Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan said Saturday that President Donald Trump "engaged in impeachable conduct" by committing obstruction of justice, breaking ranks with a Republican Party that has rallied to the president's defense in the wake of Robert Mueller's findings in the Russia investigation.



Amash also accused Attorney General William Barr of "deliberately" misrepresenting the Mueller report and misleading the public through "sleight-of-hand."

Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller's report. 2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct. 3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances. 4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

In a series of posts on Twitter, Amash criticized members of Congress for being overly partisan and not upholding their constitutional duty, saying very few members had actually read Mueller's full report. He warned that partisanship risked eroding the nation's system of constitutional checks and balances.

The Republican representative, a libertarian who often goes against the grain of his party, said he came to the conclusion that Trump committed obstruction of justice after carefully reading the special counsel's full redacted report.

Amash said Mueller's report found multiple instances of Trump engaging in obstruction of justice and if he wasn't president, he would face indictment based on such evidence.

In fact, Mueller's report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.

Amash said that impeachment "simply requires a finding that an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct." He also warned that Congress risked encouraging misconduct by shrinking from the impeachment process.



While impeachment should be undertaken only in extraordinary circumstances, the risk we face in an environment of extreme partisanship is not that Congress will employ it as a remedy too often but rather that Congress will employ it so rarely that it cannot deter misconduct.



Amash's call for impeachment goes further than even many Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for example, has repeatedly said that she does not currently support impeachment because it would only divide the country.

