Former Congressman on CNN: Trump Will Be ‘Sentenced to Jail’ When He’s Out of Office

On CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront, the Democratic and Republican panelists clashed over the mixed messages Speaker Nancy Pelosi is sending about how to deal with President Donald Trump in the wake of the Mueller report.

“People are like who are you really? What do you really believe?” said former George Bush White House official Scott Jennings. “If you go behind closed doors and say ‘I want to see the President of the United States go to prison,’ and then go out in public and say, ‘I’m against the impeachment,’ I think it hurts your own credibility. I think it’s disingenuous.”

Earlier in the week, Pelosi reportedly told her caucus in a private meeting “I don’t want to see [Trump] impeached, I want to see him in prison.” Meanwhile, she has remained the most prominent holdout among House Democrats in that caucus’s growing momentum for impeaching Trump.

Though Pelosi’s public and private statements do not, technically, contradict each other, Burnett pointed out that they do conflict with the Speaker’s insistence on gathering all the “facts” about Trump’s possible misconduct.

“If she is saying he belongs in prison then [the facts] have led her somewhere,” Burnett said. “They have led her to believe that the President of the United States belongs in prison and yet she is not publicly willing to go for impeachment.”

Jennings warned that waiting to impeach Trump in case he wins reelection would also provoke a strong political backlash.

“We’re either going to beat him at the polls if he wins or we’re going to impeach him, and by the way if we beat him we might throw him in prison. It sounds like a Banana Republic to me,” Jennings complained. “It strikes me this is what people hate about people in Washington, D.C., the willingness to say these kinds of crazy things: ‘Put him in jail’ behind closed doors and not follow through on the actions when given a chance by their own conference that wants to do it.”

Former Democratic Rep. Luis Guitérrez pushed back hard on that comment, noting the hypocrisy of criticizing Pelosi’s comments without sparing a moment to call out the threatening, 2016 campaign rhetoric of the person currently occupying the Oval Office.

“I’m sorry I have to laugh. Because I just heard Scott say ‘Put him in jail.’ Remember ‘Lock her up?'” an incredulous Guitérrez asked. “So Republicans feel that Nancy Pelosi saying that [Trump] should go to jail is somehow crazy, but they support a President of the United States whose campaign was ‘Lock her up?’ So number one, there is that going on. But look, let’s be clear. What Nancy Pelosi and Democrats want is for the president to be held accountable for his actions. And if you read the Mueller report, it’s clearly established in the Mueller report that he says we are going to preserve the evidence because once a president is no longer President of the United States he can be prosecuted. I believe this president, once he leaves office and is defeated at the polls will be prosecuted in the court and will be sentenced to jail.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.