The new Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee told ABC News' THIS WEEK, he's against any impeachment proceedings unless compelling evidence is found to put "the country through the trauma of an impeachment process."
Obviously Trump's behavior in office has been so odious that the idea of impeaching him is a juicy one, but in actuality there needs to be sufficient evidence to do something like that and then we'd need support from the Senate.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, from New York's 10th has been in office a long time and is a tough cookie.
Rep. Nadler will now become Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and when asked by ABC News about impeaching Trump, he rightfully laughed.
Stephanopoulos said, "You just laughed at that idea."
George continued, "You’ve got top Democrats like Tom Steyer, Op-Ed in the New York Times this week saying Democrats must pursue impeachment. You’ve got a lot of others warning that that would be overreach if you went too quickly. How are you going to balance that out?"
Nadler calmly replied, "Well I think it’s too early to – to make that determination. You have to be very reluctant to do an impeachment. I criticized the Republicans 20 years ago for the Clinton impeachment because I thought it was not based."
He continued, "We will have to see from the Mueller investigation, from whatever we find, because Congress should be active in our own investigations and our own upholding of our duty to hold the administration accountable and to provide a check and a balance."
"We have to look into all kinds of questions. We’ll have to find out, if we find it – that the president has or has not committed apparently impeachable offenses and whether those impeachable offenses rise to the gravity which would necessitate putting together – putting the country through the trauma of an impeachment process," Rep. Nadler said.
The new WSJ piece that outlines Trump's probable campaign finance violations of orchestrating payoffs to silence women he's had an affair during the election is something that comes to mind.
Taken together, the accounts refute a two-year pattern of denials by Mr. Trump, his legal team and his advisers that he was involved in payoffs to Ms. McDougal and a former adult-film star. They also raise the possibility that the president of the United States violated federal campaign-finance laws.
The Wall Street Journal found that Mr. Trump was involved in or briefed on nearly every step of the agreements. He directed deals in phone calls and meetings with his self-described fixer, Michael Cohen, and others. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has gathered evidence of Mr. Trump’s participation in the transactions.
The mainstream media is obsessed with this question even before Dems officially run the House and because conservatives made it a midterm campaign issue. Fox News has been screaming that if the Democrats took back the House, they would immediately impeach Trump, but only the evidence can do that.
And articles like this point to big trouble for Trump moving forward.
And now Donald doesn't have the likes of a Rep. Devin Nunez as a protector anymore, whose sole purpose was to obstruct all investigations into Trump.
Rep. Nadler also said his priorities right now are to protect the Mueller investigation from White House interference and also said he wouldn't investigate Judge Kavanaugh, but how the FBI investigations were handled.
Rep. Nadler said, "We do have a responsibility I believe to investigate the – the process by which the FBI was stifled in its investigation by the White House. When the FBI was asked to investigate, there was not a complete investigation, for the reasons I stated then. A lot of witnesses who should’ve been – who volunteered to come forward weren’t – weren’t interviewed and so forth. But we have to invest -- look into that with a view toward making sure that future FBI investigations are not subject to the same kind of White House interference and -- and can be relied upon."
