Washington Republican Leslie Lewallen: Anti-Trump GOP Jaime Herrera Beutler Had ‘Good Reason’ to Vote to Impeach Trump

Leslie Lewallen, a Republican running for Washington’s third congressional district, in December 2023 said that anti-Trump former Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler had “good reason” to vote to impeach former President Donald Trump.

Lewallen hopes to secure the Republican nomination to take on Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez (D-WA), a battleground Democrat.

However, as the district approaches the August 6th primary, Green Beret veteran Joe Kent, who was endorsed by Trump last cycle, nearly won the race, and lost by less than three thousand votes. Kent is running for the nomination again and may very well flip the district with Trump leading the ticket.

Lewallen in a December 2023 podcast, unDivided with Brandi Kruse, contended that Kent was the “wrong person at the wrong time with the wrong message.”

She attempted to fend off attacks that she is a “RINO,” or a Republican in Name Only.

However, in the same podcast, she said that Rep. Jaime Herrera Beulter (R-WA), who was one of the ten House Republicans to vote in 2021 to vote to impeach former President Donald Trump, had her reasons to vote to impeach Trump.

When asked about Herrera Buetler’s vote to impeach Trump, Lewallen said that “I personally did not have a problem with her.”

“I had to believe that she had good reason for voting the way that she did,” Lewallen added.

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Brandi Kruse then stated that it appears that Trump is now the presumptive Republican nominee for president. The podcast host then asked Lewallen if she wants Trump to be the nominee for president.

Lewallen dodges the question and then said she was “pleased” with alternative GOP candidates running for president, such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).

The Republican candidate for Washington’s third district said that Trump’s endorsement of Kent helps distance herself from the former president.

However, since Trump became the presumptive nominee for president, Lewallen has now become seemingly pro-Trump.

She wrote in May, “Trump is right! Get your ballots turned in and let’s make 2024 a historic year for the GOP!”

In contrast to Lewallen, Kent has consistently advocated for Trump’s foreign policy vision. 

In a June 2021 interview with Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong, he said discussed how he would take on the “permanent ruling class” that is hurting America from within:

Seeing the totality of the way things went in 2020, the way the Big Tech in the mainstream media and the labor unions all gotten lined up, the way that the permanent ruling class — the same permanent ruling class that had no issue leaving my wife and other Americans overseas for no clear gain — the way they’re continuing to manipulate the American people, the hard-working men and women of this country, the same ruling class that had no issue shipping all of our jobs overseas, killing off the economy, the access to upward mobility for working-class men and women, seeing the totality of that, I decided that I had to get back into the fight.

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Instead of “not having a problem” with Herrera Beutler, like in Lewallen’s case,” Kent said that the former Republican congresswoman is “totally Chamber of Commerce.”

“She’s a complete corporatist … If you look at her [donations] report, she gets very little money in individual contributions. Everything she gets is a corporate paycheck,” Kent told Breitbart News in March 2022. “So she is completely beholden to the $5,000 PAC [political action committee] checks and then the Super-PAC money that comes in from the special interest groups. So, yeah, she’s totally Chamber of Commerce.”

Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.