The White House expects the House to follow through with impeachment, press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Friday, as President Trump lashed out anew at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff.
Amid a spate of tweets, Trump called the two California Democrats leading the inquiry “corrupt politicians” and accused them of trying to take down the Republican Party. Trump’s comments came as a new poll showed the country deeply divided over whether he should be removed from office.
Schiff, meanwhile, is planning to release transcripts as early as next week of closed-door depositions in which witnesses have testified about Trump’s efforts to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Pelosi on Friday did not rule out including instances of Trump’s possible obstruction of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian election interference in articles of impeachment drafted by the House.
“There were 11 obstruction-of-justice provisions in the Mueller report,” Pelosi said during an interview on Bloomberg television. “Perhaps some of them will be part of this, but again that will be part of the inquiry to see where we go.”
Her comments come amid a debate among Democrats about whether to keep the inquiry narrowly focused on the Ukraine controversy or to include other episodes of what Democrats see as abuse of power by Trump.
During her interview on Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Pelosi said the Ukraine controversy “is what changed everything for me” in the calculation about whether to open an impeachment inquiry.
“We have no choice,” Pelosi said. “We took an oath to protect and defend our democracy, and that is what [Trump] has made an assault on. And if Republicans have a higher loyalty to the president than their oath of office, that’s their problem.”
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-trump-moves-to-bully-witnesses-and-derail-impeachment-democrats-see-obstruction/2019/11/01/0ee6edb2-fbec-11e9-8190-6be4deb56e01_story.html