Rep. Mike Johnson: Democrats used impeachment to criminalize support for Trump

by WorldTribune Staff, February 16, 2021

Though they knew they could not win in a Senate trial, House Democrats went ahead with their second impeachment of former President Donald Trump in order to brand all of his supporters as criminals, a Louisiana Republican representative said.

Rep. Mike Johnson

The ultimate aim of impeaching Trump a second time was to associate the 75 million Americans who voted for him with those individuals who on Jan. 6 breached the U.S. Capitol, Rep. Mike Johnson told Breitbart News.

“They really wanted to use impeachment as a vehicle because they wanted to equate all those tens of millions of Trump’s voters and all of his supporters and everybody who came to the rally, they wanted to equate all of those people with the couple hundred criminals who came in and ransacked the Capitol,” Johnson said.

Because of the way Democrats conducted themselves in their dogged pursuit of Trump, Johnson said impeachment will increasingly become a tool of partisan spats.

“You weaponized this. You turned it into a political weapon to be used by the majority party against a president they don’t like. You opened a Pandora’s box that we may never be able to close again,” Johnson said.

“What [Democrats] tried to do [is] to raise ‘cancel culture’ now to a constitutional level,” Johnson said, echoing remarks made on Feb. 12 by David Schoen, one of the three attorneys representing Trump who accused Democrats of using impeachment as a tool to disqualify political opponents.

“In short, this unprecedented effort is not about Democrats opposing political violence. It is about Democrats trying to disqualify their political opposition. It is constitutional cancel culture,” Shoen said.

On Feb. 13, the Senate cleared Trump of “incitement of insurrection,” a charge that his lawyers denounced as a “monstrous lie” that didn’t reflect the reality of what happened on Jan. 6.

“An insurrection — unlike a riot — is an organized movement acting for the express purpose to overthrow and take possession of a government’s powers,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in filings, arguing that the former president’s speech “was not an act encouraging an organized movement to overthrow the United States government.”


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