Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump wanted to have the last U.S. Republican president, George W. Bush, impeached over his foreign policy decision to invade Iraq in 2003, the Daily Caller noted Monday.
In a 2008 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Trump said he was surprised that the Democratic House speaker at the time, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, did not attempt to impeach Bush for invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein.
"I was surprised that she didn't do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush," Trump said.
"It just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing," he added.
Trump went on to explain that Bush should have "absolutely" been impeached because he "lied" about the war. "He got us into the war with lies," Trump said.
"I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant. And they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense," Trump continued. "And, yet, Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true."
The billionaire real estate mogul said he does not believe Bush's assertion that he based his decision to invade Iraq on faulty intelligence.
"I don't believe it. And I don't think you believe it either, Wolf. You are a very, very intelligent young man. I don't think you believe it either," Trump said. "The fact is that he lied. And he got us into a war that was a horrendous mistake. And, any way you take it, that was was a mistake."
"So, you think he should have been impeached because of it?" Blitzer asked.
"Look, it was not Saddam Hussein that attacked the World Trade Center, OK? In fact, those people, when they sent their families back, most of them went back to Saudi Arabia," Trump said. "It was not Saddam Hussein that took down the World Trade Center. And, in fact, Saddam Hussein killed terrorists. They had very few terrorists, because he didn't terrorists in Iraq, and he killed terrorists. So, we go and attack Saddam Hussein. Now, Iraq now is the number-one breeding ground for terrorists. All the terrorists go to Iraq to learn the trade. You know, we all have trades, right? And they go to Iraq. But you didn't have that when Saddam Hussein was running Iraq with an iron fist. Now you do. Now, we took out Saddam Hussein. What have we created? A mess. And the day we leave Iraq, it is going to be - forget it."
Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, the man who briefed Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney in the run-up to the war, apparently doesn't believe Bush either, recently suggesting that Bush and Cheney lied to the American people about what the intelligence actually showed, reported The Huffington Post.
The Center for Public Integrity concluded in 2008 that Bush and his top aides publicly made 935 false statements about the security risk posed by Iraq in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
"In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003," the group said, reported CNN.
