U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) leaves her office at the Capitol
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It’s Happening.

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Vivian Kane
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Published: Sep 24, 2019 03:58 pm

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Update: It happened.

We’ll update once this does or doesn’t happen but for now, there is an exciting rumor spreading through DC. According to numerous reports based on a range of sources, Nancy Pelosi will be announcing the start of a formal impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump later today.

I don’t want to get my hopes up because we’ve all been hurt here already. But this does feel different. For one thing, Pelosi is seeing immense pressure from within her own party. On Monday night, seven freshman members of Congress, all of whom have experience in the military or in defense or security intelligence agencies—published an op-ed in the Washington Post. They write that if the allegations against Trump regarding his attempt to persuade Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden’s son are true—and he has admitted they are—then they “believe these actions represent an impeachable offense.”

From the House floor, Congressman John Lewis called for impeachment proceedings to begin immediately. “I truly believe the time to begin impeachment proceedings against this president has come,” he said.

More than two-thirds of House Democrats are now saying they support impeachment proceedings—and that number continues to rise.

So is Pelosi finally going to begin impeachment proceedings? We can continue to hope. For now, though, she still refuses to say the actual word.

There is already an impeachment inquiry happening in the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jerry Nadler. But a whole lot of Democratic lawmakers see Trump’s latest scandal with Ukraine as a tipping point, requiring action from Pelosi.

To be clear, Trump’s conversations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are not separate from the existing allegations of obstruction of justice and abuse of power covered in the Mueller report. They’re more like a sequel to those allegations. And in both cases, Trump admitted to some pretty terrible things as if they’re totally normal. He admitted to being open to letting Russia influence the 2016 election, just as he admitted to trying to get the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden.

What Trump hasn’t admitted to (yet) and has so far denied is that he threatened to withhold aid money already appropriated by Congress unless Ukraine helped him go after a political opponent. Seeking foreign influence in an American election is bad enough, but this kind of extortion, if true, is what those freshman Democrats called “an impeachable offense.”

According to the Washington Post, Nancy Pelosi is planning to announce an impeachment inquiry later today after a closed-door meeting with her Democrat caucus. You can be sure we’ll be keeping an eye on this.

(image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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Image of Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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