Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.) on Sunday said that President Donald Trump "will be impeached" and criticized her party for not making his removal from office a "central issue" while taking their electoral case to the American people.
"I believe, of course, that this president can be impeached, will be impeached, and certainly has committed the high crimes and misdemeanors that is [sic] identified by the Constitution as such that would qualify him for impeachment," Waters said on MSNBC.
Waters appeared on the network to discuss the fallout from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's guilty plea in federal court last Tuesday. Cohen also implicated the president in a potential campaign finance violation as part of hush payments to women claiming to have had affairs with Trump. Also on Tuesday, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of eight charges in a tax fraud case.
Waters, who released a statement last week saying the new developments would lead to "real articles of impeachment," told MSNBC that people are starting to realize there is "something real about all of this."
Waters has risen to national prominence as one of the Trump administration's fiercest critics, calling for Trump's impeachment for more than a year and encouraging fellow citizens to harass Trump administration figures in public. She took an implicit shot at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and other leading Democrats who have resisted making impeachment threats as they seek to take the House in the 2018 midterm elections.
"I've been talking about impeachment for a long time," Waters said. "My party has not made this their central issue. They have insisted they need to talk about the issues that they believe are central to the concern of the American people ... I've been saying we can walk and chew gum at the same time. There is no reason why we shouldn't talk about those issues, but allow the American people to understand that we know something is going on."
"Don't forget, this president said he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot down Fifth Avenue and I guess shoot somebody and still get away with it," Waters added. "So all I'm saying is that I think that we have a responsibility to talk about what is going on, to explain what impeachment is, and to see how the discussion goes."