Updated at 5:30 with Cruz calling O'Rourke unfit to serve in the Senate.

WASHINGTON — Texas Democrat Beto O'Rourke, who is challenging Sen. Ted Cruz, said Tuesday that President Donald Trump's performance at a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin merits impeachment.

And he blasted Cruz for failing to denounce Trump, who shocked U.S. intelligence and law enforcement by taking the former KGB spy chief's word that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election.

Last week, the Justice Department issued indictments against a dozen Russian military intelligence officers for doing just that.

The Cruz campaign shot back by asserting that O'Rourke's stance on impeachment makes him "so radical and reckless that he is unfit to serve in the U.S. Senate."

"Standing on stage in another country with the leader of another country who wants to and has sought to undermine this country, and to side with him over the United States — if I were asked to vote on this I would vote to impeach the president," O'Rourke, a three-term congressman from El Paso, said in response to a question from The Dallas Morning News. "Impeachment, much like an indictment, shows that there is enough there for the case to proceed and at this point there is certainly enough there for the case to proceed."

(The two times O'Rourke had an opportunity to vote on impeachment of Trump, he voted against moving forward with that process: On Dec. 6, when the House voted 364-58 to kill a resolution from Rep. Al Green, a Houston Democrat, calling for impeachment, and again on Jan. 19, when the House voted 355-66 to kill another try from Green.)

Trump's stance at the Helsinki summit on Monday left Democrats and many Republicans appalled. Presidents always hang over midterm elections but the eruption of dismay over the summit took that to a new level.

O'Rourke's fresh comments in support of impeachment makes the Trump factor even more central to the Texas Senate contest. Last October, he expressed sympathy for calls to impeach the president but said conditions weren't yet ripe, with the special counsel probe under way. In April he said that he was ready to vote for articles of impeachment but, as on Tuesday, said he wasn't going out of his way to advocate that step.

"He is the only major party candidate in America to call for impeachment. Elizabeth Warren hasn't done it. Bernie Sanders hasn't done it. Nancy Pelosi hasn't done it. This is a fringe candidate in the Democrat Party," Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe said Tuesday afternoon.

.@BetoORourke looking to raise even more far-Left $$, yet again calls for impeaching @realDonaldTrump This partisan extremism may resonate great in Hollywood, but it doesn’t reflect the views of the vast majority of Texans. #RecklessAndOutOfTouch https://t.co/v4HH6TQ8gp — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 17, 2018

Cruz later retweeted this story and used it to hit his rival. "This partisan extremism may resonate great in Hollywood, but it doesn't reflect the views of the majority of Texans," he wrote.

Cruz has long struck a delicate balance when it comes to Trump. Despite their nasty rivalry in the 2016 presidential primaries, Cruz has become a prominent ally, though he has avoided being drawn into the controversies that regularly swirl around the president even as he has used his chumminess with Trump to court GOP voters.

The GOP's last two presidential nominees before Trump, Arizona Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, who is expected to win a Senate seat from Utah in the fall, both called Trump's behavior at the summit "disgraceful."

Like some leading Republicans, Cruz focused on Russian misdeeds while sidestepping any criticism of Trump. That approach has drawn searing attacks from Democrats accusing them of political cowardice.

On Tuesday, Cruz called Trump's comments with Putin a "mistake." But he said Trump critics have gone too far in labeling his actions treason. "It wasn't treason when Barack Obama refused to stand up to our enemies ... and it wasn't treason when President Trump stood at a podium and failed to condemn Russian aggression and interference in our election," he said, according to the Texas Tribune.

On the stump, Cruz has warned voters that Democrats would impeach Trump if they wrest control of Congress in November's midterm elections. On Monday night, Cruz told a CNN reporter that "we need to be acting vigorously to prevent Russian aggression. And I think it's a mistake to be apologizing for Vladimir Putin."

Cruz: “I think we need to be acting vigorously to prevent Russian aggression. And I think it's a mistake to be apologizing for Vladimir Putin.”



I asked if he believed the president apologized to Putin.

Cruz: “You have my statement.” — Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 16, 2018

That response was not good enough, said O'Rourke.

"I heard him talk about Russia but I did not hear him say a word about the president's conduct," he said.

The uproar stemmed from Trump's answer at a news conference with Putin. Asked whether he believes U.S. officials or Putin's denial regarding allegations of Russian cyberattacks in the 2016 elections, Trump said that while his own director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, pointed to Russia, "Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be."

Trump said Tuesday that he had misspoken and meant to say: "I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be."

O'Rourke collected an award for civility in politics on Tuesday morning and spoke with a handful of Texas reporters afterward. His co-honoree, Rep. Will Hurd, a San Antonio-area Republican, has been one of the most outspoken critics of Trump's handling of the summit.

Cruz mocked O'Rourke via Twitter, calling the civility award and support for impeachment an example of irony "amidst far-Left fury."

Hurd, a former undercover CIA officer, called the Trump-Putin news conference an exercise in "disinformation." He said Trump was "getting played." And he said that "there is nothing about agreeing with a thug like Putin that puts America First."

1 / 2Rep. Beto O'Rourke speaks at the Texas Democratic Convention in Fort Worth on June 22, 2018.(Richard W. Rodriguez / AP) 2 / 2Sen. Ted Cruz speaks about the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court during a TV news interview on Capitol Hill on June 28, 2018.(J. Scott Applewhite / AP)

O'Rourke lauded his friend across the aisle for putting country ahead of party loyalty.

"This is a moment that calls for unity and a nonpartisan response to a fundamental challenge to American security, to the integrity of our democracy, and our ability to move forward," he said.

Democratic congressional leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, who hopes to return to the speaker's chair if her party wins the House majority in November, have sought to tamp down talk of impeachment, calling it premature while a special council inquiry proceeds. That probe has netted indictments of Trump's campaign chairman, among others.

Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, has repeatedly called for Trump's impeachment, starting within four months of his inauguration. He has accused Trump of inciting racial violence, using the Muslim religion as a yardstick to ban travel to the United States, and bringing shame on the presidency.

Few Democrats have joined the cause. Republicans control the House and have blocked his efforts to bring articles of impeachment to a vote. The White House called Green "pathetic" in October.

Removing a president is a two-step process. First the House would vote to impeach, "which," O'Rourke said, "then sends this to the Senate for a trial where all of the facts, all of the evidence can be laid out."

As he sees it, the facts are already damning.

"You literally had candidate Trump asking the Russians over a live microphone to find the emails," he said, referring to Trump's call for Russian hackers to find emails supposedly lost from a private server used by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. "Later we learned last week thanks to the press — not the enemy of the people [as Trump has described news outlets, but] the best defense against tyranny — that later that same day, those Russian operatives began to search for those emails."

He noted that Trump fired the FBI director who was leading the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and "we know that he has ... bounced the idea off his Cabinet about whether he can fire Rod Rosenstein," the deputy attorney general who oversees the special counsel inquiry led by former FBI director Robert Mueller.

"There is the attempt to obstruct justice right now," O'Rourke said.

Trump's comments in Helsinki, openly siding with Putin in casting doubt on findings by U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI about hacking by Russian spies, he said, "underscore the importance of an independent investigation of what happened in 2016 and whether there was collusion, whether there was a cover-up of an attempt to collude."