A defiant President Trump signaled he will not cooperate with the Democratic Party's impeachment proceedings, insisting his telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was "a good call" and that he might read it aloud to Americans so they can see his point.“This is over a phone call that is a good call,” Trump, sitting behind the Resolute Desk, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. "At some point, I’m going to sit down, perhaps as a fireside chat on live television, and I will read the transcript of the call, because people have to hear it. When you read it, it’s a straight call.”
Trump spoke at a key moment in his presidency, with the Democrats preparing for a new, public phase in their effort to impeach Trump. Hours earlier, a bitterly divided House of Representatives had endorsed the impeachment inquiry, setting out rules for a process that is almost certain to overshadow much of the 2020 election.
But even after the vote, the president said he had no intention of taking part in the proceedings. Asked whether he would cooperate with the impeachment proceedings by honoring document requests and subpoenas, Trump responded: “You are setting a terrible precedent for other presidents,” he said.
...in a free-ranging, 80-minute conversation in the Oval Office with Washington Examiner reporters and editors, he insisted charges were nothing compared with those lodged against three other presidents to face impeachment.
“Everybody knows I did nothing wrong,” he said. “Bill Clinton did things wrong; Richard Nixon did things wrong. I won’t go back to (Andrew) Johnson because that was a little before my time," he said. "But they did things wrong. I did nothing wrong.”
― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Friday, 1 November 2019 01:50 (four years ago) link