Washington: US President Donald Trump slammed the impeachment inquiry Tuesday as a ‘lynching’, using explosive, racially-charged language to discredit the probe as a key witness who expressed concerns about political interference testified to Congress.
Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked the investigation as part of a broader partisan ‘witch hunt’ against him. However, Tuesday he used particularly inflammatory language to lay into his opponents, stating that they were seeking to impeach him ‘without due process or fairness or any legal rights’.
“All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching,” Trump raged, using a word that evokes the darkest days of America’s slavery legacy.
It should be stated here that than 3,400 African Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1968, and congressional Democrats, many of them black, reacted with collective revulsion.
“How dare you?!” seethed Congresswoman Barbara Lee on Twitter as she assailed the ‘disgusting and ignorant message’ from Trump.
“That is one word that no president ought to apply to himself,” House Majority Whip James Clyburn, the most senior black lawmaker in Congress, told the ‘CNN’. “I’m a product of the South. I know the history of that word. That is a word that we ought to be very, very careful about using,” the South Carolina Democrat said.
Few Republican lawmakers have openly criticised Trump for his comment, but Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican and occasional Trump critic who is up for re-election in 2020, spoke out.
“The word ‘Lynching’ brings back images of a terrible time in our nation’s history, and the President never should have made that comparison,” tweeted Collins.
Despite the White House’s decision to not cooperate with the probe, Democrats have pressed on, seizing a victory of sorts with the closed-door testimony Tuesday of Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine. His communications with other diplomats raised red flags about Trump’s pressure campaign against Kiev that is at the heart of the Democrats’ investigation.
Trump urged his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in July to investigate the US leader’s Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son, according to a summary of a phone call released by the White House.
Seeking help from a foreign country in a domestic election is illegal in itself, but a whistleblower complaint about the call made the more serious allegation that Trump also sought to condition nearly USD 400 million in military aid to Ukraine on such probes.
Taylor is a military veteran and career diplomat who served as US ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, and is now Charge d’Affaires following the ouster of ambassador Marie Yovanovich this year. Taylor could be one of the most consequential investigation witnesses to date.
Yovanovich testified to Congress two weeks ago, telling House investigators she was pushed out on ‘false claims’ that she had disparaged Trump.
AFP