‘We’ve seen enough’: LA Times board announces backing for Trump impeachment
US president should be held accountable for his ‘outrageous’ misconduct, says newspaper
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Your support makes all the difference.One of the largest newspapers in the US has come out in favour of the impeachment of Donald Trump for his “flagrant abuse of power”.
The LA Times said that the inquiry hearings had produced “overwhelming” evidence that the president had “perverted US foreign policy for his own political gain”.
Mr Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine to investigate his rival Joe Biden was “outrageous and corrosive of democracy”, it added.
The editorial also argued that the president should face articles of impeachment over his obstruction of both the ongoing House inquiry and the Trump-Russia investigation by FBI special counsel Robert Mueller.
“We’ve seen enough,” the paper's editorial board announced on Saturday. “Trump should be impeached”.
The board said that they initially harboured concerns that impeachment would be divisive and would inevitably result in Mr Trump being acquitted by the Senate.
However, the last two months of evidence was “more than sufficient to persuade us that he should be impeached”, it added.
“Witness after witness testified that the president held up desperately needed, congressionally approved aid to Ukraine to extort a personal political favour for himself,” the ten-person board said.
“In so doing, Trump flagrantly abused the power of his office.”
The LA Times concluded that the whistleblower’s complaint had been “vindicated” by the reconstructed transcript of the president’s phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on 25 July.
It also suggested that Republicans should consider “abandoning their lockstep loyalty to Trump and looking at the facts”.
The board asked: “If the president was willing in this case to subvert US foreign policy for personal and political gain, why wouldn’t he feel emboldened to do it again?”
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