A ‘loser’? Trump attacks critical GOP congressman
President Donald Trump responded to a Republican House member’s call for impeachment Sunday by labeling the lawmaker from Michigan a “loser” who seeks to make headlines.
On Saturday, Rep. Justin Amash said in a tweet that Attorney General William Barr “deliberately misrepresented” the report from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, which he said showed Trump “engaged in impeachable conduct.” Amash said he made that statement “only after having read Mueller’s redacted report carefully and completely.”
Trump tweeted Sunday he was “never a fan” of Amash, whom he called “a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy.”
“Justin is a loser who sadly plays right into our opponents hands!” he wrote in a tweet.
The president said he did not believe Amash had actually read Mueller’s report. He claimed the report was “strong on NO COLLUSION” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin and “ultimately, NO OBSTRUCTION.” At the same time, he slammed the report as “biased” because it was “‘composed’ of 18 Angry Dems who hated Trump.”
But Mueller’s report explicitly said that the investigation looked into 10 potentially obstructive acts and that the evidence did not clear the president. Rather, it said, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” and it punted that decision to the attorney general. Barr and thendeputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided not to bring charges.
The Mueller report also found that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in “sweeping and systematic fashion” with “a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton” and a hacking operation that sought to uncover information damaging to Clinton.
The report concluded that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” but it did not find “that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference.”
Because the report did not find evidence of a conspiracy, Barr has argued the president could not have obstructed justice because there was no crime to cover up in the first place. Trump made a similar argument Sunday.
Many legal experts have disputed the assertion that obstruction requires an “underlying crime.” And Amash said he believed Mueller’s report showed that Trump’s acts had “all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.”
Amash also argued that impeachment “does not even require probable cause that a crime (e.g., obstruction of justice) has been committed; it simply requires a finding that an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct.”