Former Republican Florida Rep. Francis Rooney said Thursday that he’d vote to convict former President Donald Trump.
“Yes I would. I think it’s impossible to argue, given the pre-election through January 6th, the concerted campaign to to create the big lie that the election was stolen, which, by the way, all authoritarian rulers do the big lie thing,” Rooney told CNN anchor Jim Sciutto in a live interview.
“That’s how they get away with what they do. That it wasn’t foreseeable. And if it’s foreseeable, I think that he’d probably be impeached for it. And as you all just said on your TV, the fact they were asking him to stop it shows people must have thought he started it,” Rooney told Sciutto.
The House voted 232-197 to impeach the former president a second time, charging him with a single article of “incitement of insurrection” after a mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol building on Jan. 6. The mob infiltrated the building during a protest that turned into a deadly riot against the Electoral College’s certification of the election results.
The Trump campaign launched several lawsuits, alleging election fraud after the former president lost the 2020 presidential election to President Joe Biden. (RELATED: Trump Tells Mob Storming Capitol That Election Was Stolen, But They Should Go Home Peacefully)
Convicting Trump requires 67 Senate votes, including 17 Republican votes and the impeachment trial is scheduled to last the weekend and may end at the beginning of next week, The Hill reported.
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