Democrats spent years weaponizing Congress against Donald Trump.
Now Trump wants the record corrected, and he has a powerful ally in his corner.
And what Speaker Mike Johnson just said about erasing those impeachments for good has the Left absolutely losing their minds.
Trump Calls the Impeachments What They Were
President Donald Trump told The Wall Street Journal recently that Congress should pass a resolution voiding his two first-term impeachments from the House record. His words were direct.
“It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump said. “It was a rigged deal — it was a whole rigged situation.”
The White House has called the impeachments “phony attacks.” And Trump, for his part, said he would be “honored” if House Republicans pushed it through.
The resolution in question is H.Res.1211, introduced in April by Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA). It declares both impeachments — the one from December 2019 and the one from January 2021 — formally “expunged as if such Article had never passed the full House of Representatives.”
Issa has been blunt about why he thinks this matters. “The fact is that the Constitution doesn’t spell out what to do when you’ve wrongfully indicted somebody,” he told Fox News Digital. “An impeachment is basically an indictment and it’s an indictment that you can’t really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously where do you go to get your reputation back, is the question.”
That’s not a rhetorical flourish. It’s a real problem with how impeachment works. The Senate acquitted Trump both times. But the acquittal never undoes the original vote. The impeachment stays in the history books, Democrats cite it constantly, and there’s no mechanism in the Constitution that lets a wrongfully accused president clear the record. Issa’s argument is that the House, which has the “sole Power of Impeachment” under the Constitution, also controls its own records and can vote to correct them.
The Evidence Has Shifted
The resolution calls both impeachments “maliciously false” and argues they were driven by politically biased evidence and procedural abuses that denied Trump basic due process.
That’s a serious charge. But it’s backed by serious material.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard previously announced the declassification of documents tied to the 2019 impeachment. According to reporting from Fox News Digital, Gabbard said those documents revealed a “coordinated effort” inside the intelligence community used “to manufacture a conspiracy” that became the foundation for impeaching the President.
And the 2021 impeachment? Issa’s resolution points out that the House rushed it from introduction to passage in just two days. There were no hearings. No witnesses. No real process. And a made-up so-called “crime.”
“They impeached him for essentially an insurrection, a true high crime, and it’s false,” Issa said.
The resolution has drawn the backing of House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), who put it plainly: “Democrats weaponized impeachment against President Trump with politically motivated charges. We applaud Chairman Issa for leading the fight to expunge this sham from the record.”
More than 20 Republican members have already signed on as co-sponsors. Previous attempts to expunge the impeachments in 2022 and 2023 never received hearings or floor votes. This one has Jordan controlling the committee to which it was referred, which gives it a path the earlier versions never had.
Johnson Is On Board, and the Timing Is Deliberate
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told The Wall Street Journal he has discussed the effort with Trump and supports it.
“I think it makes a lot of sense the more the evidence comes out, the more we know they really were sham impeachments,” Johnson said. “We were saying it at the time, now we know. And they make a very compelling case that it should be expunged from the record, because it was a hyperpartisan attack job.”
Johnson added: “It is a priority and something that Congress should make right.”
The plan, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, is to pursue the vote after the November midterms rather than before them. Republicans are fighting to hold their narrow House majority, and leadership wants to keep the focus on kitchen-table issues for voters. But after November, the window opens.
Trump has also gone after the Democrats who drove the original impeachment push. On his Truth Social platform, he wrote: “Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, and failed miserably, wasting the Country’s money, time, and effort, will guaranteed be trying to do it again, despite one of the most successful Presidencies in History.” He went on: “The last one that went after me on Impeachment was a pathetic soul, Al Green, who just lost his race in a landslide to an unknown candidate but, in my opinion, one that had more talent than Raskin.”
Not everyone in the Republican conference is enthusiastic. Retiring Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) told reporters he thinks the effort is “silly” and asked, “Maybe they’ve given up on holding the majority?” Bacon is leaving Congress, so his opinion carries less weight with each passing day. But his skepticism reflects a real tension inside the party between members focused on the midterm map and members who want to settle scores from the Trump years.
What This Is Really About
Critics on the Left are already calling the expungement push a “show of fealty” to Trump. That framing is predictable, and it misses the point entirely.
The first impeachment rested on the claim that Trump abused his power by making Ukraine aid contingent on an investigation into the Biden family’s dealings there. Hunter Biden had served on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father was Vice President and the point man on U.S. policy toward Ukraine. The press spent years treating questions about that arrangement as a conspiracy theory. Then the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, was buried by Big Tech and major media outlets in the final weeks before the 2020 election, and the rest is history. The underlying concerns Trump raised were not manufactured. They were real, and the people who impeached him for raising them knew it.
Hunter Biden ended up facing criminal charges for his finances.
The second impeachment, rushed through in 48 hours with no hearings and no due process, was a political exercise designed to disqualify Trump from ever holding office again based on the false claim that Trump incited an insurrection on January 6. The Senate rejected that outcome. But the House vote stays on the books.
Issa put the core question cleanly: “And that’s sort of a problem that we’re dealing with, which is that the president was wrongfully accused, the evidence is now out that there was withheld information and false information, but where do we go to unring this bell? And the answer is we go back to Congress, and we go to the House floor, and we have a vote.”
That’s not a radical idea. It’s a correction. Congress made a record, and Congress can correct that record. The Constitution gives the House the sole power of impeachment — and supporters of H.Res.1211 argue that same authority includes the power to revisit its own prior actions.
Will it have legal force? Probably not in any formal sense. But the Democrats who used impeachment as a political bludgeon twice in four years don’t get to lecture anyone about the sanctity of the process. They turned it into a partisan weapon. Getting that acknowledged on the House floor, with members on the record, is worth doing.
And if the votes are there after November, Trump may finally get the correction the record deserves.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal; Fox News Digital; Mediaite; Congress.gov, H.Res.1211, 119th Congress