President Donald Trump is reportedly seeking to have the two impeachments from his first term expunged from the congressional record through a resolution.
“It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump said when asked about the resolution in a phone call, The Wall Street Journal reported. “It was a rigged deal—it was a whole rigged situation.”
The Democrat-led House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump in December 2019, saying he had wrongfully tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, by delaying aid money, into investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden for alleged corruption involving millions of dollars.
Zelenskyy said at the time he felt no pressure from Trump, and he opened no investigation into the Bidens, and the aid money was delivered on time before the end of the 2019 fiscal year.
In January 2021, the Democrat-led House impeached Trump again, claiming he incited the January 6 Capitol incursion.
At a “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House on January 6, the president stated, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
The Senate voted not to convict Trump following both House impeachments.
The Wall Street Journal reported, “The effort to ‘expunge’ Trump’s impeachments fits with a wider campaign to erase black marks on his record. His lawyers are trying to overturn his criminal conviction for falsifying records to cover up hush money paid to a porn star, and they are seeking to reverse unfavorable civil rulings.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson told the news outlet that he has discussed the resolution with Trump.
“I think it makes a lot of sense the more the evidence comes out, the more we know they really were sham impeachments,” Johnson said, noting that the conversations about the resolution picked up about a month ago. “We were saying it at the time, now we know. And they make a very compelling case that it should be expunged from the record, because it was a hyperpartisan attack job.”
Just the News reported in April that Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz argued that Trump does have grounds to have the 2019 impeachment expunged based on documents recently released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“It’s never been done. I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be done,” said Dershowitz, who represented Trump during the Senate impeachment trial in early 2020.
“But I have to tell you one thing, history will expunge it already based on your work, because what you’ve done is you’ve created so much doubt about the credibility of the main accuser that it’s hard for anybody to sit back now and say that was a just, a just impeachment, but I don’t know that there’s going to be any remedy,” he added. “Maybe we should try to create one.”
Hellbound and Down 