During a CNN town hall Thursday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told an audience “let’s not even contemplate” the possibility of Donald Trump being elected for a second term hours after Pelosi announced that she was requesting House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler to move forward with drafting articles of impeachment against Trump.
“The damage that this administration has done to America — America is a great country, we can sustain — two terms, I don’t know,” Pelosi responded to a question from the audience. “Civilization as we know it today is at stake in this election.”
Pelosi said that Trump is jeopardizing “the integrity of our election and we could not continue to let him do that without holding him accountable for it.”
“I’m not on a timetable. I’m on a mission,” the House speaker told CNN anchor Jake Tapper. She admitted that Thursday was “historic” for “crossing a threshold” with articles of impeachment.
“The facts are uncontested: The president abused his power for his own personal political benefit at the expense of our national security,” Pelosi said Thursday morning during a press conference on Capitol Hill. “Today, I am asking our chairman to proceed with articles of impeachment.”
Pelosi later appeared to get frustrated with Tapper for asking her “questions through the prism of the White House,” as Tapper pressed Pelosi on whether the Trump administration was not obstructing justice by taking congressional subpoenas to courts, and whether Pelosi was failing to uphold her prior standard of bipartisan impeachment.
“I think it’s so overwhelming that to ignore it would be derelict in our own duty. I can’t answer for the Republicans. They have taken an oath to Donald Trump,” Pelosi said.
“Can we not have any more questions about impeachment?” Pelosi then asked.
Pelosi scolds Tapper for asking about impeachment on the day she asks for articles of impeachmenthttps://t.co/0mWPabEjm5 pic.twitter.com/N0Nrhia9Gm
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 6, 2019