Hillary Clinton said that the summary of a phone call, which is at the center of a whistleblower complaint against Donald Trump, “clearly indicates” an effort by him to “pressure” and “extort” the Ukrainian president.
“People can argue back and forth over what he might have done or what we think he did on a range of other issues, but this was in the pursuit of his official duties as president of the United States,” the former secretary of state said during a Wednesday appearance on “The View” along with her daughter, Chelsea. “That phone call very clearly indicates an effort to not only pressure, but in effect extort the president of Ukraine over much necessarily military assistance that had already been passed by the Congress.”
Following the release of the phone call summary and the emergence of the whistleblower complaint, Clinton also said that an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump “became absolutely unavoidable.”
“It would’ve been a dereliction of duty at that point for the Congress, led by Speaker Pelosi, to say, ‘Okay, another really bad thing. We’re just going to keep moving.’ They had to look at this,” Clinton said.
Later in the episode, her daughter Chelsea referred to a recent report about the lengths to which Trump wanted to fortify a border between U.S. and Mexico, which included his ideas to shoot migrants in the legs and put alligators and snakes in a moat.
“I think about the country they’re living in right now, and it’s not the country I want them to grow up in,” Chelsea said in reference to her children after bringing up Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty Is the Point” essay. “But the depths of the cruelty and the inhumanity towards migrants, toward people of color, toward our LGBTQ community, war heroes, women, just is not the America that I want my kids … or any of our kids and grandkids to grow up in.”
Watch the clip above.