Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter, a four-term Democrat from Rochester, is calling for President Donald Trump to step down or face impeachment.
This follows Trump's refusal to publicly acknowledge Russian election meddling during his meeting on Monday with President Vladimir Putin. But now Trump is saying he misspoke and meant to say he saw no reason why it wasn't Russia that meddled. Shea-Porter joined Morning Edition by phone to talk about this news.
So now that Trump has reversed his remarks on the conclusions made by U.S. intelligence agencies are you still calling for his impeachment?
Well, did he actually reverse his comments? Because he went on to say it could be somebody else, it could be others. So I don't think he really did reverse that, No. 1, and No. 2, what is really bizarre and I'm just going to quote Representative King from New York,when he was talking about having Russia cooperate with Mr. Mueller's investigation. Mr. King says it would be like bringing ISIS into a joint terrorism task force. The whole event was shameful, disgraceful, something that we have never seen before. And John McCain said these were the deliberate choices of a president who seems determined to realize his delusions of a warm relationship with Putin's regime that any regard for the true nature of his role, his violent disregard for the sovereignty of his neighbors, his complicity in the slaughter of the Syrian people, his violation of international treaties, and his assault on democratic institutions throughout the world.
Now I deliberately quoted two Republicans because I wanted to make the point-- that this is not a Republican or Democratic issue. This is a deep, deep concern about what happened, what the world saw in Helsinki. We saw our president, who acted as if Putin was a great guy, a wonderful friend and truly a very decent man.
Well as you mentioned several Republicans in Congress have also spoken out against Trump's comments it seems unlikely though that they would support an impeachment. Do you see it as a real possibility?
Not yet. Not yet but I see it coming. I think that what we are learning each day has been incredibly disturbing. We just saw an arrest of a Russian agent who had close ties in the Trump world. And so we are seeing things unfold. And my concern is that we can't even get the Republicans right now to protect the Mueller investigation. Don't we at least want to know? And something happened yesterday on the floor which I think is stunning, when we know that the Russians have interfered with our elections, they just pulled money and zeroed out the funding for these critical grants that would help protect our election systems from cyber hacking. We also see that the White House has taken and ended the position of the chief cyber security expert for the White House. And there's just so much weird stuff going on that I think Republicans as well as Democrats are looking at this and saying, you know something is not right here.
And what actions would you like to see Congress take to move forward?
There are so many questions that I think the American people have a right to know something about this.
I said that we should find out why we don't have a cybersecurity expert at the White House. I would like to know why he can't say unequivocally that it's Russia. We heard him throw in that it could still be somebody else there. So I think the actions that have to be taken is that we have to continue to investigate, we have to pass something to protect the Mueller investigation. We should see those tax returns so we can understand why some of the more puzzling questions that we have about what is actually happening in his family and his financial ties. So there's a lot that I'd like to see us do.
