In a press conference Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) compared the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry to our Founders fighting the War of Independence against Great Britain.
“As you’ve heard me say over and over again: In the dark days of the Revolution, Thomas Paine said, ‘The times have found us.’ We think the times have found us now,” said Pelosi. House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff was standing next to her.
“Not that we place ourselves in the category of greatness of our founders,” she added, “but we do place ourselves in a time of urgency on the threat to the Constitution, a system of checks and balances, that is being made.”
“[Our founders] fought for our independence,” the speaker continued. “They declared independence. They fought and won. They established a democracy.”
Apparently uneasy about praising the Constitution without qualification, Pelosi stressed, “Thank God they made the Constitution amendable so we could always ever be expanding freedom.”
Video below via GOP War Room:
The Democrats ramped up their impeachment inquiry in recent days, sending subpoenas to both Trump’s personal lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
In the subpoena sent to Giuliani on Monday, the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee explains that the committees are “investigating the extent to which President Trump jeopardized national security by pressing Ukraine to interfere with our 2020 election and by withholding security assistance provided by Congress to help Ukraine counter Russian aggression, as well as any efforts to cover up these matters.”
The inquiry was sparked by a whistleblower complaint accusing Trump of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” particularly by “pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.” The complaint points to Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as supposed evidence of Trump “pressuring” Ukraine to “dig up dirt,” as Democrats have put it, on former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.
As reports of the complaint began to circulate, Trump authorized the release of the complaint as well as a transcript of the now-famous phone call. According to the transcript, Trump never issued a “quid pro quo” as had been alleged by Democrats, but did ask Zelensky to “look into” the corruption allegations related to Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
“I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down, and that’s really unfair,” Trump told Zelensky. “A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”