Justin Amash says 'a lot of' Republican lawmakers agree with him that Trump should be impeached but won't say it publicly

• Michigan Rep. Justin Amash said many of his Republican colleagues in Congress agree with his views on the special counsel Robert Mueller's report but won't say it publicly.
• "You wouldn't believe how many phone conversations I had or conversations in person with colleagues" on the issue, Amash said.
• Amash, a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, made headlines this month when he said that based on the Mueller report, he believed President Donald Trump had committed impeachable offenses.
• He also accused Attorney General William Barr of covering up Mueller's findings.
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Michigan congressman Justin Amash said Tuesday that many of his Republican colleagues agree with his views on the special counsel Robert Mueller's report but won't admit it publicly.

Speaking at a town hall event, Amash said, "My colleagues tell me all the time. In fact, you wouldn't believe how many phone conversations I had or conversations in person with colleagues."

"By the way," he added, "a lot of them think I'm right about the Mueller report, they just won't say it. There are a lot of Republicans."

Amash made headlines this month when he became the first Republican lawmaker to call for President Donald Trump's impeachment, based on what was contained in the Mueller report. He also accused Attorney General William Barr of deliberately misrepresenting Mueller's findings and of trying to "sell the president's false narrative" about the report to the public.

But Amash said that despite Barr's portrayal of the Mueller report, Trump's actions "meet the threshold for impeachment" and he likely would have been indicted on obstruction of justice charges, had he not been president.

Many House Democrats have also called for Trump's impeachment, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pumping the brakes on the issue and said instead that she wants to "follow the facts" and investigate the president first, before considering impeachment.

Read more: Trump is said to be telling confidants he 'finally' has 'my attorney general' with William Barr

Republicans, meanwhile, have largely defended Trump's conduct - at least publicly - and echoed Trump's baseless claims that Mueller was on a "witch hunt" against him and his associates.

On Tuesday, Amash said his Republican colleagues had privately spoken to him and said, "Justin, you know, going out publicly with that, you know the Democrats will never support you, you know that they're hypocrites on this stuff."

"And I say, you know, some of them are, some of them aren't, but it doesn't matter to me," Amash said. "Because you have to look at what you're doing first. You have to care about what you're doing. And if you have a society where all we care about is that the other side is bad, and therefore we don't have to do the right thing, that society will break down and you will have no liberty."

The audience broke into applause as Amash was speaking, and he later went on to add that "the surest way to make our Constitution a dead letter is to have a society where we all hate each other ... I refuse to be a part of that. I will always stand up for liberty, and stand up for our Constitution."