If I ever get impeached, says US Prez
Washington : President Donald Trump said in an interview aired on Thursday the US economy would collapse if he was impeached. “I will tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor, because without this thinking, you would see — you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse,” Trump told the programme Fox and Friends.
Trump was responding to a question on his mounting legal woes after his former attorney Michael Cohen said under oath that Trump instructed him to commit a felony by breaking US campaign finance laws.
The US President then launched into a rambling statement on job creation and other economic progress he said had been made during his presidency and insisted Americans would be much worse off if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. “I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who has done a great job,” Trump said.
Trump has insisted he did nothing wrong after his longtime attorney implicated him in illicit hush payments made before the 2016 election, as experts warned the legal maelstrom swirling around the Republican leader could further threaten his presidency.
While the full implications for the real estate mogul-turned-President remain unclear, Cohen’s statements — and the prospect of more revelations to come — puts Trump in legal peril.
But the mercurial US leader appeared determined to ride out the latest storm. After first accusing Cohen of making up “stories” to cut a plea deal, he then tweeted that Cohen’s actions were “not a crime,” and went further saying they were “not even a campaign violation”.
Trump said the hush payments were financed with his own money — to which Cohen had access — and that while he had no knowledge of them at the time, he had since been fully transparent.
“My first question when I heard about it was, “Did they come out of the campaign?”, because that could be a little dicey,” he said of the payments — believed to have been made to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. “But they didn’t come out of the campaign,” he said. “They came from me and I tweeted about it.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, is said to be “more than happy” to speak to the inquiry into alleged collusion with Russia. He is ready to “tell everything about Trump he knows,” his personal lawyer, Lanny Davis, said.