MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said there's already enough publicly available evidence to impeach President Donald Trump -- who has admitted to some of those high crimes and misdemeanors.
The "Morning Joe" host said the transcript of Trump's call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is a red herring, because the president had publicly confessed to some of the worst details revealed in media reports on a whistleblower complaint filed through the intelligence community's inspector general.
"All of this happened very quickly, but then again so did the president's admissions," Scarborough said. "I'm going to say, it was a little exasperating yesterday hearing one talking head and news analyst and news host after another going, well, we don't know if there are going to be any revelations in the transcript or any revelations in the, you know, they're saying it may be anticlimactic."
"The bank robber already told you he robbed the bank," he added.
"This is not the Mueller report," chimed in co-host Mika Brzezinski.
Scarborough doesn't see the same political risk for Democrats as other D.C. insiders.
"I heard some people last night who I have respect for saying, well, this is really going to blow up in the Democrats' face if the whistleblower complaint is not that huge," he said. "What do you mean? We already know, we already know the president of the United States reached out and pushed the Ukrainian government to go and investigate a domestic political rival eight times, according to the Wall Street Journal. One time would have been enough."
"What else do we know?" Scarborough added. "The president also told us that he held up military aid to a country in a hot war against Vladimir Putin and Russia until he had a chance to pressure this foreign leader eight times, and so all of that information that has come out already from newspapers has pushed Donald Trump to admit things that, my god, over the past 240 years would have been seen as impeachable offenses in themselves."
He cautioned the media not to lose sight of those admissions and get sidetracked by a transcript that might not even be an accurate reflection of Trump's call to Zelensky.
"Now we've got news people, once again, playing into Donald Trump's hand by going, well, we don't know if this transcript's going to tell us anything new," Scarborough said. "What new do we need to know to know that an inquiry should start?"
