Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy said on Friday that it is “absurd” to call an impeachable offense President Trump’s tweet suggesting a delay in the presidential election due to potential voter fraud amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“The tweet was very ill-advised. If he wanted to get people talking about the potential of voter fraud then talk about voter fraud. Don’t talk about delaying the election,” the former chief assistant U.S. attorney told “Fox News @ Night.”
“The suggestion that it was impeachable is almost as absurd as the tweet,” McCarthy said.
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McCarthy argued against an op-ed from a prominent conservative stating Trump’s tweet is grounds for impeachment.
Federalist Society co-founder Stephen Calabresi said that Trump’s tweet suggesting postponing the election is “fascistic” and “grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment.”
“Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist,” Calabresi wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. “But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”
Calabresi noted that he has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including for Trump in 2016. He said he had defended the president against the Mueller investigation and against the impeachment investigation.
The Federalist Society is an influential conservative and libertarian organization that advocates for textualist and originalist interpretation of the Constitution.
McCarthy said the people concerned about Trump’s tweet should take a “deep breath” and recognize that the presidential election is decentralized into 50 state elections.
Furthermore, McCarthy rejected the idea of “talking down the election before it even happens and suggesting the mail-in process is going to delegitimize the result.”
“Let’s play the game before we start to worry about how it was carried out,” he said.
Claiming at Thursday’s White House briefing that the 2020 elections could be “fixed” and “rigged,” Trump again highlighted the risks of nationwide, universal mail-in balloting in stark terms — including by citing news articles and experts who have raised similar concerns.
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Before taking questions, Trump honored former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, noting that “unfortunately, he passed away from a thing called the China virus.” Trump also hit Democrats’ plans to keep schools and businesses closed, saying they would cause “probably more death” and economic destruction than coronavirus itself.