Pelosi sets bar high for Trump impeachment inquiry

Bloomberg

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, offering her most expansive view of the impeachment probe to date, said she decided to advance the inquiry into President Donald Trump after his phone call with Ukraine’s leader provided her with the “clarity” that prior allegations against Trump lacked.
Pelosi said the partial transcript of Trump’s July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy stood in sharp contrast to the less clear-cut allegations in Robert Mueller’s special counsel report. That phone call — where Trump is heard urging Zelenskiy to investigate Joe Biden — was a “bombshell” that peeled away her initial reluctance to take the politically divisive step.
“What happened in that phone call undermined the separation of powers, coequal branches of government, checks and balances on each other,” the California Democrat said in an interview with Bloomberg reporters and editors.
She also acknowledged the risks to her party and to her House majority — saying any case made to impeach the president “has to be ironclad.”
At the same time, she acknowledged Democrats have a limited amount of time to make it, suggesting the investigation and a decision on drafting articles of impeachment won’t drag on long.
“The public has only so much space for drama,” she said. “When does the law of diminishing returns set in? When is the value added not worth the time?”
In the interview, Pelosi portrayed herself as a reluctant warrior, saying that no one comes to Congress to impeach a president.
At the same time, she also made clear her distaste for Trump, saying, “I find him totally ineffective.”
“So what does he believe?” she asked. “He believes in himself, whatever that is.”
She also left little doubt that she understands the gravity of the path she’s embarked on — even saying she was prepared to endure gyrations in the US stock market in the pursuit of what she sees as Congress’s constitutional duty to uphold fundamental principles of US government.
“I said to the members, we cannot be undermining the markets here, but you can’t be the United States of the markets. It’s not that. It’s the United States of America,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi insisted that no timetable has been set for the investigation and that a House vote to impeach the president isn’t a foregone conclusion. But the latest vote to proceed with public hearings puts Trump a big step closer to becoming only the third US president to be impeached.
Public hearings will begin later this month, Pelosi said. A crucial hurdle for Democrats will be convincing the public, through testimony and documents, that Trump sought to use the withholding of US aid to pressure Ukraine into opening an investigation to serve the president’s political interests. That will inform Pelosi’s strategy for the timing and scope of the probe.
The clarity that the Ukraine phone call provided for Pelosi contrasts with the reaction following the release of Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s actions regarding the probe.
“There was plenty of obstruction of justice in the Mueller report and things like that,” Pelosi said. But she said it was not so clear-cut that it triggered a swell of public support for action by Congress. Trump repeatedly asserted that he was vindicated by Mueller.