Iran Press/America: "The president is self-impeaching," Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi told her colleagues last week during a private caucus meeting, echoing comments she also aired in public. "He’s putting out the case against himself. Obstruction, obstruction, obstruction. Ignoring subpoenas and the rest," The Detroit News reported.
As Trump all but goads Democrats into impeachment proceedings, viewing the showdown as potentially valuable for his 2020 re-election campaign, Democrats are trying to show restraint. Their investigations are both intensifying but also moving slowly as Democrats dig into the special counsel’s Trump-Russia report and examine Trump’s finances and governance.
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The more they push, the more Trump resists. US president making what Pelosi says is his own case for impeachment with his stonewalling of Congress.
She added, "He’s doing our work for us, in a certain respect."
"Sometimes people act as if it’s impeachment or nothing," Pelosi told reporters. "No, it’s not that. It’s a path that is producing results and gathering information."
In the aftermath of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, the slow drip of congressional oversight also serves a dual purpose politically. It allows Democrats to keep impeachment proceedings at bay, despite calls to push ahead by the liberal flank, while stoking questions about Trump going into the 2020 presidential election.
Rather than viewing Mueller’s report as the end of the debate, Democrats in Congress have taken his findings as a green light to dig in with their oversight role.
So far, House committees have issued multiple subpoenas for executive branch information, including for an unredacted version of the Mueller report and some millions of pages of underlying evidence; for testimony and documents from former White House counsel Don McGahn; for information on Trump’s business dealings; and for Trump’s tax returns.
House Democrats want Mueller to testify. His report notes that Congress has the ability to "apply the obstruction laws" as part of "our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law." The Democrats want Mueller to more fully explain what he found and what, if anything, he intended for them to do about it.
"Our strategy right now is just to get to the truth and the facts," said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the House Judiciary Committee.
The number of Americans who approve of Donald Trump dropped by 3 percentage points to the lowest level of the year following the release of a special counsel report detailing Russian interference in the last US presidential election, according to a Reuters public opinion poll. 103/211/209
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