Maxine Waters Claims Trump Agreed to Lift Sanctions in Exchange for Putin’s Election Help, Admits She ‘Doesn’t Have the Facts to Prove It’
Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) on Monday said she still believes that President Trump conspired with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 elections despite lacking any evidence to support her claim.
While it is has been widely established that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation yielded no evidence that President Trump or anyone on his campaign coordinated with the Russians.
“I believe, even though I don’t have the facts to prove it, I believe that Putin wanted to lift the sanctions [against Russia],” Waters told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Tuesday. “He’s always wanted to lift these sanctions that were placed on him because of his interfering with, and incursion into Crimea.”
“And so I believe that they wanted to elect President Trump and Trump—I will always believe this—that he agreed that if he got elected that he would lift those sanctions,” Waters continued. “He would like to do it; he’s not been able to do it, but when [Republicans] talk about, ‘we’re just making things up’ and he talks about this as a ‘witch hunt,’ there are too many facts.”
Waters has a history of controversial statements regarding Trump and the extreme threat he poses to the country. In 2018 Waters publicly called on anti-Trump protesters to “harass” Trump supporters in response to the President’s immigration policies.
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters told protesters. The next day she said protesters will “absolutely harass them [administration officials] until they decide that they’re going to tell the President, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.'”
In an October CNN interview, the Representative said Trump should be in “solitary confinement.”
“Impeachment is not good enough for Trump,” Waters said. “He needs to be imprisoned and placed in solitary confinement.”
“But for now,” she added, “impeachment is the imperative.”
President Trump is currently the subject of an impeachment push by House Democrats due to his conduct regarding Ukraine. The House will likely vote to approve two articles of impeachment, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress respectively, by the end of this week.
