Welcome to the Donald Trump impeachment show
For weeks, Palmer Report has been pointing out that Donald Trump’s impeachment was obviously going to end up happening, no matter what any Democratic House leader might say in the meantime. The logic was simple enough: pro-impeachment poll numbers moved from the high 30s in mid-April to the high 40s in mid-May, and the numbers were going to keep climbing. You can’t stop that kind of momentum. Thanks to Robert Mueller’s public statement yesterday, there’s no longer any doubt where this is headed. So now what?
Contrary to what the pitchfork brigade has decided in response to not getting immediate gratification, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a gifted political tactician who knows what she’s doing. She’s not some bumbling naive fool who doesn’t understand that impeachment is inevitable. She’s not stalling for no reason. To anyone paying smart attention for the past month, it’s been clear that Pelosi knows about something we don’t.
We still don’t know what that is. Maybe Pelosi has been waiting for Mueller to resign so he can publicly testify – which he’ll dutifully do, no matter how much he’s hinting that he doesn’t want to. Maybe Pelosi is waiting because Mueller’s last act on the job was to convince a judge to force the redacted Flynn-related portions of the Mueller report into public view as soon as tomorrow. Maybe it’s a smoking gun. House Democrats acknowledge they’ve been talking a lot with Mueller behind the scenes about his testimony, so maybe he told them that it’s worth waiting for.
Or maybe Pelosi is buying time because House investigators are still digging through the Trump financial records that Wells Fargo and TD Bank turned over on the sly, even as Donald Trump was in court trying to delay Deutsche Bank from turning over his records. Maybe it’s something else entirely, and we don’t even know it exists. Considering House Democrats managed to obtain Trump’s records from two banks without anyone knowing, it’s clear they have a lot going on behind the scenes that they can’t talk about yet, because they can’t tip Trump off about it yet.
The notion of impeachment not happening was always absurd. But considering how extraordinarily difficult it’ll be to get a conviction in the GOP Senate, and thus the need to make the House impeachment hearings be as catastrophically damaging to Donald Trump as possible, it was always just as absurd to expect Pelosi to rush into it without a real gameplan.
Whatever Nancy Pelosi has up her sleeve, she now gets to carry out her gameplan with the public already demanding that she pull the impeachment trigger, the cover of a House Republican loudly calling for it as well, and the inevitability factor of most people on both sides having accepted impeachment as an eventuality. We don’t what all she’s sitting on right now, and just how clever of a gameplan it is. But it’s not nothing, and you’d have to go pretty far out of your way not to see that. Welcome to the impeachment show.
