Pelosi Got Idea To Withhold Impeachment Articles from a CNN Interview: Report
It’s one tiny detail, but if it’s true, it’s damning.
Buried inside a lengthy, fawning profile of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi published Thursday by Time magazine is a nugget of information that had conservative news sites and social media buzzing.
The woman being portrayed as the reigning mastermind of the Democratic Party, someone whose mania for micromanagement in the party’s battles with President Donald Trump extended from “from major strategic decisions to minor stagecraft,” got one of her biggest ideas from watching a television interview of a convicted felon.
Specifically, it was a CNN interview with Watergate figure John Dean, the former counsel to President Richard Nixon’s White House who’s gotten trotted out by Democrats every time a Republican has been in the White House to tell the country that whatever the latest scandal happens to be is “worse than Watergate.”
It’s a detail that makes Pelosi look less like a grand strategist than a victim of her own designs, fumbling blindly for a way out of a trap she was creating for herself.
The Time report doesn’t offer much in the way of explanation — the detail is reported in a single sentence without elaboration. It’s attributed to an unidentified source and there’s no elaboration.
It barely fits into the two paragraphs it’s part of:
“On Dec. 17, the night before the full House would debate and vote on Trump’s impeachment, Pelosi met behind closed doors with top caucus members on the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. She hinted, for the first time, that she was contemplating a curveball: declining to immediately transmit the impeachment articles to the Senate after the House passed them,” Time reported.
“Pelosi, according to an aide, had been mulling the tactic since she heard former Nixon White House counsel John Dean float the idea on CNN on Dec. 5. In the committee meeting, she added that she believed McConnell would be motivated to move. ‘Somebody said to me today that he may not even take up what we send. [But] then [Trump] will never be vindicated,’ she said, according to the aide in the room. ‘He will be impeached forever. Forever. No matter what the Senate does.’”
As The Daily Wire noted, Dean did appear on CNN on Dec. 5 in an interview with Don Lemon, possibly the most virulently anti-Trump voice on an virulently anti-Trump network.
“What I think Nancy Pelosi has some real leverage on this. She doesn’t have to send articles of impeachment to the Senate,” Dean said, according to a CNN transcript of the Dec. 5 episode of “CNN Tonight.”
“What happens, Don, after there’s a vote on the articles, they adopt a resolution where they select managers and then they decide when they’re going to send the managers over to the Senate.
“So there’s a flexibility in the process where she could say, listen, let’s just hold these articles here until the Senate gets its act together and that could last right through the campaign as far as her powers.”
Liberals routinely mock Trump as a man who allegedly gets his ideas from watching Fox News, but here is a report in an otherwise hagiographic profile that shows Pelosi literally getting an idea that holds the presidency and the country hostage from a television interview on a rabidly partisan “news” network.
By Dec. 5, an impeachment vote was a foregone conclusion. Pelosi had even announced that very day she saw “no choice” but to proceed with the articles of impeachment in the House.
She had to know that polls were showing impeachment was not the political winner Democrats evidently expected it to be.
So she also had to know the dilemma she was headed for.
According to the Time article, she found her way out from the Dean interview.
The news created an online stir.
At National Review, senior writer David Harsanyi was scathing.
“Now, Dean is often portrayed as a patriotic, whistleblowing impeachment expert — which is true insofar as he planned the Watergate coverup, and then informed on everyone whom he conspired with after they were caught. His real expertise is cashing in on criminality for the past 50 years (I wrote about Dean’s slimy past here),” he wrote.
On social media, the comments were worse:
Because he’s a pillar of success & wisdom. Lol!
— Grateful_Mom (@mom_grateful) January 9, 2020
Proof positive that Speaker Pelosi has lost her ever-loving mind.
— Bill (@Wagglethis) January 9, 2020
Her legacy will be she followed advice of a convicted felon
— Luvmycountry (@Luvmycountry6) January 9, 2020
The media does control the Democrats & vice versa
— Texas Conservative (@TexasConsBanker) January 9, 2020
That last one nails it.
For all the liberal complaints about Fox News and the Trump administration, the reality is that it’s the Democratic Party that’s in bed with the vast majority of the mainstream media.
They’ve been allies fighting Trump since he announced for the presidency in 2015 and they’re allies now — each helping the other spread poison throughout American politics.
Nancy Pelosi is so blind to her own failures that, according to the Time article, she considers the passage of the disaster known as Obamacare to be her greatest legacy (an idea that Time’s bootlicking Molly Ball seems to agree with).
Now, it turns out, if Time is accurate, that this woman with decades of Democratic misgovernance behind her got her worst idea yet from an interview on television — with a convicted felon who’s apparently bent on redeeming his crimes by spending decades as a Democratic hack.
The article tries to paint Pelosi as a Capitol puppet master, pulling the strings of the nation’s power center in her fight to defeat the president.
What it reveals instead, if this detail is true, is simply pathetic.
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