White House Trump on impeachment: 'It's a dirty, filthy, disgusting word'

President Donald Trump expressed bewilderment on Thursday at the prospect that House Democrats could even consider moving to oust him from office, calling impeachment a "dirty, filthy, disgusting word.”

“I don't see how they can because they're possibly allowed, although I can't imagine the courts allowing it. I’ve never gone into it,” Trump told reporters of potential impeachment proceedings while leaving the White House on Thursday. “I never thought that would even be possible to be using that word. To me, it's a dirty word — the word impeach. It's a dirty, filthy, disgusting word.”


Circling back to whether he thought he would be impeached, he told reporters, “I don’t think so, because there was no crime.”

He returned to a flawed argument he and his backers have long put forth to dismiss the threat of Trump’s impeachment.

“You know, it's high crimes and, not with — or — it’s high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said. “There was no high crime and there was no misdemeanor. So how do you impeach based on that?”

Trump has frequently fallen back on the lack of charges stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation to argue against his impeachment, though his legal rationale is not solid. The phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” as a justification for impeachment is not defined in the Constitution. But constitutional scholars say that it likely conveys some violation of public trust in addition to possible statutory violations.

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Mueller suggested as much Wednesday in public remarks, when he confirmed that his investigation operated within a Justice Department policy barring the indictment of a sitting president. The DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel opinion “says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing,” he noted in remarks that emphasized his investigation had not exonerated Trump.

The special counsel’s comments prompted another wave of Democrats calling for the House to begin impeachment proceedings, an effort House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been attempting to beat back for months. She has remained firm in her opinion that initiating impeachment proceedings against Trump is still too divisive and has instead vowed to continue investigating the president.