As the House of Representatives debated on the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump Wednesday, longtime CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer reached into his archive and resurfaced a Trump interview from Oct. 2008. The video shows Trump, then a private citizen and reality TV show host, praising Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), defending former president Bill Clinton, and saying George W. Bush should have been impeached for lying to the American people.
“You know, when she first got in and was named Speaker, I met her, and I’m very impressed by her. I think she’s a very impressive person, I like her a lot,” Trump said when asked what he thought about Pelosi.
Trump did have one complaint about Pelosi’s tenure as Speaker: that she didn’t aggressively act to impeach President Bush.
“But, I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It just seemed like she was really going to look to impeach Bush and get him out of office,” Trump said, adding, “which personally, I think would’ve been a wonderful thing.”
“Impeaching him?,” Blitzer asked.
“Absolutely,” Trump responded. “For the [Iraq] war. For the war.”
Trump then clarified that he believed Bush’s dishonest justifications for the Iraq war provided sufficient grounds for his impeachment and removal from office.
“Well he lied. He got us into the war with lies.”
He then commented on Bill Clinton’s 1998 impeachment for lying under oath about having a sexual relationship with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
“And I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant, and they tried to impeach him which was nonsense,” Trump said. “And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction. By saying they had all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.”
Trump was asked about this interview in the lead up to the 2016 election, where he again reiterated the magnitude of Bush having lied to the American people.
[image via CNN screengrab]
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