President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he thought the Senate impeachment trial was going “very well” for him, noting that his administration has not provided congressional investigators with any of the material necessary to make their case.
Speaking to reporters from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump directly addressed the proceedings, saying he was happy with what he’d seen thus far.
“When we released that conversation, all hell broke out with the Democrats because they say, ‘wait a minute this is much different than [what] shifty [Rep. Adam] Schiff told us.’ So, we’re doing very well,” Trump said.
The president then weighed in on why he thought his legal team had been so successful, appearing to openly admit that he and his administration had actively prevented Congress from obtaining material evidence directly relevant to the impeachment proceedings.
“I got to watch enough – I thought our team did a very good job. But honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material,” he said.
Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), one of the House impeachment managers tasked with arguing the case against Trump in the Senate, caught wind of Trump comments and immediately accused President Trump of confessing to and bragging about committing an impeachable offense.
“The second article of impeachment was for obstruction of Congress: covering up witnesses and documents from the American people,” Demings, a former law enforcement officer, wrote. “This morning the President not only confessed to it, he bragged about it: ‘Honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.’”
Throughout the impeachment inquiry, the Trump administration has stonewalled congress at every opportunity, refusing to produce any documents demanded by lawmakers and instructing current and former White House officials not to comply with demands to testify. The Clinton administration, by contrast, provided Congress with nearly 100,000 pages worth of documents and multiple allowed multiple witnesses to testify during the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton.
“Trump, who obstructed Congress by withholding documents and witnesses, just told reporters in Davos that the House doesn’t have the evidence, ‘we’ have all the evidence,” former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub wrote of Trump’s comments. “Given that one of the charges is obstruction, that’s as brazenly corrupt and cynical as it gets.”
https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1219952380986433540
Other comments were made in the same vein.
https://twitter.com/NatlSecCnslrs/status/1220025282381385729?s=20
[Image via SAUL LOEB_AFP via Getty Images]
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