House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., renewed Democrats’ call for an independent commission to investigate Russia’s meddling in the presidential election on Tuesday.
Democrats first proposed the 9/11-style commission after the intelligence community concluded that Moscow interfered in the election. Now Pelosi and Democrats want the yet-to-be-authorized panel to probe Trump administration officials’ potential unsavory contacts with Russia.
Pelosi asked why the FBI is “not fully investigating” former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s contact with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. “Stop flirting with lifting sanctions and condemning the START Treaty and the rest of that because you’re flirting with Russia, which has a direct impact on the safety of the American people,” Pelosi warned President Trump.
“This is deadly, deadly serious,” she continued. “This is a raging example of a president who is incompetent, reckless and strategically incoherent.”
Rep. Elliot Engel, D-N.Y., said he’s never witnessed a more serious political scandal.
“This has never happened before,” he said. “It is unbelievable to me that they are not leading the charge for the truth” in terms of Russia’s “hacking the election and trying to undermine” the U.S.
“I can’t remember a crisis, and that includes Watergate, that is more important than right now,” he said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants investigators to share with the “Gang of 8” the recordings it has between Flynn and the Russian ambassador, to which Pelosi interjected: “Before they destroy them.”
He warned that Flynn’s departure puts the U.S. in peril.
“We don’t have a functional National Security Council; we don’t have a particularly functional White House when it comes to national security and that’s terribly concerning just in terms of the paramount responsibility of government, that is protecting the American people,” Schiff said.
Pelosi said the vacuum created by Flynn’s departure elevates the influence of Trump’s chief strategist Stephen Bannon, who Democrats want removed from the National Security Council.
