Former Republican Senator Slade Gordon said that the party members are committing betrayal to the U.S. and the Constitution as they refuse to admit that Donald Trump deserves to be impeached regarding the Ukraine scandal.
Gorton, who urged Richard Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate affair, quoted the famous “Facts are stubborn things” maxim by John Adams as he compared the two impeachment processes, and he warned today’s GOP against writing off the Ukraine investigation as a “partisan witch hunt.”
The ex-senator penned an op-ed in Monday’s New York Times, titled “My Fellow Republicans, Please Follow the Facts,” that urges Republicans to put the truth over their party.
Newsweek reports that Gorton challenged Republicans in both the House and the Senate to “wrestle with the facts at hand” instead of hiding behind “deep state” conspiracy theories. He expressed his shame at Republican congressmen like Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan as they “try to find some reason to denounce every witness who steps forward, from decorated veterans to Trump megadonors.”
According to the former senator, now 91, the Ukraine scandal involving Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and several administration officials is a clear-cut case that demands impeachment.
“It seems clear that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine was subjected to a shakedown—pressured to become a foreign participant in President Trump’s re-election campaign, a violation of the law,” Gorton wrote. He later cites Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, which express the Founding Father’s fear that a president could one day betray the interests of the country for his personal benefit.
Hamilton, Gorton wrote, warned that “an avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth” and that a president might “make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents.”
“Several credible witnesses have testified to the existence of a quid pro quo, including William B. Taylor Jr., the acting ambassador to Ukraine; Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the White House’s top Ukraine expert; and [EU ambassador] Gordon Sondland,” Gorton wrote. “Are they to be believed? Here’s my bottom line: That’s what an impeachment inquiry and a Senate trial are designed to find out. That’s why there’s a process under the Constitution.”
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