BREAKING: Pelosi Announces Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday afternoon the launch of a formal impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, laying out his supposed violations of the law and the Constitution in a bombshell press conference.
“Today I’m announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry,” Pelosi said, after laying out Trump’s transgressions. “I’m directing our six committees to proceed with their investigations under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry.”
“The president must be held accountable,” she said. “No one is above the law.”
The announcement comes as the Senate passed a resolution calling for the release of the whistleblower complaint filed by a former U.S. intelligence official over Trump’s alleged attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Biden family. The resolution passed unanimously in the Republican-controlled Senate on Tuesday.
Trump is accused of holding up military aid to Ukraine while pressuring the country’s new president to investigate the former vice president, who also happens to be his top 2020 opponent.
Speaker Pelosi has managed a somewhat fractured Democratic caucus on the topic of impeachment, which includes now over 100 members calling for impeachment proceedings — while she and others have been coyer with their language. Pelosi has led investigative hearings, which her deputies, namely Hakeem Jeffries for example, have called “discovery” into possible impeachment proceedings.
Since the Senate currently holds a Republican majority — combined with the fact that no Republican Congressional members have been critical of Trump’s alleged impropriety — a House impeachment vote would likely fail in removing Trump from office.
Impeachment is a political proceeding, not a criminal one, and Pelosi appears to have been of the mind that without bipartisan political support, a Democratic-led impeachment would only help Trump play the victim and ostensibly help his re-election effort. This thinking, however, was common when Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation was ongoing and being delivered.
The whistleblower controversy appears to have set a different standard for an impeachment inquiry, at least adjudged by Speaker Pelosi’s announcement on Tuesday afternoon.
[Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images]
