Salt Lake City Mayor calls for Bush's impeachment
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- He's a mayor in a state that
President Bush carried by 46 percentage points in the 2004 election, but Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson told CNN Monday he thinks it's time the president should be impeached.
"We think if impeachment were ever justified, this certainly is the time," Anderson, a Utah Democrat, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "This president, by engaging in such incredible abuses of power, breaches of trust with both the Congress and the American people, and misleading us into this tragic, unbelievable war, the violation of treaties, either international or our Constitution -- our own domestic law, and then his role in heinous human rights abuses, I think all of that together calls for impeachment and certainly would communicate to the rest of the world that is not who we are as the American people." (
Watch video: Mayor calls for Bush's impeachment)
Anderson also accused the president of deliberately lying about intelligence findings leading up to the war.
"He had the National Intelligence Estimates where the State Department's own intelligence agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told him that they completely disagreed, as did his Department of Energy, with this whole notion that those aluminum tubes that Saddam Hussein was acquiring could be used to build up a nuclear capability," Anderson said. "And what the founders and those who engaged in the ratification debate had clearly in mind, and this was derived from the British, is that these are political crimes."
Anderson also called Congressional Democrats "timid," claiming they are withholding impeachment charges for political reasons.
"I think that they have got 2008 clearly in view," he said. "I think the Democratic Party, frankly, has been incredibly timid. And I think that there is a lot of culpability certainly with Congress and certainly with many of the Democrats in Congress."