House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said there should be an investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s alleged knowledge of FBI activity in the lead-up to Director James Comey’s letter to Congress about the review of additional emails related to the Bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton.
“I believe that the Comey letter was a foul deed. It was a wrong thing to do. I had had great admiration for Director Comey. I just think he couldn’t take the heat,” Pelosi said at a news conference Thursday. “I think there should be an investigation—and we’ll figure out how to call for that—of how Giuliani knew two days before that something was coming.”
Two days before Comey sent his correspondence, Giuliani, one of Donald Trump’s leading campaign surrogates, told Fox News to be on the lookout for “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days.” The former New York City mayor followed up with the network a week later, saying he had only been in contact with former agents and that a “revolution” at the FBI had reached its peak. “I did nothing to get it out. I had no role in it. Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents,” he said, in an apparent reference to the culture at the Bureau. He told CNN his “surprise” remark referred to the pending announcement of a Trump ad blitz in the election’s closing days.
Two of Pelosi’s fellow House Democrats, John Conyers and Elijah Cummings, have also called for a probe into the agency.
“Something is not right in this picture, and I think the American people deserve an investigation into how a foreign government had an impact on our election, and how Rudy Giuliani had access to that information when he did,” Pelosi added Thursday. “I think the Comey letter was dispositive.”
The 76-year-old representative, who said she has a majority of support from her conference to continue her job as House minority leader in the next Congress, also spoke about her party’s relationship with the working-class voters that lined up behind Trump. She was uncritical of the Democratic platform, rather blaming poor communication for the results on November 8.
“As far as we are concerned, the problem was more with the communication than it was with our policy. What did we do? In facing Republican resistance, bailed out the auto industry. That was the congressional Democrats and President Obama, at the time when Mitt Romney, in an op-ed—and doesn’t Mitt Romney look good to us now, my gosh?—but when Mitt Romney wrote in an op-ed that we were interfering in the free market by bailing out the auto industry. And we did that,” Pelosi said. “Now, what does that affect? Hundreds of thousands, millions of jobs in Ohio, Michigan, western Pennsylvania—all of Pennsylvania—Indiana, Iowa. But people didn’t—we didn’t message it so people understood it.”
She likened the communication breakdown to a spousal issue.
“Now, I would say to people, you may think that messaging—plenty of you aren’t married—you may think you’re messaging, but if your spouse doesn’t think you’re messaging, you aren’t communicating. So they didn’t think we were communicating.”
