Sen. John Cornyn becoming one of Trump’s most outspoken Twitter defenders from impeachment push
Texas Sen. John Cornyn has been one of President Donald Trump’s fiercest defenders on Twitter in the face of a formal impeachment inquiry sparked by Trump’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine.
Cornyn has directly tweeted or retweeted criticism of the inquiry more than 50 times from his personal Twitter account over the course of the past week. The tweets question the motivations of the whistleblower, who first called attention to the phone call, criticize Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who announced the inquiry last Tuesday, and accuse media coverage of the inquiry of being “disinterested in gathering the facts.”
The Twitter defense comes as scrutiny builds over a July phone call where Trump asked Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky for “a favor” to investigate former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, according to a rough transcript of the call.
Trump withheld $300 million in military aid to the Eastern European country prior to the phone call but has denied doing anything improper.
Sunday morning, Cornyn tweeted he was “skeptical of anonymous allegations” by the whistleblower, who was a CIA officer stationed in the White House at the time of the complain, according to the New York Times.
“There are reasons to be skeptical of anonymous allegations from someone with no personal knowledge and who has an ‘arguable political bias …in favor of a rival political candidate,’” Cornyn tweeted Sunday, quoting an Inspector General’s report about the whistleblower’s complaint that continued in the next sentence to say the bias did not affect the credibility of the report.
The Texas Democratic Party has also taken notice of Cornyn’s Twitter blitz, accusing Cornyn of “parroting” White House talking points on the impeachment inquiry in a Monday afternoon press release.
Cornyn will be up for reelection in 2020, and Texas Democrats have made flipping his seat a priority in the upcoming campaign.
Cornyn’s counterpart, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has been much more subdued online in his defense of Trump from the impeachment inquiry. Cruz has only tweeted or posted on Facebook a handful of times since Pelosi announced the House Democrats’ investigation.
Both Cornyn and Cruz have publicly said in recent days they don’t think the transcript or whistleblower memo amounts to an impeachable offense, and Cruz said on Saturday at the Texas Tribune Festival that he “would have wished the president have not gone down that road.”
Cornyn, meanwhile, has been mostly mum on his opinion of the conversation between Trump and Zelinsky, saying “it’s possible to find some of the conversation troubling” during a Wednesday conference call with reporters.
“I think there’s nothing in the conversation that justifies impeachment,” he continued.
Cornyn seems adamant on his position that the impeachment process shouldn’t move forward, tweeting on multiple occasions that the inquiry is politically motivated on multiple occasions.
“It’s all about politics, folks,” he tweeted Thursday.
Read more from The Dallas Morning News here.
