Hillary Clinton says Trump should be impeached and ‘removed from office’

‘Members of Congress who joined him [Trump] in subverting our democracy should resign, and those who conspired with the domestic terrorists should be expelled immediately’

File image: Hillary Clinton joins the growing calls to impeach President Trump  (Getty Images)

Hillary Clinton has backed moves to impeach Donald Trump for a second time, but with a warning that the deeper problems that led to the Capitol riots will still remain.

With the House of Representatives set to vote on the motion of impeachment on Wednesday, Ms Clinton penned a scathing op-ed for the Washington Post in which she hit out at members of Congress who supported Mr Trump and suggested white supremacy was the underlying problem that led to last Wednesday’s unrest.

"Removing Trump from office is essential, and I believe he should be impeached. Members of Congress who joined him in subverting our democracy should resign, and those who conspired with the domestic terrorists should be expelled immediately,” said Ms Clinton.

House Democrats introduced their impeachment motion against President Trump on Monday, and if the house votes in favour, Mr Trump will be the first president in history to be impeached twice.

Stressing the need to do more soul searching beyond laying the blame with the president, Ms Clinton wrote that impeachment “alone won’t remove white supremacy and extremism from America”.

She said that while Mr Trump was in power, he awarded white supremacists with important positions and by the time he lost November’s election “he had whipped a dangerous element of our country into a frenzy”.

Ms Clinton, a former secretary of state and the 2016 presidential candidate for the Democrats, drew a comparison with the criticism of the government in the 9/11 Commission Report, stating that both incidents were not prevented due to "failure of imagination”.

“Almost 20 years later, we are living through another failure of imagination — the failure to account for the damage that can be done to our nation by a president who incites violence, congressional leaders who fan the flames, and social media platforms that sear conspiracy theories into the minds of Trump’s supporters,” wrote Ms Clinton.

Urging tech companies to do better in terms of controlling misinformation and hate speech, she said: “Twitter and other companies made the right decision to stop Trump from using their platforms, but they will have to do more to stop the spread of violent speech and conspiracy theories.”

The incoming Biden administration, she said, "will need to address this crisis in all its complexity and breadth, including holding technology platforms accountable, prosecuting all who broke our laws, and making public more intelligence and analysis about domestic terrorism”.