Nancy Pelosi Rejected Democrat’s Impeachment Article Over Trump National Doral Meeting of World Leaders: New Book

Samuel Corum / Drew Angerer, Getty Images

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejected an impeachment article by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) over then-President Donald Trump hosting world leaders at his Miami resort in 2019.

This is according to an upcoming book by Politico’s Rachel Bade and The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian titled The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump. It is scheduled to be released Oct. 18. This excerpt from the book was published in Politico’s Playbook newsletter on Thursday.

Then-Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney announced on Oct. 17 of that year that the annual G-7 meeting – featuring leaders from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Germany, France and Italy (the European Union is a member, though it is not a country and therefore doesn’t count among the seven members) – at Trump National Doral. The announcement caused bipartisan backlash.

According to Bade and Demirjian:

It was as blatant a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against accepting “emoluments” as Raskin had ever seen. And, in his opinion, it was time Democrats stopped sitting on their duffs and did something about it.

…

Raskin had been something of a broken record on the emoluments issue for more than two years. He regularly seethed to colleagues about the foreign officials and domestic favor-seekers staying at Trump hotels. Furthermore, he argued, Trump was nakedly profiting off the presidency by spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars at his own properties.

Democratic lawmakers had sued Trump over the emoluments question more than two years prior. But after the party took control of the House, Raskin pressed Pelosi to do more: The lawsuit would be tossed out of court, the former constitutional law professor explained, unless the House formally voted to rebuke Trump.

However, despite being initially for the impeachment, Pelosi ended up saying no to Raskin’s impeachment article, according to the authors. Her excuse? “Oh, I’m not a lawyer.” Moreover, Pelosi’s “deputies were more blunt: Vulnerable Democrats from pro-Trump districts didn’t want to be seen as being overly combative with the president. Democrats already had a bevy of contentious Trump probes; they didn’t need another one.”

“We know the end of this story,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) told him. “What’s the point?”

At the time Raskin wanted to impeach Trump over the announced meeting, which ended up not happening at Doral and was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the House impeachment inquiry into Trump seeking to withhold U.S. assistance to Ukraine in exchange for political dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Trump would end up getting impeached by the House in December 2019 but later acquitted by the Senate the following February.

With Trump reversing course on the Trump Doral meeting, Raskin’s impeachment article was never voted on in the House despite the congressman insisting on a vote.

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