Senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) on Sunday compared President Trump’s recent contacts with Ukrainian president Voldymyr Zelensky to former president Richard Nixon’s attempts to spy on Democratic opponents in the Watergate Hotel.
Trump has confirmed that he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company from 2014 to 2019. House Democrats began impeachment inquiry into Trump after it was alleged that the President may have withheld military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure Zelensky to conduct an investigation damaging to Trump’s political rival.
Klobuchar asserted during a Sunday interview on “Full Court Press” that while Nixon had ordered a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters to obtain dirt on his opponents, Trump “has decided to use his clout with world leaders, and try to do it on a global basis.”
“To me, this is just like Watergate. You had a president that was paranoid and an election was coming up and he wanted to get dirt on his political opponents,” she said. “There’s an argument it is even worse because [Trump is] messing around with national security.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar: “To me, this is just like Watergate. You had a president that was paranoid and an election was coming up and he wanted to get dirt on his political opponents.” pic.twitter.com/ylMhHRzJAv
— The Hill (@thehill) October 7, 2019
Klobuchar is scheduled to participate in the October 15 Democratic primary debate in Ohio. However, she has struggled to receive more than two percent of the prospective vote in polls, according to RealClearPolitics.
In the Watergate scandal, it was found that the Nixon administration was involved in a burglary attempt at the DNC National Headquarters. Nixon subsequently tried to use federal agencies to cover up his administration’s involvement and refused to release incriminating evidence recorded on tape in Nixon’s offices. The tapes were only released after the Supreme Court forced his administration to do so, following which Nixon resigned in order to avoid impeachment by Congress.
By contrast, Trump released the transcript of a phone conversation between himself and Ukrainian president Zelensky that forms the basis of the Democrats’ current impeachment probe.
