McCarthy: Trump’s Removal Would ‘Undo’ 2016 Election

On Sunday’s broadcast of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said removing President Donald Trump by impeachment would be an undoing of the 2016 presidential election.

Partial transcript as follows:

MCCARTHY: No, let me be very clear Margaret. What I’m open to, when you’re talking about the removal of the president of the United States, undoing democracy, undoing what the American public had voted for, I think that individual should come before the committee. He could come down to the basement. But he needs to answer the questions. We need an openness that people understand this. Remember what you’re asking. You’re going to change the course, the very fabric of democracy today, based upon someone wrote a written question of somebody that wasn’t even on the phone call, that had hearsay? Even though we all know what the transcripts said?

BRENNAN: Well Mike Pence would become president–

MCCARTHY: Are we really this far that we–

BRENNAN: –It wouldn’t undo the election results. If the president were removed–

MCCARTHY: Margaret, you–Margaret–

BRENNAN: –Mike Pence would become president.

MCCARTHY: Margaret you’re- Margaret you- Margaret you’re really saying today on national television, that somebody who was not on a phone call that you had the transcripts of the phone call, ‘no big deal’ just remove the President of the United States over a phone call?

BRENNAN: No, I’m just saying that it wouldn’t undo the election–

MCCARTHY: That is the difference of what I fundamentally believe.

BRENNAN: –it would put the vice president–

MCCARTHY: Yes, it would undo–

BRENNAN: –in the commander in chief’s spot.

MCCARTHY: No.

BRENNAN: OK.

MCCARTHY: President Trump was duly elected as the president United States. And–

BRENNAN: OK.

MCCARTHY: –I think democracy is too precious to think that somebody who’s not on a phone call, that cannot stand before the American public, and answer the questions, that somehow we would change the course of that? And we’re one year away from today. What are they so afraid of? What do they have to hide? Why wouldn’t they release one item? If you were a jury member, you have to look at all the information. You don’t just get the prosecutor to give you one line from an opening–

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