Washington, D.C. – Congresswoman Frederica S. Wilson has issued the following statement on the House vote to formally begin impeachment inquiry:
Today the House took the sad but very necessary step of voting for a resolution to formalize the rules for an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. It is only the third time in history that our chamber has taken such a vote, and we did so with heavy hearts.
“My Republican colleagues have for weeks called for a formal impeachment vote, but now that it’s a fait accompli, they don’t like it. They have falsely accused Democrats of denying Republican members of the committees leading the inquiry access to the closed-door depositions held in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) and literally violated the basic tenets of national security by storming the SCIF to promote their lie. They also have accused us of using the impeachment process to undo the results of the 2016 election, turning blind eyes and deaf ears to the fact that this inquiry is based on evidence that in 2019, Trump tried to shake down the president of Ukraine for personal gain.
“This flagrant abuse of power is exactly the sort of thing that our Founding Fathers sought to prevent when they included the impeachment clause in the Constitution. As we enter the more public phase of this process, it would do President Trump and his allies good to remember that we all have taken oaths to uphold the Constitution and no one is above the law. Republican lawmakers also should ask themselves why, if Trump is as innocent as they proclaim, they doth protest so much.”
