Nancy Pelosi Issues Warning To Donald Trump On Impeachment: ‘You’ve Come Into My Wheelhouse Now’
Nancy Pelosi is issuing a stark warning to Donald Trump as his impeachment inquiry begins.
The House Speaker moved this week to open an impeachment inquiry after a whistleblower complaint claimed that Trump took a number of steps to pressure Ukraine into digging up dirt on his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden. Pelosi had been slow on moving toward impeachment regarding the claims that Trump obstructed justice in the Russia investigation, but moved with considerable speed this week in opening the inquiry related to Ukraine.
In an interview this weekend at The Texas Tribune Festival, Pelosi said she was “heartbroken” over the allegations that Trump tried to press a foreign country into interfering in the 2020 presidential election, but was ready to move fully forward toward a possible impeachment, the Texas Tribune reported.
“Let us be prayerful. Let us be solemn. Let us try not to make it further divisive,” she said. “But we cannot ignore our oath of office to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic.”
Pelosi added that the inquiry moves straight into her area of greatest expertise — the U.S. intelligence community. As the Texas Tribune noted, Pelosi was a longtime member of the House Intelligence Committee, which is now leading the way on the impeachment inquiry.
“I’m saying to the president and I’m saying to you, ‘You’ve come into my wheelhouse now. I have 25 years of experience in intelligence,'” she said.
Pelosi’s statement also represents one of the most aggressive she has made toward Trump after many months of pursuing careful measures against the president. Since the Ukraine scandal first broke, Pelosi seems to have abandoned the measured caution she showed during the Russia investigation, saying that the current situation has much more urgency.
Her official statement announcing the impeachment inquiry took another shot directly at Trump.
“The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable facts of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” she said, via Politico.
Pelosi has taken aim at Attorney General William Barr as well, who critics say tried to bury the complaint against Trump in an effort to protect the president.
The current impeachment inquiry also seems to have brought an end to Democratic infighting regarding their approach to impeachment. Before the whistleblower’s complaint was made public, a number of members of the Democratic party had started to publicly criticize Pelosi regarding her approach to impeachment, with some even vowing to go on their own without the support of the House Speaker in starting impeachment proceedings against Trump.
