After tweeting last week that her “greatest desire was to lead Donald Trump right into impeachment,” Maxine Waters said Monday that Trump’s actions are leading him to possible impeachment.
CNN reports that the California Democrat made her remarks to reporters at a news conference.
“I have not called for the impeachment yet. He’s doing it to himself,” Waters said at the news conference when asked about her previous statement. “Let me just say that the statement I made is a statement in response to questions and pleas that I’m getting from many citizens across this country. What are we going to do? How can a president who is acting in the manner that he’s acting?”
Waters expressed concern about Trump’s travel-ban order, “the way he’s talking about Muslims” and his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I think that he’s leading himself in that kind of position, where folks are going to ask, ‘What are we going to do?’ and the answer is going to be, ‘Eventually we’ve got to do something about him,’” Waters said. “We cannot continue to have a president who’s acting in this manner. It’s dangerous to the United States of America.”
In a later appearance on CNN Newsroom, Waters was asked to explain why she was mentioning impeachment just two weeks into Trump’s presidency.
“First of all, just let me say, these are not normal times,” Waters said. “We have a president who has created chaos and division, so many questions about his conflicts of interest, lies about whether or not he’s separated himself from the businesses he claimed he would separate himself from, not showing his tax returns, putting his arms around Putin, defending Putin, working with the Kremlin.
“I want to know, and a lot of people want to know, was there collusion between Putin and the Kremlin and this president as they hacked our DNC and our DCCC and some of us” she continued. “We want to know how deep does that go.
“This man is questionable,” Water added. “And because we have suspicions—many of us—about who he is, where he came from, what his actions are and all of his conflicts ... we have to find out more about him, and some of that leads to the possibility of impeachment.”
A White House official who would speak to CNN only on background said that the congresswoman’s comments were an example of “extreme rhetoric from a completely out-of-touch party.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who was also at the news conference Monday, said that impeachment would be an issue only if Trump broke the law.
“I’m not here to talk about impeachment today,” Pelosi said. “Any of the things that the congresswoman said are grounds for displeasure and unease in the public about the performance of this president, who has acted in a way that is strategically incoherent, that is incompetent and that is reckless. And that is not grounds for impeachment.”
Pelosi added, “When and if he breaks the law, that is when something like that would come up, but that is not the subject of today.”
Read more at CNN.