Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.) called the impeachment inquiry into President Biden “sickening” and said Republicans are weaponizing the impeachment process.
“It’s sickening and it’s repulsive,” Phillips told NewsNation’s Dan Abrams Friday. “Once we start weaponizing impeachment as a political tactic in Congress, which is what’s happening right now, we’re really in trouble, and I’m not seeing even an iota of evidence that would make an inquiry even reasonable.”
NewsNation is a cable news channel owned by Nexstar Media Group, which also owns The Hill.
Phillips, who announced a 2024 White House bid in October, said the inquiry into Biden is different from the two impeachments of former President Trump. Phillips said on air Friday that he believes Trump is going to beat Biden, as polls reflect, which is why he is running against the current president.
The Minnesota lawmaker said he understood if people saw “a little bit of nuance” in Trump’s first impeachment, which found he solicited foreign intervention in the 2020 election. The second impeachment claimed Trump incited an insurrection against the U.S. government for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Phillips, who voted to impeach Trump for both offenses, said if inciting violence to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election results was not an impeachable offense, “I do not know what is.”
As for the inquiry into President Biden, Phillips said there “is not a shred of evidence,” and Republicans are “trying to find something.” He admitted that the President’s brother and son, who are wrapped up in the inquiry, “appear not to be very ethical people,” but said they are not the President.
The House formally approved an inquiry into Biden with a vote last week, a step Republicans hope will add legal weight to their demands. Phillips thinks the inquiry into Biden will hurt the president because “most Americans don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the news.”
He said they will see that an inquiry was opened into Biden and “that’s all they’ll know,” adding that people will know Trump was “a little corrupt, and so is the current president, which is not fair.”
In a separate interview with Semafor, Phillips said while he hasn’t seen evidence that Biden did anything wrong, even just having the inquiry opened “makes him unelectable.”