John Kasich becomes the first major Republican to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump. Kasich competed with Trump back in 2016 for the Republican presidential nomination and has been a frequent critic of the president’s, but has not supported impeachment, until now. He says acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s admission of a quid pro quo was the final straw for him. Here is what the former Ohio governor said, in his own words, today on CNN.
“This has been a very difficult 24 hours for me. The issue of impeachment is really big to me, and when I heard what Mulvaney said, the Chief of Staff to the president, it pushed me really across the rubicon. I’ll tell you why. Withholding military aid, vital military aid to a nation like Ukraine which has Russian troops inside its territory that’s threatened all the time, that withholding it so that a political operation can take place, investigate this thing around the server. We’re going to withhold the aid until you do that. To me, it’s — it’s totally inappropriate. It’s an abuse of power. Now, I know that there are presidents that will withhold aid because they have policy differences. But this is not a policy difference. And so my view is that – look, I fought with people on the air about, is there a quid pro quo, and business rise to the level of impeachment. Now I believe it does and I say it with great sadness…. This has been excruciatingly hard but this behavior, in my opinion, cannot be tolerated and action has to be taken.”