U.S. President Donald Trump’s unconventional firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday has sparked growing calls from civil groups for an impeachment investigation.
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“On Tuesday night, Trump gave another powerful reason for his impeachment,” Democracy for America said in a petition. It calls on the Congress to investigate and impeach Trump immediately.
“We have no love lost for Comey, but Trump firing him in order to shut down the Russia investigation is another in a long line of impeachable offenses. This has to stop. Congress must act — NOW,” the petition stated.
Comey recently testified before the Congress, revealing that the FBI was in the midst of investigating potential ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in last year’s presidential election.
Comey also was reported to have asked the Justice Department for more prosecutors and other resources to handle the investigation, just days before he was fired.
Another petition from the campaign “Impeach Trump Now” had received over 950,000 signatures since it was launched on Trump’s Inauguration Day.
It originally called for a congressional impeachment investigation into Trump’s violations of the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses of the U.S. Constitution, referring to Trump’s conflict of interest. “Now we are expanding the impeachment campaign in response to the president’s apparent interference with a criminal investigation by firing FBI Director James Comey,” the petition said.
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Trump’s decision Tuesday instantly drew comparisons to President Richard M. Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” in October 1973. At the time, Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor who had been demanding access to the president’s secret recordings.
Nixon’s actions prompted his attorney general and his top deputy to resign in protest. Later it sparked a national outcry that ultimately led to his resignation.
Critics say the Trump administration was trying to undermine the FBI’s investigation just as Nixon tried to stop lawmakers from learning the truth about the Watergate scandal. If that’s true, the obstruction of justice can be an impeachable offense.
In his letter firing Comey, Trump said the FBI director had told him three times that he was not under investigation, denying his action was done out of self-interest. Therefore, there needs to be a separate investigation into why Comey was fired before the obstruction charge can be proven.
In Nixon’s case, the Democratic Party controlled both the House and the Senate. As the current Congress is controlled by the Republicans, it’s not likely they will impeach Trump soon.
According to The New York Times, nearly every Democrat has called for a special prosecutor or independent investigations to examine Trump’s Russian ties. On the opposite side, after Comey’s firing, about 40 Republican lawmakers have questioned or asked for more details about Trump’s decision. Most Republicans either supported Trump or avoided the issue.
An investigation into Trump’s Russian ties, or even an impeachment, may have to wait until after the midterm elections in November 2018, Professor of Politics at Occidental College Peter Dreier wrote in Salon.
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“If the Democrats take back the House — with the power to undertake an honest investigation of Trump’s Russian connections and conduct impeachment proceedings — Trump might wind up being the second president, after Nixon, to be forced from office,” Dreier wrote.
But calling for impeachment now "is the appropriate response," Ted Glick, national campaign coordinator of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, wrote in a post. "We need to punch back."
“It is the call for impeachment, manifested in all of the various ways it can be put forward, that the people’s resistance movement needs to begin integrating into all of our other various issue-oriented and political efforts,” Glick, who co-founded Nixon’s impeachment campaign at that time, wrote.
Trump is already the least popular president in the U.S. history. The latest poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University found Trump’s approval rating dropped to 36 percent, a near-record low.
A March Gallup poll said Trump's approval ratings to be 39 percent — a historic low since Gallup started charting presidential approval in 1953.