Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is blasting her successor, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for trying to blame her for his decision this week to open an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden without holding a vote in the House.
“That’s hogwash,” Speaker Emeritus Pelosi told MSNBC on Thursday (video below) when asked about McCarthy claiming she “made the rules and he’s just following them now by not holding this initial vote for an impeachment inquiry,” as “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist said.
“I mean, it’s ridiculous,” declared Pelosi, who also announced this week she will run to retain her congressional seat next year. “And I don’t know why the press keeps repeating it. The fact is, we said we were going to, I assigned my committee chairs, six of them, to develop the the facts, because you have to act upon the facts – that’s a strange thing to say maybe around here, but you have to act upon the facts.”
“We had a couple of weeks of doing that,” she added, referring to the time between her September 24, 2019 announcement and the full House impeachment inquiry vote on October 31, which passed in a 232 to 196 vote.
“They’ve had eight months of investigation, come up with nothing,” Pelosi said of House Republicans, who have been investigating President Biden and his family. “And now they’re trying to say, ‘well, we’re not going to have a vote because Nancy didn’t have a vote the first day.’ No, we had a vote. We were in preparation for vote.”
“But again, this is a big deal, an impeachment. You have to do it with care and not on impulse. And until we had the case, ready, that’s when we went forward. Now they again have been investigating for months, coming up with nothing and now they’re going to say on the basis of nothing, we’re not going to have a vote on how we go forward.”
“Don’t blame it on me. Take responsibility for what you were doing there and don’t misrepresent the care that we took the respect that we had for the institution to go forward in a way that really address the high crimes and misdemeanors of Donald Trump.”
Watch below or at this link.