‘He will be impeached today,’ Val Demings says

Democratic Rep. Val Demings expressed certainty Wednesday morning that the House of Representatives will approve a second impeachment of President Donald Trump Wednesday afternoon.

“You’re absolutely right,” she told Morning Joe hosts in a morning interview on MSNBC. “We will impeach the President of the United States twice, the first time this has been done in history. But if we think over the last four years and the unbelievable behavior, the high crimes and misdemeanors, their attempts to steal an election, and most recently to incite a riot and to overthrow the government, this is all about accountability, holding this President accountable.

“He will be impeached today. The speaker has the votes to do that. I believe that the Senate, while we have heard a lot of rhetoric, I believe they can do anything that they have the will they can do,” Demings, a Democrat representing Florida’s 10th Congressional District in Orlando, said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will call the House of Representatives into session at 9 a.m. She expects a debate on articles of impeachment in the early afternoon and a vote around 3 p.m. Wednesday.

Demings, a retired career police officer who rose to become chief of the Orlando Police before entering politics, also blasted Republican colleagues who on Tuesday complained about now having to go through newly-installed metal detectors to enter chambers, and who reportedly gave hard times to Capitol Police administering security there.

“I really want to know all of their names,” Demings said.

She also said she was angry that colleagues have, in her view, abandoned their oath of office to defend the U.S. Constitution.

“They’ll go down in history for not supporting our Constitution, for helping the President in inciting a riot, and not supporting the rule of law. They’ll have to answer for that,” she said.

Demings was one of the leaders of Trump’s 2019 impeachment. She was an active and outspoken member of both of the committees that set it up, the House Intelligence Committee that investigated charges, and the House Judiciary Committee that presented the first articles of impeachment. Then she was a house manager helping prosecute the impeachment in the Senate, where Trump won acquittal from the Republican majority.

On Wednesday she applauded Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s recent statements, reported Wednesday by the New York Times, that he personally believed that this time Trump has committed impeachable offenses, and that he would allow GOP Senators to vote to convict if they wished to do so.

She said now that she’s been able to watch, in a safe place on the outside, video of what happened in the Capitol last week while she and other House members were trapped in the House gallery, she is even more disturbed.

“And anybody who watches that, I don’t care what side of the political aisle you are on, knows that all hell had broken lose, that police officers were under attack, that members of Congress who were just trying to do our job were under attack, that the Vice President of the United States was under attack,” she said.

“And those responsible, those in the crowd, the members of Congress, the President of the United States, must be held accountable. And that’s exactly what we intend to process today,” Demings said.