WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Sunday joined NBC’s Meet the Press with Chuck Todd to discuss last week’s public testimony in the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump and the extraordinary circumstances calling for this impeachment inquiry.  

“It's an extraordinary measure to try to impeach a president. And you can only use it under extraordinary circumstances. But these are extraordinary circumstances. What we know is that the President of the United States was using the massive powers entrusted to him to try to use taxpayer dollars as leverage to get a foreign country to interfere in an election,” Murphy said of the impeachment inquiry.

Murphy continued: “So let me tell you why this is different. The president was trying to use the power of his office to influence the upcoming election, right? He was attempting to get a foreign power to destroy a candidate for office who was running against him in 2020. And so this is directly relevant to the sanctity of American elections. If you don't stop a president from trying to rig an upcoming election then I don't know how we live in a democracy anymore. That's why you had to use this means right now.”

Murphy added: “My job is to try to explain to the American people why this is so serious […] I think a lot of Americans are paying attention to their pocketbooks [and] are more concerned with the president's sabotage campaign against the Affordable Care Act than they are with this impeachment inquiry. So we have a job to do, to explain why this matters.”

Click here to view the entirety of Murphy’s interview with Chuck Todd.

###