WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump declared Friday’s House committee vote to impeach him “an embarrassment to our country” and refused to back away from the charge that first ensnared him in the scandal. Almost simultaneous to the vote, Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, turned up at the White House.
With a vote by the full House expected next week, Trump declared in the Oval Office that the Democrats had “made absolute fools of themselves” by moving ahead with impeachment. Trump stands poised to be the third president in history to be impeached, though it is all but certain he will not be removed from office by the Republican-controlled Senate.
“You’re trivializing impeachment when you use it for absolutely nothing other than trying for political gain,” Trump said as he sat alongside the president of Paraguay. “It’s a sad thing for the country but a good thing for me politically.”
Trump’s latest pushback on impeachment came a short time after Giuliani turned up at the White House. Giuliani, who has been deeply involved in the Ukraine dealings at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, has been expected to meet with Trump, who requested a briefing from the former New York City mayor on his recent trip to Kyiv.
Trump, who ignored a shouted question about his lawyer, also has urged Giuliani to inform the Justice Department and Republican senators about what he discovered in Ukraine. Giuliani did not immediately respond to a request for comment but tweeted that “The American people have already made up their mind on this #ImpeachmentScam. This is a SMOKESCREEN for the Obama-Biden administration’s corruption. It will soon be proven.”