House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday the country faces a
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday the country faces a “constitutional crisis” over President Donald Trump’s resistance to congressional investigation, and she promised a methodical, if lengthy, effort to pursue oversight of the White House.
Pelosi made no promise for a swift House vote to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress over his refusal to release special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report, deferring to a fresh subpoena for the document from the Intelligence Committee that’s due back next week. She continued to tamp down talk of impeachment.
Instead, Pelosi foreshadowed a long-game strategy of Congress confronting a White House she suggested is all but goading her with its refusal to comply with oversight demands.
“The president thinks it is a laughing matter,” Pelosi said. “This is about the American people and their right to know, and their election that is at stake — and that a foreign government intervened in our election — so we can prevent it from happening again.”
“We won’t go any faster than the facts take us or any slower.”
The step-by-step approach has been Pelosi’s touchstone for the escalating standoff between the two branches of government in the aftermath of Mueller’s report. By rebuffing Congress, she said, the White House is essentially committing the kind of obstruction of justice Mueller probed in his report.
“The president is almost self-impeaching,” she said.
The House Judiciary Committee voted Wednesday to hold Barr in contempt of Congress, capping a day of ever-deepening dispute between congressional Democrats and the Republican White House. Ahead of the vote, Trump for the first time invoked the principle of executive privilege, claiming the right to block lawmakers from the full report on Mueller’s probe of Russian interference to help Trump in the 2016 election.
Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler of New York declared the action by Trump’s Justice Department a clear new sign of the president’s “blanket defiance” of Congress’ constitutional rights to conduct oversight.
