“How’s it going in Washington? Anything interesting happening?” cracked Jimmy Kimmel. “I’m really happy to be here,” Nancy Pelosi replied with a wink and a smile.
The Democratic Speaker of the House joined the comedian on his late-night program Thursday night just one day after Robert Mueller delivered an impromptu press conference where he asserted, “If we had had confidence the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so”—once again punting to Congress.
After asserting her Golden State Warriors’ fandom, and the fact that she has a signed Draymond Green jersey that she won at auction (“because every team needs somebody like that”), the House Speaker got into the whole Mueller mess, with Kimmel questioning why Pelosi hasn’t pushed for Trump to be impeached like many of her Democratic colleagues, including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren.
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“We’ve been on that path for a while, and when we do get to where we’re going, we’re going to be ready,” said Pelosi. “You have to remember, we’ve only had the [congressional] majority…since this year, and the first month government was shutdown.”
“We have to be ready,” she added. “Our Founders, in the darkest days of the Revolution, they said, ‘The times have found us.’ Well, I think right now the times have found us. We have a defiance of the Constitution of the United States, and so when we go down this path, we have to be ready, and it has to be clear to the American people, and we have to hope that it’ll be clear to the Republicans in the United States Senate.”
When Kimmel joked that we’ve “been on this path” since the ‘70s, Pelosi held her ground. “We’re on a path to getting information. The public deserves to know the truth—the facts—and so, when you go down a path like impeachment, which is very divisive—it could divide the country—let me put it this way: we understand our oaths of office, to defend the Constitution of the United States. Apparently, the president does not understand his oath of office. He doesn’t honor the oath to protect and defend. We know our responsibility, but again, because it is divisive, we have to try to bring people together.”
“I probably have a better idea as to what the president has to be held accountable for than anyone,” Pelosi asserted. “The only person who knows better than I do…is the president of the United States. He knows. He knows what his violations have been.”
After some more back-and-forth, Pelosi laid out why she believes that Trump wants the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives to file articles of impeachment: so that it’ll be shot down by the Republican-controlled Senate.
“[Here’s] why I think the president wants us to impeach him,” Pelosi explained. “He knows it’s not a good idea to be impeached, but the silver lining for him is, then he believes that he would be exonerated by the United States Senate, and there’s a school of thought that says, if the Senate acquits you, why bring up charges against him in the private sector when he’s no longer president? So when we go through with our case, it’s got to be ironclad.”
