Rep. Eric Swalwell Claims Airline Passenger 'Punched' Him While Demanding Trump Impeachment
Democratic California Rep. Eric Swalwell, fresh off a failed presidential run, said Sunday that he was recently punched in the shoulder by a person urging him to vote to impeach President Donald Trump.
Swalwell tweeted that the incident occurred on a United Airlines flight.
“A passenger boarding the @United plane I’m on just stopped in front of me, punched my shoulder, and said ‘you all better get your act together and impeach him,'” the fourth-term congressman tweeted early Monday morning EST.
A passenger boarding the @United plane I’m on just stopped in front of me, punched my shoulder, and said “you all better get your act together and impeach him.”
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) September 23, 2019
Swalwell’s encounter comes amid speculation that House Democrats are increasingly more likely to move to impeach Trump after last week’s report of a whistleblower’s complaint that the president made a “promise” to a foreign leader.
According to Politico, multiple reports accused Trump of pressing Ukrainian officials to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, whose business dealings in Ukraine during the Obama administration generated corruption claims.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that such a request by the president would constitute “the most profound violation of the presidential oath of office,” The Washington Post reported.
“I have been very reluctant to go down the path of impeachment,” Schiff said, but also acknowledged that “we very well may have crossed the Rubicon here.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has not publicly expressed support for impeachment, warned in a Sunday letter to “all colleagues” that “if the Administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the President, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.”
The president told reporters Sunday that he did indeed discuss Hunter Biden and “corruption” in a phone call with the Ukrainian president.
“The conversation I had was largely congratulatory. It was largely corruption — all of the corruption taking place,” Trump said, according to Politico.
“It was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”
Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, has denied his or his son’s involvement in any corruption and deflected blame to the president.
“You should be asking [Trump] the question: Why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader?” Biden said Saturday, Politico reported.
Swalwell, for his part, has voiced support for an impeachment inquiry, writing in The Atlantic on July 13 that the inquiry was necessary because “our democracy is worth saving.”
Regardless of whether House Democrats can successfully impeach the president, he is unlikely to be removed from office as the Republicans have a majority in the Senate.
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