Florida Rep. Francis Rooney told CNN Friday morning he was "shocked" by White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's admission on Thursday that Donald Trump withheld aid to Ukraine over an investigation Trump wanted into Democratic servers.
"Whatever might have been gray and unclear before is certainly quite clear right now—that the actions were related to getting the Ukraine to do some of these things," Rooney said, adding, "Sen. Murkowski said it perfectly: 'We’re not supposed to use government power and prestige for political gain.'" Murkowski offered some blunt criticism of Mulvaney's revelations Thursday following his bombshell press conference at the White House. Mulvaney explicitly tied the hold-up of aid to Ukraine to an investigation into a baseless conspiracy theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, interfered in the 2016 elections by hacking into Democratic servers.
When CNN anchor Poppy Harlow asked Rep. Rooney if Trump's actions rose to the level of impeachable offenses, Rooney said he wanted to "study" it more and was looking forward to more testimony next week from U.S. ambassadors. "It's certainly very, very serious and troubling," Rooney offered.
Harlow responded that he clearly was "not ruling out the possibility that this is an impeachable offense" for Trump.
"I don't think you can rule anything out until you know all the facts," Rooney responded. "Every time one of these people testifies, we get more information about what was going on over there.”
Rooney also indicated that he backed some of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's criticisms about Trump's policies that "all roads lead to Russia," as she charged during a bipartisan meeting Wednesday at the White House that degenerated quickly, according to news reports.
"I've read some of that and I was skeptical of it, like most Republicans were," Rooney said, "but I've got to say—this business about the Ukraine server, which no one had ever heard about until it was mentioned recently, tells me, what, are we trying to exculpate Russia, who all of our trained intelligence officials have consistently corroborated that Russia was behind the election meddling, not the Ukraine?"
Harlow noted that it "sounds like you agree" with Pelosi's assessment.
"Well, there's a lot of things I've agreed with the speaker on," Rooney said.
Interestingly, Rooney is a strong backer of building Trump’s border wall and voted with Trump 96% of the time in the last Congress. But in the 116th Congress, controlled by Democrats, Rooney's Trump score has dropped to 76%. He voted, for instance, in favor of overturning Trump's emergency declaration to seize funds for building the wall and also supported banning drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Rooney is also a former ambassador to the Holy See, so he knows something about how diplomacy should be conducted.
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