Andrew Cuomo Says Pelosi Caved to 'Leftist' Democrats, Impeachment Going 'Nowhere'
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sudden lurch toward impeachment has been derided by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as the California Democrat caving in to leftists in the Democratic caucus.
“I think we now go to a very long and unproductive road,” said Cuomo, one of the top names in the Democratic Party, at a panel discussion Thursday at New Jersey’s Seton Hall Law School that was designed to focus upon political civility.
House Democrats have been demanding the start of a formal impeachment process for months, but Pelosi has been cool to those demands. Cuomo said last week’s change in her position was simply a sign that the pressure from the left was too great for her to resist.
“Speaker Pelosi was dealing with pressure from her caucus and…there is a heightened leftist component to the Democratic Party that she was feeling pressure for,” Cuomo said, according to Fox News.
“She is a deliberate, responsible person. She is not a knee-jerk person and I think she even resisted the pressure in her caucus admirably for a long period of time,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo doubted the so-called impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s dealings with the government of Ukraine would result in substantial findings.
“They’re doing their quote-unquote ‘inquiry.’ I think the Ukraine issue raises a lot of questions and I think it is for an investigative committee, it is fodder they can spend months, one witness after another, one witness after another, on all sort of different tracks,” Cuomo said.
“Where does it go ultimately? Nowhere, because even if they vote for impeachment, it goes to the Senate and it wouldn’t happen in the Senate,” he said.
Cuomo said the focus on impeachment will marginalize all other issues.
“So my guess is that this continues and blends into the presidential campaign. The problem with that is that nothing else is going to get done between now and then,” he said.
On Wednesday, Cuomo had supported the impeachment inquiry after the release of a transcript of a July 25 phone between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“When the transcript came out today, and you actually see what the president says, you’re darn right there should be an inquiry,” Cuomo said, according to Patch.com.
Cuomo’s office on Friday issued a statement about Cuomo’s Thursday remarks.
“Now, there’s no question that the investigation must follow all leads,” Communications Director Dani Lever said in the statement,
“The Governor strongly believes that the paths to investigate must include the allegations of the President’s solicitation of foreign assistance, the President’s abuse of power in effectively extorting the Ukrainian president with federal funds, the reported cover-up by the Attorney General of a complaint that implicated [William] Barr himself, and the tampering with government documents in the attempt to secret the transcripts,” the statement said.
As for former New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who appeared at the Seton Hall event along with Cuomo, the call was simply Trump being Trump.
“This is the president, who he is and how he talks, and how he does business. And this is no mystery to anybody who’s known him, even just as a public servant over the last three years, let alone me knowing him for 18 years,” Christie said, according to Politico.
“So, yeah, I wouldn’t have said something like that. But that’s the way he talks. That’s the way he does business. I don’t think that’s a mystery to the American people.”
Christie also lashed out at House Democrats. He said they “lose credibility when they announce an impeachment inquiry before they read the transcript.”
Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry on Tuesday. The transcript was released on Wednesday.
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