House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Wednesday President Trump was laying the groundwork to impeach himself.
“The president … wants to goad us into impeachment because he knows, as do I, that that’s not a good thing for the country,” Pelosi said during a Washington Post Live event. “The point is that every single day, whether it’s obstruction, obstruction, obstruction, obstruction of having people come to the table with facts, ignoring subpoenas, and the rest, every single day the president is making a case. He’s becoming self-impeachable.”
The White House on Wednesday asserted executive privilege over special counsel Robert Mueller’s unredacted report as House Democrats prepared to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt for refusing to turn over the document to Congress. The move followed the Trump administration instructing former White House counsel Don McGahn to defy a subpoena for information from the House Judiciary Committee led by Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.
But while Pelosi reiterated Wednesday that impeachment was a “divisive” response that needed to be “about patriotism not about partisanship,” she was not taking it off the table for either Trump or Barr if it was based on “the presentation of fact.”
In an interview that also broached on foreign policy issues given recent developments with China, Iran, and North Korea, Pelosi added — on a domestic front — that she would not endorse a candidate during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
“I think all the candidates are fabulous, and any one of them would be a better president than the current occupant of the White House,” she said.
[Read more: Pelosi: ‘We cannot accept a second term for Donald Trump’]
