Congressman Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) introduced a resolution to expunge former President Donald Trump‘s first impeachment.
Rep. Mullin says that he believes President Trump’s impeachment case was “an unimaginable abuse of our Constitution.”
According to the congressman, the resolution is meant to “confront the political absurdities on which” Trump’s impeachment was based.
Mullin’s full statement reads:
“This impeachment was an unimaginable abuse of our Constitution. Democrats in Congress put politics over country and threw all democracy out the window to unseat our president. This is exactly what our Founding Fathers warned against. While we cannot undo history, we can make it right. This resolution will bring credibility back to the impeachment process and ensure this manipulation never happens again.”
“President Trump was impeached over a sabotaged, perfect phone call. The hearsay of witnesses completely contradicted the plain text of the transcript. Facts did not matter, and Democrats in the House impeached President Donald J. Trump, nevertheless. Now, we have Joe Biden stoking international crises with public comments surrounding the same nation. And Democrats in Congress remain predictably speechless.”
If passed by the House, the resolution would call for expunging Trump’s 2019 impeachment, where Democrats charged him with attempting to leverage U.S. military support for Ukraine in an effort to convince President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate the Biden family’s corrupt financial dealings within the country.
The Washington Examiner notes:
Mullin’s resolution used the term “expungement” because that was the verbiage used to describe the withdrawal of a censure against President Andrew Jackson in the U.S. Senate, a spokeswoman for Mullin told the Washington Examiner. The Senate “censured” Jackson in 1834 and later “expunged” the censure in 1837 after the Senate “switched hands,” the spokeswoman explained.
The resolution mentioned the impeachments of former Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, saying they were “based on well-defined and specific criminal acts” and arguing Trump’s impeachment was based “entirely on secondhand knowledge” from an anonymous “whistleblower.”
Conservative Brief further explained:
In addition, the resolution says that Trump took “every reasonable measure to ensure that which transpired between the White House and Ukraine was as transparent as possible,” which included the unprecedented release of the transcript of a phone call he held with Zelenskyy in September 2019. Trump also had his administration released a redacted version of the whistleblower complaint, submitted anonymously, “so that all Americans could read it for themselves.”
Mullen is also running for the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Sen. Jim Inhofe.
It’s not likely that the expungement resolution would pass under the current Democrat-controlled Congress, but by introducing the bill now, it will be easier to re-introduce it if the GOP retakes control of one or both chambers following the November elections.
If Republicans do win back control, it is expected that Trump will formally declare his candidacy for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination if he decides he wants to run one more time.