White House Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway suggested Friday afternoon that House Democrats’ vote to authorize the impeachment inquiry would not change how the White House views the impeachment process.

Asked whether the White House would cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, she directed reporters to the October 8 letter White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote to House Democrats, calling it “unconstitutional” and “illegitimate.”

Asked if the vote changed things, she responded:

Do you actually think you can apply due process retroactively? Don’t you think the better procedure would have been to have this out in the open from the beginning and not just selectively leak and by extension lie about what did or didn’t happen? I mean, how are you going to put the genie back in the bottle?

…

All we’ve had is [a] secretive process, and selective leaks and disparaging lies, including from the mouth of the chairman of the Intel Committee himself. It’s not his job to tell everybody what he has concluded based on limited testimony and based on a process that’s been in the dark.

Conway also criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for forging ahead with an impeachment inquiry despite the American public being deeply divided over whether President Trump should be impeached and removed:

For Nancy Pelosi to have said and to have committed to the country as speaker of the House third, as in line to the presidency, several short months ago, to have committed that impeachment would have needed to be ‘overwhelmingly bipartisan,’ and have the support of the public — we’re not there, ladies and gentlemen.

Conway noted that the vote was not bipartisan and that two Democrats actually voted against the impeachment inquiry, whereas no Republicans voted for it.

Conway said:

In fact, the opposition was bipartisan. A couple of Democrats broke with her, and so I think it’s incredibly disappointing that she keeps changing her mind, her commitment to the public — impeachment was not overwhelmingly bipartisan to vote for this inquiry, and we don’t have a majority of Americans saying impeach him and remove.

She dismissed national polls showing that a higher percentage of Americans want to impeach and remove Trump than do not.

“I never did a single national poll when I was campaign manager, why would that be relevant, you got to look state by state, and in those states where these members are,” she said.

Conway pointed out that 31 Democrats in red states that backed Trump in 2016 are vulnerable now that Pelosi pushed for an impeachment inquiry vote.

“I also don’t understand why Nancy Pelosi sacrificed so many of her members yesterday,” she said. “She represents a safe district, but they don’t.”

Conway also argued Democrats were so obsessed with impeachment that they were not getting anything else done.

“I’m concerned that if the Democratic Congress continues to obsess about one issue to the exclusion to everything else, that we need them to help with, and that they committed they would get done — it’s that simple.”

“They’re simply not doing the business of America,” she told reporters. “Impeaching the president is not, as far as I know, not in the top three of the burning issues that the country wants you to focus on.”

She recalled after two shootings over the summer that Democrats vowed to pass gun control legislation.

“Now they don’t even mention it,” she said. “They’re not interested in anything but removing the president of the United States.”

 

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