Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff just put a very real time stamp on the start of Donald Trump’s impeachment
Over the weekend, House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings offered a strong hint at when the impeachment of Donald Trump will begin – but that hint was essentially a conditional, and didn’t adhere to the calendar. Now Cummings’ counterparts on two other key House committees are offering a more definitive timeframe.
Elijah Cummings said that while the House is currently waiting to win its court battles over impeachment evidence and testimony before proceeding, it could go ahead and immediately jump to impeachment if Trump directly defies a court order at any point during that process. Yesterday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler appeared on MSNBC and pointed to “late in the fall” of 2019 as his ideal timeframe for introducing articles of impeachment if they’re going to happen.
Tonight, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff also appeared on MSNBC. He said that if some of the court battles over evidence and testimony end up being “drawn out too long,” he wants to begin impeachment even without those pieces of evidence.
It now very much appears that the “big three” committee chairs are on the same page, as they’re each saying a variation of the same thing. House Democrats are aiming for late fall as the start date for Donald Trump’s impeachment, because that should give them enough time to win most or all of their court battles over impeachment-related evidence and testimony. If they haven’t won every battle by then, or if Trump defies a court order in the meantime, they’ll just go ahead and do it. These three committee chairs control the impeachment process as much as Speaker Nancy Pelosi does.
