Mark Wilson/Getty Images White House Trump: People will ‘revolt’ if he’s impeached

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that there would be chaos across the country if he were impeached.

“I’m not concerned, no,” the president told Reuters reporters about his potential impeachment during an interview in the Oval Office. “I think that the people would revolt if that happened.”


Trump brushed aside the latest assertions from federal prosecutors that during the 2016 election he coordinated and directed Michael Cohen’s efforts to silence women who claimed they had affairs with him, in violation of federal campaign finance law.

On Friday, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York revealed more details behind the charges against Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer. Prosecutors allege that Cohen paid off the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, during the final weeks of the presidential campaign in coordination with and directed by Trump himself — potentially meaning the president could be charged with a felony, although legal experts say that this is unlikely to occur while he’s in office and that convicting Trump is far from a done deal.

The president also said if there were any laws violated by the hush money payments, it was Cohen’s fault, not his.

“Michael Cohen is a lawyer,” Trump said. “I assume he would know what he’s doing.”

But Trump told reporters in April that he was not aware at all of the $130,000 payment to Daniels.

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In the Reuters interview on Tuesday, the president also scoffed at prosecutors’ claims that individuals in his campaign had contact with Russian officials during and after the 2016 election, despite earlier pronouncements that no such contacts had occurred.

“The stuff you’re talking about is peanut stuff,” he said.

Previously, Trump repeatedly denied suggestions that his campaign, to his knowledge, had any contacts with Russians during the campaign.

“No. Nobody that I know of,” Trump said in February 2017, not long after he was sworn in to office. “I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”

Since then, he has criticized the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose work informed some of the New York-based prosecutors’ charges, as a “witch hunt” and denied that anyone on his campaign colluded with Russian officials in that country’s meddling in the 2016 election.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said Trump’s role in Cohen’s payments would be an “impeachable offense” and said that Congress would need to examine the details. Nadler has previously tried to tamp down pushes from the Democratic Party’s base to file impeachment charges against the president, a move that would originate in his committee.

Trump and his political allies have previously predicted calamity if Trump were to become the third president to be impeached in American history.

Under the Constitution, only a simple majority in the House of Representatives is needed to bring impeachment charges, which could occur once Democrats retake the House in January. But it would take 67 senators to convict the president of any allegations and to remove him from office. A conviction appears unlikely, given that Republicans will hold a 53-to-47 majority in January and that both presidents previously impeached by the House — Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton — were acquitted by the Senate.