House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) criticized how President Trump is handling the impeachment inquiry during a press conference Thursday.
After stating that “none of us came here to impeach a President,” Pelosi railed against Trump for using his office “for his own personal gain” and said that he “undermined the national security.”
“The evidence is clear that the President has used his office for his own personal gain and in doing so undermined the national security of the United States by withholding military assistance to Ukraine to the benefit of the Russians,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi then reiterated how she told Trump that his now-infamous call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfectly wrong,” and added that “there’s something very sad about all of this because the President is undermining and fretting the fabric of our democracy.”
Pelosi also took issue with Trump’s crusade to expose the whistleblower whose complaint sparked the impeachment inquiry.
“Wherever you may stand on what the President did, an attack on the whistleblower is an attack on the integrity of our system,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi added that Democrats will “absolutely not” wait for courts to get impeachment testimonies from acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, former national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“We cannot be at the mercy of the courts,” Pelosi said. “Courts are very important in all this. These cases will continue, but I never said we cannot proceed without the courts, because that’s a technique on the part of the administration — just keep, just keep ratcheting up to a higher court.”
On Monday, Pelosi sent a letter to her Democratic colleagues that argued against the GOP’s talking point on the delay of Ukraine military aid.
Last week, Pelosi conceded to other top Democrats that although it may be hard to for people to get on board with the impeachment inquiry, they must move forward with it anyway.
Watch Pelosi’s remarks below:
.@SpeakerPelosi: "The evidence is clear that the president has used his office for his own personal gain."
Full video here: https://t.co/iFdbOGsjyt pic.twitter.com/9aEwFHJu80
— CSPAN (@cspan) November 21, 2019
