Ocasio-Cortez slams Democrats, says party's refusal to impeach Trump a bigger scandal than POTUS's 'lawbreaking behavior'
Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted her exasperation at her party's refusal to impeach President Trump. Her September 22 tweet, that has evoked twenty-six thousand retweets and over 130 thousand 'likes', reads: "At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior - it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it." Ocasio-Cortez represents New York's 14th congressional district that includes the eastern part of the Bronx and portions of north-central Queens in New York City.
Her tweet comes after Democrats accused President Donald Trump of "impropriety" during a phone call on July 25 with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. During the call, Trump asked Zelenskiy for dirt on Joe Biden with regard to the investigation into a Ukrainian company on whose board Biden's son was serving while his father was the vice president. According to Trump, Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to drop the investigation under threat of withholding U.S. aid.
The details about the phone call were leaked because of a whistleblower complaint from a person in the U.S. intelligence community, who either heard the call with Zelenskiy or read the call's transcript. Full details of the whistleblower complaint have not been made public with Trump labeling the allegations as "just another political hack job", adding that "it's always appropriate" to have such conversations.
Ocasio-Cortez outrage (that mirrors the sentiments of some Democrats) has put additional pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to impeach President Trump.
Representative David Cicilline, a senior Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee that is currently considering whether to impeach Trump, said the latest incident would be considered during the panel's deliberations. "This is deadly serious", Cicilline said on Twitter. "If the President does not allow the whistleblower complaint against him to be turned over to Congress, we will add it to the Articles of Impeachment."
However, Pelosi has been reluctant to agree to these calls for impeachment because such a move might harm her party's chances in the 2020 election if the Republican-controlled Senate did not convict Trump, which was the most likely outcome. However, she has said that Trump faces "serious repercussions" if the complaint was true since it had "grave, urgent concerns for our national security." Joe Biden was equally restrained, saying Trump "could be impeached" depending on the results of a House investigation.