Trump reportedly told his impeachment lawyers he wouldn't resign after the Capitol riot and asked them, 'What fucking good did that do Nixon?'
Saul Loeb/AFP and Tom Middlemiss/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
- Former President Donald Trump was "dead set against" resigning after the January 6 insurrection.
- "What fucking good did that do Nixon?" he asked his lawyers, a new book says.
- The lawyers knew Trump wanted to keep open the possibility of a 2024 presidential campaign, the book says.
President Donald Trump was "dead set against" resigning when the topic came up with his lawyers on January 13, 2021 — the eve of his second impeachment vote in the House.
"What fucking good did that do Nixon?" he asked, according to the new book "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future."
The book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns describes the meeting between Trump, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and other attorneys just hours before the House debate was to begin.
Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in 1974 before his likely impeachment and removal from office in connection with the Watergate scandal. Nixon could have run for president again after resigning since he hadn't been convicted at trial, the lawyers reminded Trump.
"They knew Trump wanted to keep open the possibility of a 2024 campaign, and there could be no big, beautiful Trump comeback if he was found guilty," Martin and Burns wrote.
The House ultimately voted 232 to 197 to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, but he was acquitted by the Senate.
A year earlier, the Senate also acquitted Trump on impeachment charges for withholding $400 million in military aid from Ukraine and pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family.
But Trump's second impeachment was the most bipartisan in American history. Ten House Republicans voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol riot, while seven Republican senators voted to convict him.
The authors reported that even Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — the longtime Senate Republican leader — believed Trump had committed impeachable conduct.
"If this isn't impeachable, I don't know what is," McConnell reportedly told two aides on January 10, 2021.
McConnell also reportedly thought Trump had been "thoroughly discredited" by the riot, telling Martin that Trump "put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger."
But McConnell later backed down from that position after it became clear that other Senate Republicans wouldn't be joining him, reportedly telling a friend that he "didn't get to be leader by voting with 5 people in the conference."
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