Speaker Nancy Pelosi, speaking to rank-and-file Democrats in a closed-door meeting in the Capitol basement, said the whistleblower complaint involving President Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine convinced her it’s time to conduct a formal impeachment inquiry.
“Right now, we have to strike while the iron is hot,” Pelosi told Democrats, according to a source in the room. “This is a national security issue … and we cannot let him think that this is a casual thing, so that’s where I’m at.”
Pelosi has long resisted endorsing impeachment, arguing to Democrats that the public didn’t back such a move. But she told Democrats Tuesday that the allegations leaked to the media about Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine President Voldymyr Zelensky changed her mind.
Trump, she told Democrats, admitted “that he brought up the investigation of the Biden family in his call. He is asking a foreign government to help him in his campaign. That is a betrayal of his — our national security — and a betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”
That, she told Democrats, is “understandable to the public. It has clarity in terms of what he did.”
She told the caucus Trump informed her in a phone call that he did not make the decision to withhold the whistleblower information, which was blocked from Congress by acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire.
“I had a conversation with the president this morning,” She told Democrats. “He said, you know, I don’t have anything to do with that. I said, Well, then undo it. Undo it. Because you are asking the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] to break the law. I mean, it’s just outrageous.”
Maguire will testify publicly before the House Intelligence Committee Thursday and privately before the Senate Intelligence Committee the same day. Pelosi called on Democrats to conduct an impeachment inquiry “expeditiously.”
“It would be my intention with the consent of this caucus, to go forward in saying what the president has done, and his betrayal of the Constitution, challenges us to proceed with an impeachment inquiry,” she told Democrats.
