Congressman Justin Amash, the House Republican who received significant attention for saying the Mueller report revealed impeachable conduct by President Donald Trump, has stepped down from the House Freedom Caucus.

Amash not only said that the President engaged in impeachable conduct, but also called out Bill Barr‘s summary letter “deliberately misrepresented” Mueller’s report and his Republican colleagues for their responses to his assessment.

Republicans were so incensed that the House Freedom Caucus––of which Amash is a founding member––formally condemned him last month.

Tonight CNN is reporting that Amash has officially stepped down from the House Freedom Caucus, saying he didn’t want to “be a further distraction for the group”:

[Amash] told CNN in March that he had stopped going to Freedom Caucus meetings after clashing for months with members over the group’s direction under Trump. He told CNN he had attended a House Freedom Caucus board meeting before House votes on Monday night to announce he would step aside from both the board and the group as a whole. The other members didn’t know he would be going to the meeting. “It was a positive meeting. It wasn’t negative,” Amash said.

Amash has been criticized by not just fellow House Republicans, but by the head of the RNC and even President Trump himself.

Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com </s> The Washington TimesRep. Justin Amash has stepped down from the House Freedom Caucus, telling CNN on Monday night that he had just told his colleagues.The Michigan Republican, who last month became the first Republican to call for President Trump’s impeachment, said he didn’t want to be a distraction for the conservative group.

Read more at The Washington Times. </s> Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) has stepped down from the conservative House Freedom Caucus, weeks after becoming the first Republican member of Congress to publicly support impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

Amash, one of the Freedom Caucus’ founding members, told CNN that he’d announced his resignation at the group’s weekly board meeting on Monday. He said the meeting had been a “positive” one.

“I have the highest regard for them, and they’re my close friends,” Amash said of the Freedom Caucus. “I didn’t want to be a further distraction for the group.”

Amash made waves last month when he tweeted his conviction, based on his reading of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, that Trump had “engaged in impeachable conduct.”

Here are my principal conclusions:

1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.

2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.

3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.

4. Few members of Congress have read the report. — Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019

Top GOP leaders, including the president himself, condemned Amash for his views. The House Freedom Caucus also distanced itself from the congressman, with former chairman Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio telling Politico in May that “every single” member who’d attended that week’s meeting “disagrees with what he says.”

Amash told CNN in March that he’s stopped attending most Freedom Caucus meetings following clashes with members over their differing views on Trump.

The congressman has refused to back down from his calls for Trump’s impeachment.

“I’d do it whether it was a Republican president or a Democratic president. It doesn’t matter. You elected me to represent all of you,” Amash told supporters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last month. “Congress has a duty to keep the president in check .… And I think we owe it to the American people to represent them, to ensure that the people we have in office are doing the right thing, are of good character, aren’t violating the public trust.” </s> Rep. Justin Amash quit the conservative House Freedom Caucus on Monday night, weeks after becoming the lone Republican to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment.

The Michigan lawmaker told a CNN reporter that he has “the highest regard for them, and they’re my close friends,” but he “didn’t want to be a further distraction for the group.” Amash’s decision to step down was confirmed to POLITICO by his office.

Story Continued Below This browser does not support the Ad element.

Amash, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, has long been a lone wolf in Congress, routinely bucking GOP leadership and defying Trump on a number of issues throughout the past two years.

But Amash’s support for impeachment roiled members of the Freedom Caucus, who found Amash’s criticism dead wrong. The group decided to uniformly oppose his impeachment stance last month, though they stopped short of kicking him out of the caucus — despite some lawmakers complaining that Amash was still a member.

Amash, a 39-year-old libertarian who rode the 2010 tea party wave to Congress, had stopped showing up to HFC meetings this year and even threatened to quit the group at one point last year after they didn’t stand up to Trump for attacking one of their own members, South Carolina’s Mark Sanford, who was facing a pro-Trump primary challenge. (Sanford lost his primary.)

Now, Amash finds himself in a similar position, facing two primary challenges back home and being ripped by Trump on Twitter. While Amash beat back a primary challenge from an establishment candidate in 2014, he faces a far more uncertain political future in the age of Trump, in which fealty to the president has often become a litmus test in the GOP.

There has also been speculation Amash might challenge Trump in 2020 as a libertarian candidate, something he did not rule out at a recent town hall.

“I’ve said many times, I don’t rule things like that out,” Amash said. “If you’re fighting to defend the Constitution, if you find a way to do that that’s different and maybe more effective, then you have to think about that.” </s> Republican Representative Justin Amash is stepping down from his position with the House Freedom Caucus amid the fallout after he called for President Donald Trump's impeachment.

Amash made the announcement of his voluntary departure on Monday at a Freedom Caucus board meeting, Fox News reported.

Amash said during his remarks that he didn't want to be a 'further distraction' for the influential conservative caucus.

A few weeks ago, the Michigan lawmaker became the only Republican in Congress to openly argue that Trump had committed impeachable offenses. He made the accusations in a lengthy Twitter thread.

'Some of the president's actions were inherently corrupt. Other actions were corrupt—and therefore impeachable—because the president took them to serve his own interests,' Amash posted on May 23.

Jim Jordan, a Republican representative from Ohio, and a member of the Freedom Caucus, told Fox on Monday that Amash mutually came to the decision to step aside with the caucus's chairman, Mark Meadows.

Amash had come under fire from those within his party, and especially the president, after he sided with Democrats who have increased calls for Trump's impeachment after the publication of the Russia report.

'Never a fan of @justinamash, a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy,' Trump posted to Twitter in response to Amash's call for impeachment.

'Justin is a loser who sadly plays right into our opponents hands!' he continued.

Although more than 50 Democrats in Congress have called for Trump's impeachment, no Republicans – until Amash – had agreed.

Calls for impeachment proceedings increased after Mueller delivered remarks at the Department of Justice last month and said his report is his testimony. He also said he did not charge Trump because it is longstanding DOJ protocol to not charge a sitting president with a federal crime.

Democrats claimed this was basically Mueller telling them it was up to Congress to bring charges against the president and impeach him.

A redacted version of Mueller's 448-page was made public in April, a few weeks after Attorney General Bill Barr classified the report in a four-page memo that claimed it found Trump had committed no crimes.

The report did not find evidence that Trump had conspired with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 elections, but did outline a handful of 'episodes' that were potential grounds for obstruction.

Democrats say this is enough to impeach Trump, and Amash accused Barr of intentionally misrepresenting Mueller's report.

About a week after taking a stance on impeachment, Amash held a town hall with constituents in Michigan.

Amash fielded mixed reviews from about 800 audience members at the event in Grand Rapids.

For more than two hours that evening, Amash took questions from audience members at the DeVos Center for Arts and Worship at Grand Rapids Christian High School.

The majority of attendees peppered the congressman about Mueller's Russia report and the congressman's analysis of the document.

Although many of the audience members applauded the congressman with standing ovations on his courage in calling for Trump's impeachment, others accused him of switching political parties.

'How can you become a Democrat when we voted you in as a Republican?' 57-year-old Diane Luke, who was wearing a 'Make America Great Again' hat, questioned, adding she was disappointed in Amash. </s> Amash is the only Republican in the House to call for impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. Currently, a quarter of the House Democratic caucus support opening such an inquiry.

Amash, 39, identifies as a libertarian Republican and is considered among the most conservative members of the House, in which he’s served in since 2011. He helped found the Freedom Caucus in 2015, which is chaired by Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a frequent defender of the president.

“I have the highest regard for them, and they’re my close friends,” Amash told CNN reporter Haley Byrd on Monday evening. “I didn’t want to be a further distraction for the group."

Amash's chief of staff Poppy Nelson confirmed the move to NBC Tuesday.

Meadows said that he had spoken to Amash on Monday, and that Amash did not attend the group's weekly meeting that evening.

“Justin and I have had conversations over the last several weeks and discussed the mission of the Freedom Caucus, which is to represent the millions of Americans who feel like Washington, D.C., has forgotten them," Meadows said. "He felt like his continued affiliation with the caucus would be a distraction, and that it was best for all concerned that he step aside.”

Conservative groups like the Club for Growth, Heritage Action for America and Americans for Prosperity have awarded Amash lifetime ratings of more than 85 percent. But that hasn’t stopped the congressman from bashing Trump publicly.

Last month, Amash posted a series of tweets about his conclusions from reading special counsel Robert Mueller’s redacted report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, saying, “Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment.”

The tweets led to Amash receiving his first official 2020 GOP primary challenger — Michigan state Rep. Jim Lower, who said in a statement that he is a “pro-Trump, pro-life, pro-jobs, pro-2nd Amendment, pro-family values Republican,” and that Amash's remarks “show how out of touch he is with the truth, and how out of touch he is with people he represents.”

Amash is often viewed as an outlier within his own conference, as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., noted Tuesday. "Justin Amash can determine his own future, but I think in a philosophical basis he is probably in a different place than a majority of Republicans," McCarthy said at a GOP leadership press conference when asked about the Michigan congressman's resignation from the Freedom Caucus.

In February, Amash was one of 13 Republicans to join 232 Democrats in favor of a bill to overturn Trump’s emergency declaration to build a border wall. A month later, he defected again and joined Democrats in a vote to override the president’s veto of that measure. And in December, Amash was one of only eight Republicans to vote against a spending bill that would have provided $5.7 billion in border wall funding. According to FiveThirtyEight, Amash voted about 54 percent of the time with Trump in the first two years of his presidential term. </s> • GOP Rep. Justin Amash stepped down from the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus on Monday night.
• “I have the highest regard for them, and they’re my close friends,” Amash told CNN. “I didn’t want to be a further distraction for the group.”
• The move comes after Amash ignited a firestorm within his own party by calling for President Donald Trump’s impeachment last month.
• Though his stance was viewed favorably by many in the public, it prompted Trump allies and several top Republicans to disown him.

Michigan Rep. Justin Amash stepped down from the House Freedom Caucus on Monday night, CNN reported.

“I have the highest regard for them, and they’re my close friends,” Amash said. “I didn’t want to be a further distraction for the group.”

The move comes after the lawmaker ignited a firestorm by being the first Republican to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment last month.

He said he made his decision after reading the former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation, which examined Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election and whether Trump sought to obstruct justice in the inquiry.

Amash wrote on Twitter at the time that he came to his conclusion “only after having read Mueller’s redacted report carefully and completely” and reviewing relevant testimony and materials.

Read more: A Republican congressman just became the first in his party to call for Trump’s impeachment

Amash also sharply criticized Attorney General William Barr’s handling of Mueller’s report, the way it was portrayed to the public, and his subsequent attempts to sugarcoat Mueller’s findings in what many saw as an effort to shield Trump.

At a town hall shortly after making his comments, Amash said “a lot of” congressional Republicans agree with him that Trump should be impeached, but won’t say it publicly.

Amash’s remarks were viewed favorably by much of the general public; indeed, a majority of Americans in an INSIDER poll agreed with the Michigan congressman that Trump committed impeachable offenses.

But he faced a lot of heat from members of his own party, many of whom disowned him after he came out against the president.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Amash’s decision a plea for attention during an appearance on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“You’ve got to understand Justin Amash. He’s been in Congress quite some time,” McCarthy said. “I think he’s asked one question in all the committees that he’s been in. He votes more with Nancy Pelosi than he ever votes with me. It’s a question whether he’s even in our Republican conference as a whole.”

The move also prompted Michigan State Rep. Jim Lower to launch a primary challenge, citing Amash’s claims as the catalyst.

But the GOP response to Amash was predictable.

Just a few weeks before Amash spoke out against Trump, a media report revealed Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena to Donald Trump, Jr. The move infuriated Trump’s allies and prompted Republicans to turn on a senator they had previously championed as a calculated leader during tense investigations. </s> Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, the first and only Republican to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment, said he was leaving the Freedom Caucus on Monday, a development that underscores Trump’s unrivaled influence on the Republican Party.

Amash, a conservative libertarian, co-founded the Freedom Caucus to fight against a certain Republican Party groupthink and to promote small-government and constitutionally conservative ideals. But on Monday, he told CNN he no longer wanted to be a “distraction.”

An exclusive group of roughly 40 of the House’s most conservative members, the Freedom Caucus was founded on a mission of rebellion; for years they’ve been unafraid of escalating tensions and divisions within their party to push forward a conservative agenda. They haven’t seen many concrete legislative wins, but the group has been effective at moving the debate far to the right — oftentimes so far that passing legislation becomes impossible.

But since Trump, they’ve assumed a new role: defending the president at all costs. Amash hasn’t been attending Freedom Caucus meetings for some time, but he remained on the caucus’s board. Amash’s official exit is a demarcation line; yet another data point in Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.

Amash has stood on an island in his own party for some time. That island is shrinking. He made headlines in recent weeks after tweeting that Trump’s conduct is impeachable, that Attorney General William Barr knowingly misled the public about the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and that his Republican colleagues in Congress are willfully ignoring it all. He came to that conclusion after reading the entirety of the redacted special counsel report.

In May, the Freedom Caucus unanimously voted to condemn Amash, a founding member, for speaking out against Trump, escalating the treatment that Trump critics — like former Freedom Caucus member Rep. Mark Sanford or even Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake — have received in the past.

To outside observers, it’s been a slow unraveling of a group that was once based on strict principles, Corie Whalen, Amash’s former congressional staffer, told me in May.

“Trump was unexpectedly elected, so they wanted to work with him when they could, but it went from working with him to being sycophants,” Whalen said then. “And for what? I’m not sure they can tell us.”

Amash says Trump has blinkered the Republican Party. Look no further than the Freedom Caucus.

Amash’s comments indicting the president have also thrust the Republican Party’s strategy of inaction into the spotlight.

“We’ve witnessed members of Congress from both parties shift their views 180 degrees — on the importance of character, on the principles of obstruction of justice — depending on whether they’re discussing Bill Clinton or Donald Trump,” Amash tweeted.

This is perhaps most poignant with the Freedom Caucus. Led by Reps. Mark Meadows (NC) and Jim Jordan (OH), who have a direct line to the president, the Freedom Caucus has always liked to tout itself as a big-tent group with raucous policy debate. Amash, a libertarian, played a big role in that, often breaking from Trump on major issues from immigration to government spending.

But now the group has become some of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders in Congress.

It’s helped raise the caucus’s influence. When Republicans controlled the House, the Freedom Caucus, having cultivated Trump’s ear, forced congressional Republican leaders to listen to their demands. They used that power to move the debate on issues like health care and immigration further and further right, often tanking negotiations altogether. But the group has had to accept that Trump wasn’t always aligned with their mission: He’s supported deficit-busting budgets and abandoned cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare.

“It’s all got a little bit fuzzy in the Trump era,” Sanford told Vox of the Freedom Caucus’s mission in May, pointing out “more than a little irony” in Mick Mulvaney — now acting White House chief of staff and another Freedom Caucus founding member, who’s known for being one of Congress’s most notorious deficit hawks — supporting an administration that’s ballooned the debt.

Their biggest focus has been on securing political wins for Trump, using the House inquiry into Russia’s election meddling to sow distrust in the FBI, and defending the president through every twist and turn of Mueller’s investigation.

Meadows has said the group was based on two rules: Members had to be willing to vote with Republican leadership, and against it.

Now questioning Trump is seen as a distraction.

“It just seems like these guys want to follow the leader,” Whalen said. “It’s actually sad.” </s> Rep. Justin Amash, the first Republican to call for President Donald Trump's impeachment following the release of the Mueller report, has left the conservative House Freedom Caucus and its board, a source close to Amash confirmed to ABC News on Tuesday.

"I have the highest regard for them and they're my close friends," Amash told CNN on Monday. "I didn't want to be a further distraction for the group."

Amash publicly condemned President Trump on Twitter in May saying that after reading the Mueller report he believes that the president engaged in “impeachable conduct.” He also took aim at Attorney General William Barr for “deliberately misrepresenting” the findings of the report.

The caucus was officially founded by conservatives in 2015 at the House Republican retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and now includes more than 30 members. It's chaired by Rep. Mark Meadows, a third-term Republican from North Carolina. Beyond Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Reps. Justin Amash, R-Mich., Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, and Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., were all founding members and still serve in the House of Representatives.

Following Amash's remarks about Trump's impeachment, the House Freedom Caucus came out strongly against him.

“We had a good discussion and every single member, I think now based on who was there and our board meeting was probably over 30 members, every single member disagrees and strongly with the position Justin took over the week, and we're focused on the now,” Jordan said to reporters.

The Michigan lawmaker opposed Trump’s primary campaign and in the past couple years close observers believe he has grown frustrated with the caucus’s leadership, including Trump loyalist Meadows and Jordan.

While Amash has not signed on to any existing impeachment resolutions proposed by Democrats, in a town hall in Grand Rapids he said it is appropriate for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to proceed with impeachment inquiries and hearings. Ultimately, he says, the ball is in Pelosi's court regarding how to go forward.

"I think it's really important that we do our job as a Congress, that we do not allow misconduct to go undeterred, that we not just say someone can violate the public trust and that there are no consequences to it," Amash said.
Congressman Justin Amash announces that he will leave the Freedom Caucus, weeks after calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.