Mike Pence said a president who lies or covers up an affair should be impeached
“He would like to impose a religiously inspired politics on our country” (Alex Wong/Getty)
Vice President Mike Pence once said that a President who lies to the American public and covers up an adulterous affair should resign or be impeached.
President Donald Trump has been accused of having affairs with multiple women during his three marriages, including porn star Stormy Daniels, Playboy model Karen McDougal, and Marla Maples before the pair married.
The President’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, admitted Trump’s legal team had paid Daniels $130,000 for her silence about the affair – which former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci compared to same-sex marriage.
Pence is a prominent part of an administration that has taken rights away from LGBT+ people (Mark Wilson/Getty)
This was despite Trump having explicitly denied, just weeks earlier to the press on Air Force One, that he had any knowledge of the payment.
Scaramucci also mentioned President Bill Clinton when he said that public officials should be able to keep their private lives private, but Pence was not so forgiving about Clinton lying.
In columns written during the late 90s, when Clinton was embroiled in controversy over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, the future Vice President was very clear on what he thought about denying affairs to the public, CNN has reported.
Presidents should be an “inspiring supreme symbol of all that is highest in our American ideals,” wrote Pence (Yuri Gripas – Pool/Getty)
Pence denied that the President was “just like the rest of us” and should “ought to be entitled to a little privacy.
Instead, he wrote that “this argument fails on two grounds; (A) President Clinton made this issue public when he denied it eight months ago and (B) President Clinton is not, by definition, ‘like the rest of us.'”
He added: “A truly private matter in this realm might be an affair between the President and a friend not working in the White House for whom no favours were granted and no cover-up attempted.”
Pence, who was a local Indiana radio host and running for Congress when the columns were published, wrote that it was especially bad when a President lied, as he should be held to a more stringent standard than anyone else.
Trump has lied thousands of times to the public while in office (Alex Wong/Getty)
He said that “the President’s repeated lies to the American people in this matter compound the case against him as they demonstrate his failure to protect the institution of the presidency as the ‘inspiring supreme symbol of all that is highest in our American ideals.’
Pence continued: “Leaders affect the lives of families far beyond their own ‘private life’.
“In the Bible story of Esther we are told of a king who was charged to put right his own household because there would be ‘no end of disrespect and discord’ among the families of the kingdom if he failed to do so.
“In a day when reckless extramarital sexual activity is manifesting itself in our staggering rates of illegitimacy and divorce, now more than ever, America needs to be able to look to her First Family as role models of all that we have been and can be again.”
“For the nation to move on, the President must move out” (Alex Wong/Getty)
As well as his proven falsehood about the Stormy Daniels payoff, Trump has made more than 4,000 false or misleading claims since taking office, according to The Washington Post.
The President has also been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 19 women.
Pence also called on the Republican Congress to impeach Clinton if he would not resign, even if it meant losing its majority.
He wrote: “If our leaders flinch at this responsibility, they would do well to heed the Proverb ‘if a ruler listens to lies, all his officials become wicked.’
“Our leaders must either act to restore the lustre and dignity of the institution of the Presidency or we can be certain that this is only the beginning of an even more difficult time for our land.
Pence wrote the columns while he was a radio host and running for Congress (Alex Wong/Getty)
“For the nation to move on, the President must move out.”
In April, an explosive report by the Human Rights Campaign held Pence to account for his anti-LGBT record in office.
As a PinkNews fact check showed in February, Pence has called for HIV funding to be drained from programmes supporting LGBT people and to be given instead to groups that “change their sexual behaviour.”
