Trump ‘Richly Deserves’ Impeachment, Chairman of House Judiciary Panel Says

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler, said on Sunday that he believed President Trump “richly deserves” to be impeached, the most forceful public comments yet from the leader of the panel that would open the proceedings to remove the president from office.

“He has done many impeachable offenses,” Mr. Nadler, Democrat of New York, said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He’s violated the law six ways from Sunday.”

But deflecting from his opinion, Mr. Nadler continued: “That’s not the question. The question is, can we develop enough evidence to put before the American people? We have broken the logjam. The president and the attorney general were lying to the American people consistently, saying that the Mueller report found no obstruction, no collusion and exonerated the president.”

Privately, Mr. Nadler had signaled to lawmakers and aides that he had gradually become convinced that his panel should proceed with impeachment hearings as expeditiously as possible. But he had not said so publicly, and his comments on Sunday, after the congressional testimony last week of the former special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, only sharpened the divide among senior lawmakers over whether House Democrats should proceed with impeachment.

More than half a dozen lawmakers came out for beginning impeachment proceedings after Mr. Mueller’s testimony, including Representative Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, the vice chairwoman of the House Democratic Caucus, helping to push the total number of lawmakers in favor of doing so to more than 100. But much of the caucus has remained skeptical of the political implications of such a move that would doubtless end with an acquittal in the Senate, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged caution. “We will proceed when we have what we need to proceed,” she told reporters on Friday. “Not one day sooner.”

The Judiciary Committee has toyed with the idea of impeachment for months, holding hearings and subpoenaing witnesses. In an escalation carrying perhaps the most overt political implications yet, on Friday the panel asked a federal judge to unseal grand jury secrets related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation, using the court filing to declare that lawmakers had already in effect begun an impeachment investigation of Mr. Trump.

“Too much has been made of the phrase ‘an impeachment inquiry,’” Mr. Nadler said at a news conference on Friday. “We are doing what our court filing says we are doing, what I said we are doing, and that is to say we are using our full Article I powers to investigate the conduct of the president and to consider what remedies there are. Among other things we will consider, obviously, are whether to recommend articles of impeachment.”

Mr. Trump took aim at Mr. Nadler on Saturday night, fuming on Twitter that “we gave Nadler and his Trump hating Dems the complete Mueller Report (we didn’t have to), and even Mueller himself, but now that both were a total BUST, they say it wasn’t good enough.”

“Nothing will ever be good enough for them,” he continued. “Witch Hunt!”



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