WASHINGTON – United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) joined Shannon Bream for his first national television interview as a sitting U.S. Senator to discuss day two of the impeachment trial and our nation’s relationship with China.
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Partial Transcript below:
Senator Hagerty on the impeachment trial: “This is about politics plain and simple, Shannon. What has happened is the Democrats have chosen to stop the work of the United States Senate in the middle of a pandemic and recession, at a time when we’re going through a presidential transition. And what they’re doing is putting us through an unconstitutional, in my view, show trial. The remedy for impeachment is removal from office, President Trump is no longer the president. The Chief Justice isn’t presiding. President Trump is a private citizen and they are continuing to pursue this because really what the aim is, I think, to humiliate President Trump, and discredit his policies, and to shame the 74 million people, who voted for him, into conformity.
Sen. Hagerty on the Events of January: “Watching the videos is very painful. The violence that occurred that day was immediately condemned by me and every other member of the Republican Congress. I don’t know a single senator who didn’t condemn the violence. Over 200 people are being prosecuted under criminal statutes for the violence that took place that day. That’s the venue to deal with this— there’s civil laws, there’s criminal laws for private citizens to be dealt with, not an unconstitutional impeachment trial. We have serious work to be doing instead we’re going through a political partisan show trial.”
Sen. Hagerty on President Biden’s call with China: “I read the read-out and was pleased to see he has called out Xi. China is moving aggressively every day moving against us militarily, and diplomatically, and certainly economically in a very predatory manner. They don’t play by the same rules as we do. We have to be present and pushing back.
Sen. Hagerty on China’s lack of transparency on the spread of COVID: “They’ve been anything but forthcoming. You recall what happened back in January of last year, February. It was a huge cover-up. They silenced doctors, destroyed samples, they did everything that they could to prevent us from finding out what was happening. They knew what was going on and even halted internal air traffic: you couldn’t get a flight from Wuhan to Beijing, but they still allowed air travel from Wuhan to Italy and to North America. They’ve been hiding it and suppressing doctors and scientists. […] They’ve not been forthcoming from the very beginning My hopes haven’t been high for the W.H.O. and the progress they might make. The leadership there has been strongly linked to China and touting Chinese propaganda from the very beginning. I hope they get to the root cause of this. I certainly think that should happen, but I’m not very optimistic.