Nancy Pelosi: Trump is ‘goading’ Democrats to impeach him to solidify his base – CNBC

President Donald Trump is “goading” Democrats to try and impeach him because he believes it would help “solidify his base” of supporters, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday.

Pelosi has not been shy about publicly criticizing the president and his administration. But she has shown clear resistance toward the politically fraught prospect of impeaching Trump, even amid growing pressure from her progressive Democratic colleagues to support the drastic move.

“Don’t tell anybody I told you this,” Pelosi said, prompting laughter from a small crowd at an “Inside Congress” event sponsored by Cornell University’s Institute of Politics and Global Affairs.

“Trump — I use his name — Trump is goading us to impeach him,” she said. “That’s what he’s doing. Every single day, he’s just like taunting, taunting, taunting.”

Pelosi said Trump was dropping that bait because “he knows that it would be very divisive in the country, but he doesn’t really care. He just wants to solidify his base.”

The White House did not immediately respond to Pelosi’s remarks on Trump’s alleged impeachment strategy.

Some Democrats, including Reps. Al Green of Texas and Maxine Waters of California, have long called for Trump’s impeachment. But the debate over whether to impeach the president has moved closer to the mainstream in the wake of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election meddling.

The special counsel’s team did not find sufficient evidence to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had coordinated with the Kremlin, and Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded from the report that there wasn’t enough evidence to support an obstruction of justice offense against Trump.

But Democrats have pointed to the details in the 448-page report, including 10 instances of potential obstruction cited by Mueller, as evidence of wrongdoing by Trump.

Trump, too, has increasingly railed against the political hot-button topic of impeachment, tweeting about it at least five times in April.

“How do you impeach a Republican President for a crime that was committed by the Democrats?” Trump tweeted April 21.

“If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump wrote three days later.

Pelosi described impeachment as a difficult political situation in which Democrats “can’t impeach him for political reasons,” but also can’t refuse to impeach him for political reasons, either. “We have to see where the facts take us,” she said. 

Prior to discussing the politics of impeachment, Pelosi laid out her vision to “unify” the country, in part by focusing on winning America’s political center by championing issues with broad appeal that are more commonly identified with the left.

“In terms of owning the center ground, I think the center ground can be owned by the left,” Pelosi said, listing issues such as raising the minimum wage, protecting the environment and preventing “taking babies out of the arms of their parents,” an apparent reference to the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

Those issues, she said, are “advocated by the left but they are right down the center.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.