House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stated on Wednesday that impeaching President Donald Trump is not a priority at the moment. The remarks came after Michael Cohen’s guilty plea to campaign finance violations that implicated the President.
“Impeachment has to spring from something else,” Pelosi, who has long downplayed the possibility of impeachment, told the Associated Press.
Cohen, who was Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a number of tax and bank fraud charges as well as a campaign finance violation. He said in court that Trump had directed him to arrange payments to two women during his 2016 presidential campaign in exchange for their silence about alleged affairs with Trump.
“If and when the information emerges about that, we’ll see,” Pelosi said. “It’s not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward.”
Pelosi said Democrats should focus on oversight of the President and allow special counsel Robert Mueller to finish his work, the AP reported. The charges against Cohen sprang from Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Tuesday was convicted on eight out of the eighteen counts in his Virginia trial, while the federal jury could not decide on the other ten after their fourth day of deliberations.
Manafort was convicted on counts of bank and tax fraud, but since the jury failed to reach a decision on ten such counts connected to financial crimes, Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on them. The former campaign manager is the first Trump associate to be found guilty as part of the special counsel’s investigation. He faces a maximum of 80 years in prison.
“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort,” said President Donald Trump, who was in Virginia for a political rally. “It has nothing to do with Russian collusion,” he added, again referring to the probe as a “witch hunt.”
Be the first to comment