On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said she felt vindicated about her early calls for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Waters said, “I had began to notice him and pay attention to him during the primary campaign in the way he conducted himself. And then my staff and I did our own kind of investigatory work to the degree that we could. We saw the connection between Putin and our president and Manafort and Papadopoulos and all of these individuals who were in this little group of people who were connected in some way to the oligarchs of Russia, to the Kremlin and to Putin. And we thought something’s wrong with what we’re seeing. And then, of course, when they hacked into our DNC, and this president refused to condemn them, to call them out. As a matter of fact, he defended Putin and said maybe it was him, maybe it was somebody else.”

She added, “So I’ve known that this president was a danger to our democracy, that he was not standing up for our democracy and that he was aligning himself in ways that I thought would be detrimental to us and disregarding the Constitution altogether. So, yes, I started early, and I wanted to create this discussion. And I wanted to get more involved in investigating him. And of course, the Mueller Report came out. It did not absolutely do what people wanted it to do. It was only when he made the call to Zelensky and the Ukraine, the new president that people began to see ‘oh, my goodness he’s using the power of the presidency to try and get this new president to come up with a phony investigation on Biden because of his son and the work he had done with a company there.’ And so this seemed to trigger a lot of belief that, yes, this man is dangerous. There’s something wrong with him — to abuse his power in that way absolutely flies in the face of the Constitution of the United States.”

She concluded, “So I was right that something was wrong with him, that he did not deserve to be president, that he was potentially dangerous, that he didn’t care about the Constitution. When I came to those conclusions early and starting the discussion, I wanted to sound the alarm that we better pay attention. And finally, it came to that. I really knew that it would because of his character that he would not stop.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN