Nancy Pelosi appears to have been worn down. She is expected to announce a formal impeachment inquiry later today.
“As soon as we have the facts, we’re ready. Now that we have the facts, we’re ready,” Pelosi said at a forum hosted by The Atlantic. “For later today.”
In the hours before Pelosi’s appearance, support for impeachment among House Democrats surged to more than two-thirds of the caucus, including a key group of vulnerable freshman members and veteran leaders such as Representative John Lewis of Georgia, the civil-rights icon. “We cannot delay. We must not wait. Now is the time to act,” Lewis said in a speech on the House floor earlier today.
All eyes were on Pelosi, who joked as she joined Goldberg onstage that she had been “in hiding” from reporters seeking to see if her position on impeachment had changed. During the interview, Trump tweeted from New York, where he was delivering a speech to the United Nations, that he would release a declassified, unredacted transcript of his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump has acknowledged that he pressed Zelensky to launch an investigation into the Biden family’s “corruption” and that he sought to withhold aid to Ukraine, but he has said that it was not a quid pro quo.
Pelosi, however, made clear that might not matter. “There is no requirement there be a quid pro quo in the conversation” for it to have been wrong, the speaker declared.
Trump has announced he has authorized release of the transcript of his phone call with the Ukranian president, but the actual whistleblower complaint that the law said should have been given to Congress some time ago is still being kept hidden.
Back to WaPo:
The acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who held back the whistleblower’s complaint from Congress, is testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday.
That panel’s chairman, Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), said the whistleblower wants to speak to the committee and is seeking guidance from Maguire about how he could do so.
“We‘re in touch with counsel and look forward to the whistleblower’s testimony as soon as this week,” Schiff tweeted.
That the whistleblower is seeking guidance from Maguire is worrisome. This makes me suspect the whistleblower is another creature of the intellligence/military community, possibly Dan Coats himself, who will not step outside the chain of command.
House leaders announced they are preparing a resolution for a vote Wednesday, formally disapproving of the Trump administration’s effort to block the release of a whistleblower’s complaint into Trump’s conversations with the president of Ukraine, information the administration and Trump’s acting director of national intelligence have so far kept from Congress.
Pelosi is also considering setting up up a special committee to formally begin an impeachment inquiry — a move that could spark controversy within the Democratic caucus as the House Judiciary Committee is already pursuing an impeachment inquiry of its own. Pelosi is expected to formally make an announcement at the end of the day on Tuesday, after meeting with the full caucus.
Update: It’s on, folks. I thought Nancy Pelosi’s speech announcing the impeachment inquiry was quite good. And the Senate unanimously passed a nonbinding resolution Tuesday calling for the whistleblower complaint to be released to the ingelligence committes. That’s got to have put some fear into the creature.
