'He'd do it again': Former Obama official says Trump must be impeached

Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, the author of the new bestseller “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump,” believes the GOP notion that Congress can responsibly let voters decide if President Trump’s conduct is impeachable at the ballot box “makes no sense.”

“This is the election that the president was trying to cheat in, the 2020 election,” Katyal said during an interview on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery.”

Asked about the dangers of pursuing impeachment when there is no national consensus on whether it is the right course of action, Katyal said Democrats have no choice. “This is the election that he said, even after he got caught, he’d do it again,” Katyal said, referring to allegations that Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. “He’d do it with China. It’d be one thing if he expressed contrition. But this is kind of like, if I get caught cheating in a game of Monopoly with you, I don’t think the answer to that is for me to say, ‘Oh, let’s just play another game of Monopoly and see who wins.’”

Katyal served as acting solicitor general in the Obama administration and is now an attorney in private practice as well as a national security law professor at Georgetown University. He told “Skullduggery” the idea that it is appropriate to just let voters decide Trump’s fate is what he set out to “demolish” in his new book.

“If you don’t remove this president, he has said he will do it again. I think we have to worry about exactly that,” Katyal said. “That’s the whole point. You can’t just let this conduct go unpunished.”

Democrats, he said, would never defend a sitting president using the office to press a foreign government to investigate a political rival. “If this were President Obama who did this, or Elizabeth Warren or something, you would have a massive number of people, and I sure hope every Democrat too, saying, ‘No, this person has to go. That is completely unacceptable in our democracy.’”

Neal Katyal. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images)
Neal Katyal. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images)

Download or subscribe on iTunes: “Skullduggery” from Yahoo News

Katyal also issued a stern warning to fellow Democrats, asserting that just because 20 Republican senators haven’t yet announced their intentions on an impeachment vote, Democrats can’t passively wait for them to do so.

“That’s the standard way that the Democrats have been thinking for so long, and [they] have been so afraid to actually call the Republicans out,” Katyal said. “As the evidence is developed, as the House moves toward an impeachment vote, and then the information is presented in the Senate, I don’t know what’s going to happen … [but] every one of those 100 people came to Washington to make the country a better place.”

Katyal continued: “They didn’t come to make money. There are a lot easier ways to make money. And I think … when the evidence is listened to, and that’s what I tried to lay out in the book, there’s only one choice, which is to remove this guy from office.”

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