Speaker Nancy Pelosi dialed her long-time deputy, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, on Monday afternoon to let him know she’d come to a momentous decision: she was going to endorse an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Pelosi was in New York City for a private dinner with members of the
Speaker Nancy Pelosi dialed her long-time deputy, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, on Monday afternoon to let him know she’d come to a momentous decision: she was going to endorse an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
“The facts drove the timing and the decision,” Pelosi told POLITICO in a brief interview. “And that’s what I’ve said all along — when we get the facts, we will be ready. And we’re ready.” While on a plane back to Washington that night, Pelosi scrolled through a Washington Post op-ed that had published minutes earlier from seven vulnerable Democratic freshmen — and long-time impeachment holdouts — backing proceedings to remove Trump from office. The op-ed underscored how quickly the political ground was shifting among Democrats.
Less than 24 hours later, after first informing her 235-member caucus of the decision in a private meeting, Pelosi walked out to a podium on the speaker’s balcony, in front of a wall of American flags, and spoke to the country. It was May 22, and two days before, Trump had barred former White House counsel Don McGahn from testifying before the House Judiciary Committee about the president’s alleged obstruction of justice.
“We just need to let all this Mueller stuff go,” Bustos said, according to three sources who attended the meeting. It was also when Democrats who backed impeachment made a conscious choice: they weren’t going to simply fall in line with their party leaders and were going to continue organizing colleagues to join the impeachment cause.
Then a blockbuster follow-up report from the Wall Street Journal a few day later blew apart Democratic leaders’ delicately knitted attempt to hold off an impeachment investigation. The report detailed how Trump “repeatedly” pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son in a July phone call while simultaneously withholding military aide from the country.
But Pelosi wasn’t going to rush into any decision. She was a rising backbencher when the House impeached President Bill Clinton in 1998, and she knew that impeachment proceedings against Trump would be just as divisive to the nation. One other important factor weighed heavily on Pelosi — her “frontline” members in the toughest swing districts were overwhelmingly opposed to impeaching Trump, and some had directly told her so. It was her duty to represent the whole caucus, so Pelosi did what she felt she had to do as speaker: Say no to impeachment.By Saturday morning, Pelosi informed her staff to be ready to prepare a statement endorsing an impeachment inquiry.
Rep. Dean Phillips emailed his staff to inform them he’d decided to endorse an impeachment inquiry while on a flight returning to Washington on Sunday. On her own D.C.-bound flight the next day, Rep. Angie Craig, who sits in a bordering district, said her thinking also crystalized mid-air. In Washington, much of the attention on the shift within the caucus has focused on the seven battleground freshmen who published the op-ed on Monday night. That 427-word statement came after days of nonstop texts and conference calls among a tight-knit group of lawmakers who all have backgrounds in national security, including in the military and CIA.
Rep. Henry Cuellar , who survived the Democratic wipeout in the 2010 midterms, offered a warning to the undecided freshmen in the room. Multiple freshmen in competitive districts said that they tried to put politics aside. But they couldn't entirely ignore the idea that impeachment could cost them their seat.
Swing-district lawmakers, in particular, were actively pushing Democratic leaders to adopt an entirely new strategy from their Mueller days — one that didn’t involve what they saw as overly aggressive members of the House Judiciary Committee. Democrats privately described the showdown — the first public hearing with a Mueller-report witness — as an embarrassment, and they blamed Nadler for the mess. Pelosi herself said in a closed-door meeting that she would have held Lewandowski in contempt immediately, a comment several attendees viewed as a dig at Nadler.
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