House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she opposes impeaching President Donald Trump, going further than her previous efforts to keep a lid on the question Democrats have debated since the day Trump was elected.
“Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path,” Pelosi said in a Washington Post interview published Monday. “It divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”
Pelosi has vigorously defended Congress’s constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight of the executive branch, but she has responded carefully to questions on whether Trump’s actions merit his removal from office.
Her increasingly definitive rejection of impeachment risks alienating some Democrats who campaigned last year on impeaching the president. They say he crossed ethical and legal lines in his 2016 presidential bid and first two years in office.
Many Democrats say they’re waiting for the results of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election before they’ll consider impeaching Trump. Pelosi’s statement, coming before any public word on a report by Mueller, appears to recognize that even if the special counsel details specific wrongdoing, Republicans are likely to stick with Trump and support him for re-election.
Several Democrats have already introduced articles of impeachment, arguing that Trump has already committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” by allegedly obstructing Mueller’s investigation and lying to the public. Representative Rashida Tlaib, an outspoken first-year lawmaker from Michigan who used an expletive while promising in January to impeach Trump, said she will introduce articles of impeachment by the end of the month.