Trump Threatens Democrats, Says GOP House Will Impeach Dem President

President Donald Trump accused House Democrats of "trivializing" impeachment at a Friday Oval Office sit-down with Paraguay's President Mario Abdo Benitez and warned that it would encourage a future Republican Congress to impeach a Democrat.

Earlier on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance two articles of impeachment against Trump for abusing his office and obstructing Congress.

Now that the Judiciary Committee has approved the two articles of impeachment, they go to the full floor of the House and require a simple majority vote to pass. If the House votes to impeach Trump, he will be tried on the charges of abusing his power and obstructing Congress in the US Senate.

In his Friday comments, Trump attacked the impeachment process as a "witch hunt," a "sham," and a "hoax."

"It's a scam, it's something that shouldn't be allowed, and it's very bad for our country," he said. "You're trivializing impeachment, and I tell you what, someday there will be a Democrat president and a Republican House, and I suspect they're going to remember it."

In early September, an anonymous whistleblower complaint lodged by a member of the intelligence community said that in a series of events culminating in a July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump used "the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election."

The complaint detailed concerns that Trump, days after withholding a nearly $400 million military-aid package, used the call with Zelensky to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The whistleblower's complaint has been corroborated by the White House's summary notes of the July 25 call, White House officials themselves, and the sworn testimony of several career diplomatic and national-security officials.

Multiple diplomats testified under oath that the Trump administration explicitly conditioned lifting the hold of the military aid to Ukraine on Zelensky publicly announcing investigations into Burisma and a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to benefit Hillary Clinton.

Trump also accused Democrats of cheapening the impeachment process at the annual NATO summit held earlier this month in London, England.

In a televised sitdown with French President Emmanuel Macron at the NATO summit, Trump said a Republican Congress would impeach a Democratic president, "because somebody picked an orange out of a refrigerator and you don't like it, so let's go and impeach him."

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