President Trump asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if there was any way to “work something out” hours before she announced that she supports a formal impeachment inquiry.
The two shared a phone call Tuesday, while Trump was attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York. At an event afterward, Pelosi divulged that Trump called initially to talk about gun violence but the conversation then “segued into other things.”
According to NBC News’ Heidi Przybyla, the California Democrat later told fellow Democrats in a closed-door meeting that she and Trump talked about the Ukraine controversy.
“I got a readout on that — that the president actually said to Nancy Pelosi, ‘Hey can we do something about this whistleblower complaint? Can we work something out?’ And she said ‘Yes, you can tell your people to obey the law,'” Przybyla reported on MSNBC.
“So she quickly swatted that down and made it clear that it is full steam ahead,” Przybyla said. She also noted that Trump “used language that we’ve heard before.”
After meeting with the House Democratic Caucus, Pelosi announced support for a formal impeachment inquiry, though there’s no vote scheduled at this time.
Pelosi demanded that when acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testifies to the intelligence committees on Thursday he hand over a whistleblower complaint that reportedly relates to a July 25 phone call in which Trump urged Urkaine’s president to work with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who did business in Ukraine while his father was vice president.
So far the Trump administration has refused to give Congress the whistleblower complaint, citing jurisdictional issues, but Trump says he will release the transcript of his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to show he did nothing wrong.
