Rand Paul thankfully doesn’t agree with Justin Amash that Trump has committed impeachment worthy obstruction of justice. Here’s what he told the Huffington Post:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) was wrong to suggest that President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice and should be impeached for it.
“President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct,” Amash tweeted on Saturday.
But Paul, a libertarian-leaning senator from Kentucky who has grown close with Trump, said Amash got it all wrong. He called the Mueller report the “antithesis of libertarianism.”
“I actually think the libertarian position on the investigation is ― you know, libertarians, we’ve been very, very critical of the intelligence community having too much power, including congressman Amash has said, you know, really you should have to get a warrant before you get an American’s records,” Paul told HuffPost in a brief interview on Wednesday.
Paul said he believed the Mueller investigation was “an abuse of intelligence power consistent with what libertarians have been complaining about for a long time.” He further said he supported an amendment offered by Amash in the House “which says you have to have a warrant before you target Americans because foreign intelligence warrants have a lower standard.”
The Huffington Post quotes an anonymous Republican Senator suggesting that Amash isn’t doing this for publicity: “I’ve known him to be a pretty straight shooter. I don’t see him doing this just as a publicity stunt”
I just don’t see how it could be otherwise, really. It just makes such little since to me, especially when Bill Barr, a very respectable Attorney General, has said Trump didn’t obstruct justice.
And why side with Democrats when you know the Senate isn’t going to allow true impeachment to occur, unless you are trying to set yourself apart for a presidential run or something. Because I just don’t think there’s any way he wins his seat back in 2020 after taking a position like this.