Sen. Elizabeth Warren makes her case for the urgent need to impeach Trump, politics be damned

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was the first 2020 presidential candidate to call for the House to impeach President Trump after Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report was released Thursday. In a CNN town hall Monday night, she explained why impeachment is more important than politics, telling moderator Anderson Cooper, "There is no political inconvenience exception to the United States Constitution."

Warren read the entire redacted Mueller report right away, she said, and "three things just totally jump off the page. The first is that a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election in order to help Donald Trump. ... Part 2, Donald Trump welcomed that help," and "Part 3 is when the federal government starts to investigate Part 1 and Part 2, Donald Trump took repeated steps, aggressively, to try to halt the investigation." If any other American "had done what's documented in the Mueller report, they would be arrested and put in jail," she said.

Mueller decided he couldn't charge Trump with a crime, saying "in effect, if there's going to be any accountability, that accountability has to come from the Congress," Warren said. "And the tool that we are given for that accountability is the impeachment process. This is not about politics; this is about principle."

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"I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and so did everybody else in the Senate and in the House," Warren said. "If there are people in the House or the Senate who want to say that's what a president can do when the president is being investigated for his own wrongdoings or when a foreign government attacks our country, then they should have to take that vote and live with it for the rest of their lives."

Julian Castro has joined Warren in calling for impeachment and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said at her CNN town hall Monday that "Congress should take the steps toward impeachment," but other 2020 Democrats have been more cautious.