As Nancy Pelosi broached Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry with Stephen Colbert on Thursday night—specifically, Congress’s vote to formalize the impeachment inquiry regarding the president’s phone call with Ukraine, she told the comedian, “I wanted to thank you for your patriotism.”
“This is a sad thing for our country,” Pelosi said of the impeachment process. “We do this prayerfully, and with great seriousness. Nobody goes to Congress to impeach a president. And you’ve had your fun with the policy and the personality and the rest, and that’s about the election. The patriotism, the Constitution, is really what impeachment is about.”
“The most important thing for the American people to realize,” she added, “is no one is above the law.”
Colbert, of course, has had his fun with the ongoing spectacle of Trump’s impending impeachment inquiry—but Pelosi returned several times to the gravity of the matter at hand. When Colbert asked for her first reaction to the phone call, even offering to bleep out any expletives she might have used, the Speaker of the House remained on message, telling the comedian, “I prayed for the United States of America. Really. It’s a very sad thing. We don’t want to impeach a president. We don’t want the reality that a president has done something that is in violation of the Constitution. But it was more about—so much had happened before.”
“I had not been, shall we say, enthusiastic about the divisiveness that would occur from an impeachment,” Pelosi said of her former stance on the matter. But the phone call, she said, changed everything. As she put it, “This was something that you could not ignore.”
“In one conversation he undermined our national security by withholding military assistance to a country that had been voted on by the Congress of the United States—to the benefit of the Russians,” Pelosi said. “At the same time, he jeopardized the integrity of our elections, the heart of our democracy. And in doing so, in my view, he possibly violated his oath of office to protect, defend, and preserve the Constitution of the United States.”
Pelosi also looked back to the time soon after Congress first launched the inquiry in September. “The week after that…was when the president called about how perfect the phone call was,” Pelosi said. Her review of the exchange, it seems, was somewhat different: “My view was that it was perfectly wrong,” Pelosi said, eliciting a burst of applause from Colbert’s audience.
Colbert posited that Trump lacks the empathy to realize why his behavior during the phone call seems like corruption, but Pelosi issued a slight correction. “Well, you’re being very gentle!” she said. “I think that ‘integrity’ is the word that this is about.”
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