WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th December, 2019) The House Democrats have yet to provide a single piece of evidence suggesting that US President Donald Trump committed a crime and there is no chance he will be removed by the Republican-majority Senate anyway, Virginia State Senator Richard Black told Sputnik.
"The impeachment process, so far we've had all these hearings, and all these promises that there's going to be blockbuster information. The hearings have been enormously boring. Only three percent of the American population watches the impeachment hearings," Black said. "They have yet to present one piece of evidence, even one piece of evidence that suggests that President Trump has committed a crime."
The House Democrats may be able to impeach Trump, the state senator added, but they do not have a single Republican vote.
"It's just going to be a Democrat vote [in the House] and there's no chance whatsoever that the president will be removed in the Senate so the whole thing is a farce," he said.
The senator also said the House hearings have been very unimpressive and the impeachment process is being abused.
"They're not following any particular legal rules and I don't think they're hurting the president a bit," he said. "It's really just a matter of trying to overthrow the government through using a mechanism that it was never intended for. But there's been no sign of any crime on the part of President Trump."
The impeachment inquiry was launched by House Democrats in September after a whistleblower complaint alleged that Trump abused his power and pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a July 25 phone call to investigate the possible corruption of his political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, who sat on the board of a local energy company, Burisma. In addition, Democrats believe that Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer, could have played an important role in the situation. Witnesses to the impeachment proceedings claimed that Trump also had concerns over alleged Ukrainian meddling in the US 2016 presidential election in favor of the Democrats.
"The only crimes worth looking into, and I don't know whether they're crimes or not, but the things that [former US] Vice President Biden and his son Hunter Biden did certainly have the air [of] corruption about them," Black noted.
Joe Biden, the senator noted, threatened to withhold $1 billion in American aid to Ukraine if Kiev did not fire the prosecutor who was investigating corruption in the Burisma company that his son was involved with.
"To me that is something that should be investigated by Congress but instead they're just listening to these opinions by rather silly minor officials from the State Department talking about how important they think they are and how much more they know than the President," Black said.
On Monday, the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees will hear presentations on the next steps of the impeachment process. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she had ordered the House Judiciary Committee to draft articles of impeachment against Trump.
