possible so that he can stay in power, by any means necessary.”
Watch theGrio’s full interview with Jasmine Crockett in the video above.
