President Donald Trump is impeached — that fact will never change, and it will always remain associated with his legacy as a president. In an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher this past Friday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pointed this out while discussing the uncertainty surrounding what will actually unfold during the Senate impeachment trial, which has opening arguments set to begin this coming week. Some Senate Republicans have already been gearing up to acquit Trump no matter what, but that will not change that House Democrats held him accountable with impeachment. That’s forever!
And we all know how obsessed with his public image that Trump really is, so this message seems likely to get on his nerves from the get-go, if he hears of it.
Asked what she’d say to the president if he was listening, Pelosi said, speaking as if directly to Trump:
‘You are impeached forever. No matter what the Senate does, it can never be erased.’
Leaders of the current Republican majority in the Senate have openly flaunted that they won’t be “impartial jurors” and derided the idea of even attempting to hear Democrats out. No matter the evidence that’s formally part of the case or outside of it, they’ve been preparing to — in Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham’s words — “end this crap as quickly as possible.”
Meanwhile, Pelosi continued, elaborating:
‘If I knew that the president is listening, I would want him to know that he is impeached forever, and he is impeached forever because he used the office of the president to try to influence a foreign country for his personal and political benefit. In doing so, he undermined our national security, he was disloyal to his oath of office to protect the Constitution and he placed in jeopardy the integrity of our election. He gave us no choice.’
If she had appeared on a Fox show, then she could be more assured that the president actually was listening, since the president is obsessed with that network.
As she indicates, he led yet another election interference plot. This time, through delaying military aid and dangling the possibility of a summit in D.C. with his team, Trump was trying to bribe Ukraine into investigating his domestic political opponents, including the Bidens. The scheme was revealed before Ukraine actually launched that investigation — and now, in a fitting twist, they’re actually investigating people in the president’s own orbit. They’re looking into text messages that seem to suggest that those people had Marie Yovanovitch under surveillance when she was serving as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.
Those texts are part of yet another new trove of evidence outlining the Ukraine plot, but Pelosi says there was plenty of evidence to proceed before the latest emerged.
She commented:
‘The fact is is that we knew we had a solid case for impeachment of the president. The facts were clear, the Constitution required it, and we wanted to make our case and go forward, so we put forth the articles of impeachment and in fact voted them. We knew there was plenty of other, should we say, information to come forward… It would have been further incriminating, but not necessary, and it wouldn’t in any way weaken the case that had the support of my caucus and was completely understood by the American people.’
Her implication that Americans support the investigation is exactly correct — Americans are about evenly split on the question of whether or not they support the investigation, with support maintaining a slight lead.
Check out her comments:
