By Denny Gulino
CAPITOL HILL (MaceNews) – U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in a late afternoon announcement carried nationwide and beyond on several TV channels, declared, “I’m announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.”
She added, “The President must be held accountable. No one is above the law.”
President Donald Trump was in his Trump Tower suite in New York, presumably having watched Pelosi’s announcement after she had informed the Democratic Caucus of her decision.
He immediately unleashed a fusillade of tweets. “PRESIDENTIAL HARRASSMENT!” read one. “They never even saw the transcript of the call. A total Witch Hunt! read another.
A short time earlier, informed of what Pelosi was about to do, he fumed to reporters, “It’s the craziest thing anybody’s seen.”
He went on, “if it’s true, I can’t even believe that it’s true. how can you do this and you haven’t even seen the phone call?”
Even earlier in the day he had tweeted, while enmeshed in meetings at the UN with some foreign leaders, that he was going to release the full “unredacted” transcript of his telephone call with Ukraine Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky, a call that was the spark that lit the impeachment inquiry fire. If that was intended to forestall action by the Democratic House, it was too late.
Acting DNI Joseph Maguire is scheduled to testify to a congressional committee this week. He has said he is not required to turn over the actual complaint. The whistleblower’s lawyer has indicated that despite Maguire’s edict, that he wants to communicate directly with Congress as well, Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said.
On Wednesday the House will vote on an eight-page resolution demanding not only the transcript but the text of the complaint filed by a still anonymous whistleblower, said to be an intelligence official, who was blocked from communicating directly with Congress by his boss, the administration’s director of national intelligence. The resolution will condemn Trump’s actions but in itself will not be an immediate part of the impeachment inquiry.
If the House investigation shows Trump asked the head of a foreign government to investigate his political adversary Joe Biden, that, Pelosi said, would amount to a “betrayal of his oath of office.”
Now the six House committees that are already investigating a variety of Trump’s alleged misdeeds will “proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry,” Pelosi said. Her declaration will doubtless widen the inquires and clear the way for more resources to be devoted to it, a process likely to also generate substantially more subpoenas.
The drama that descended on the House side of Capitol Hill Tuesday afternoon, as it became clear the threshold of an impeachment inquiry was about to be crossed, generated a gargantuan “stakeout” by reporters and camera crews in the narrow hallways of the Capitol basement as many dozens of media representatives gathered on the chance they could interview members of the Democratic Caucus.
As it turned out, Pelosi’s brief TV address to a pool camera generated the initial headlines and breaking news bulletins on those broadcast networks that had not carried her words live.
Afterward, in hallway conversations, some reporters marveled at the speed at which the formal announcement had come about early in a week which was to be a prelude to a two-week break for members of Congress.
The impeachment inquiry news overwhelmed what would otherwise have been the key topic in the Capitol, whether another government shutdown will be avoided as the new government fiscal year begins in a week.
Although there is bipartisan sentiment on Capitol Hill to pass a short-term budget that would prevent a shutdown, at least until November, history has shown that last-minute legislative glitches, or a White House disagreement, could easily trigger a last-minute shutdown crisis.