Pelosi Says House Will Move With Impeachment Articles; White House Signals It Won't Cooperate with Impeachment Process
DAVID GREGORY, CNN HOST (voice-over): End game. Congress is closer than ever to impeaching the president of the United States.</s>REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: If we allow the president to be above the law, we do so surely at the peril of our republic.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's a disgrace to our country that's done by, frankly, losers. You almost question whether or not they love our country.</s>GREGORY: Plus, how President Trump's fellow leaders treat him behind the scenes.</s>JUSTIN TRUDEAU, CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER: I just watched, I watched his team's jaws just drop to the floor.</s>GREGORY: And Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg square off over transparency and corruption.</s>SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Who is doing the fundraising for the mayor, what special accesses are they getting? What's happening behind closed doors?</s>PETE BUTTIGIEG (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I certainly think it would be a good idea for her to release as I have to cover her entire career.</s>GREGORY: INSIDE POLITICS, the biggest stories sourced by the best reporters, right now.</s>GREGORY: And good Sunday morning. Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm David Gregory, in this morning for John King. Thanks so much for joining us. Well, buckle up for a historic December. By the end of this month, it's now all but certain that Donald J. Trump will be the third president in American history to be impeached.</s>PELOSI: The president has engaged in abuse of power, undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our elections, sadly. But with confidence and humility, with allegiance to our Founders and a heart full of love for America, today I am asking our chairmen to proceed with articles of impeachment.</s>GREGORY: Democrats want a vote by Christmas, and the timeline is tight. The Judiciary Committee will hold a second impeachment hearing tomorrow and then it must vote on the actual articles likely by the end of the week. After that, a vote by the full House before Congress leaves town for the holidays. Rather than mounting a defense, the White House is sticking to its strategy of trying to delegitimize the process, made clear on a Friday letter from White House counsel Pat Cipollone to Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler. He writes: As you know, your impeachment inquiry is completely baseless and has violated basic principles of due process and fundamental fairness. House Democrats have wasted enough of America's time with this charade. You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings. For his part, the president claims public opinion is on his side.</s>TRUMP: You know this, that the impeachment thing is a total hoax. The numbers have totally swung our way. They don't want to see impeachment. Especially in the swing states, I've never seen a swing like this, because people realize it's a total hoax. The people see that it's just a continuation of this three-year witch hunt.</s>GREGORY: In fact, we've seen public opinion polling shows that voters remain more or less split on impeachment. So, with us now to share their reporting and their insight, Julie Pace with "The Associated Press", CNN's Jeff Zeleny", Vivian Salama at "The Wall Street Journal" and "The Washington Post's' Karoun Demirjian. Welcome to all of you. Good Sunday morning.</s>JEFF ZELENY, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.</s>GREGORY: So, Julie, here we go. We've got this big week ahead. Where do we go on this very fast timeline to vote on articles of impeachment?</s>JULIE PACE, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: There are two important tracks right now. One is in the House and one is in the Senate. So, on the House side, certainly what those articles of impeachment will look like, how does the House potentially pull in some of the Mueller investigation or do they try to stay focused on Ukraine, and how does Pelosi manage the anxiety we're seeing from the House Democrats that were slow to get on board with the idea of an impeachment proceeding? And I would really watch the Senate. This is where it's going to head after the holidays. That the Republican-controlled Senate will hold a trial and if everything that we are hearing holds up, it will be a pretty robust trial where both the White House and Democrats will be able to call witnesses. The relationship to watch there, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, who are going to have to negotiate over the rules for that process.</s>GREGORY: So, before we get to the Senate, Karoun, this whole question of how narrow, how broad are these articles going to be, and you do see some Democrats who we can't forget are in more vulnerable districts, districts that were won by President Trump. And they're saying let's be careful about what we do. We go to the full screen here. Representative Brad Schneider from Illinois saying: I think this is where you're hearing moderates speak up. We want something that's very tightly defined. I don't think we should be throwing the whole kitchen sink and try to overreach. Another representative from New Jersey: If we impeach the president for everything he's done that's impeachable, it will probably take us to 2025. Let's be smart, disciplined and focused about this and get it done. Because he charge will be, really, this is impeachment because you never liked him in the first place.</s>KAROUN DEMIRJIAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. So, they're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. There's a faction that wants to stay focused on Ukraine, just on that fact pattern, and yet, part of the whole argument the Democrats have been making is that this is not an isolated circumstance. We had to move quickly because the president welcomed foreign interference in the last election, and he solicited it for the upcoming one. So, how you kind of square the circle is their dilemma. Also, the other part of the dilemma is that while it seems pretty certain that they will issue an obstruction of Congress charge, that's been said over and over again, do they decide to go all the way and accuse Trump of bribery as Nancy Pelosi has used that word, Adam Schiff has used that word, several others. So, how do they match their articles to their rhetoric? And, yes, there are moderate Democrats who are nervous about it, but unless they match the articles to their rhetoric, they kind of undermine what they've been saying. And they have to figure out in the next few days what the sweet spot is on all of that. If they don't include some of reference to things in the past, then they kind of lose --</s>GREGORY: Well, obstruction of Congress, Jeff. I mean, this is what people can understand, which is when Pelosi says, you can't do whatever you want to do as president. You have to stand up for Congress, which doesn't often stand up for itself.</s>ZELENY: For sure, and I think one of our guides here, we don't know exactly which route, but one guide is Speaker Pelosi's own words. She's been reluctant from the beginning. She made this change, remember talking to her the night before she made this announcement back in September she said this is going to be a big moment. She has not approached this in a gleeful way. So that's why I believe it's going to be more of a narrow path here. This is going to be narrow articles and she wants to -- you know, all of her rhetoric has been consistent, so she is controlling -- hoping to control some of her more liberal members. There is a tendency to want to throw everything in, but she is very cognizant of the majority makers and how difficult it is for them. So I'm keeping an eye on her and I think she'll go in a narrow way. But we'll see how it works.</s>GREGORY: Vivian, it's interesting, the Vice President Mike Pence on Fox over the weekend. He's still working the house portion of this, warning these vulnerable Democrats about what could happen. Let's watch this.</s>MIKE PENCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There's more than 31 Democrats in Congress who are in districts that the president carried in 2016. I really believe that if the American people will let their voice be heard, especially -- especially to those Democrats that just arrived a year ago on Capitol Hill, we would still have a chance to set this partisan impeachment aside.</s>GREGORY: See, I think they would love to see as many defections as possible to say, you know, there's not unanimity here.</s>VIVIAN SALAMA, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Well, and there isn't. That's something important to realize. And going to Karoun's point about the various articles and sort of reconciling which ones they want to pursue and not, for a number of Democrats, it's a really dicey situation, where on the one hand, they do want to show that they're supporting the party and they're supporting impeachment of the president, but on the other hand, they don't want to make it seem like they're going into it blindly without really scrutinizing all the facts in front of them. And so, with a greater number of articles that will be presented, maybe they could pick and choose to show that they weren't just going for a sweeping impeachment vote. And so, this is something that a lot of them have realized going into 2020, is that they might face a lot of pushback from voters, especially in these swing districts.</s>GREGORY: Interesting. What I can't seem to get past is this is all kind of set play. We know what's going to happen and how this is going to play out. And it really plays to Donald Trump, too, who said at the end of the week on Thursday, he said -- this is something he tweeted, of course. If you're going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate and so that our country can get back to business. We will have Schiff, the Bidens, Pelosi, and many more testify and we'll reveal for the first time how corrupt our system really is. You know, impeachment, reality show, bring it on. He wants it now, Jeff.</s>ZELENY: He does want it now. And we don't know what a Senate trial is going to look like in today's age. I mean, it is a lifetime ago, the Clinton impeachment in terms of how media is conducted. So he can eager to have this show and he's been defining this from the very beginning, and winning in some respects. But there are still voters out there in the middle. Suburban women will hold the key for the 2020 election, who are watching all of this. So he wants it to go quick. But I don't think that we know exactly how this is going to end up. I think we should just be -- at least my mind is open. A, we don't know what the vote in the House will be exactly. But the Senate, I don't know. What does Susan Collins do? What does Corey Gardner do?</s>PACE: And when you talk to Republicans privately, they will acknowledge that don't know actually how the politics of this plays. I mean, they are making this argument that this is basically the same as everything else that we've seen come before with Trump, where voters are very hardened, Republicans stand with him, Democrats are opposed him. But in reality, they don't know what this looks like next year after we get through a Senate trial and a Democratic nomine --</s>GREGORY: And it is a trial in an election year, which we shouldn't underplay.</s>DEMIRJIAN: Right, and that's part of why he's moving so quickly and why the courts haven't been involved up to this point and why the GOP has been pushing back and saying where is the fire. You're going to have an election anyway. But the point you're making, like there is a way for the GOP and the Senate to kind of thread the needle and say, we want to have a legitimate trial, so, yes, we'll become in any of the witnesses. Maybe you'll have votes for like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins of this world to have the impeachment trial, to hear from John Bolton and for things like that. But they still don't have to go all the way home at the end of the day and say this was an impeachable offense. If you look at the precedent of the members of the House that we thought were going to do that, the Will Hurds of this world, who did the opposite thing, right? If you look at just going back and the concerns everybody raised about Brett Kavanaugh. It's a totally different situation, but how many people actually voted against him in the end? It's really easy for the GOP to do everything preliminary and look like they might be on the fence and then side with the president.</s>GREGORY: Well, I mean, the question is whether any Republicans want to make a statement about the president's conduct, in the course of the trial, short of impeaching him. We haven't seen whether they want room to make that statement. We'll still with this. We'll take a break here, and come right back. And when we come back, we'll talk about house speaker Pelosi who was the reluctant impeacher, got to yes after this.