let s impeach the president, isn t that a good idea? when all in starts now. good evening from new york. i m joy reid. chris hayes is in ohio covering tonight s debate. well, at this point it s not a question of if the president of the united states, donald trump, committed an impeachable offense. he s already admitted to it in public statements and in documents that the white house itself released. we know that when the president of ukraine said that he wanted to buy more american weapons to protect his country from military aggression by russia, donald trump immediately responded, i want you to do us a favor, though. and then he proceeded to ask that ukraine investigate former vice president joe biden s son and give life to a nutty right wing conspiracy theory that would absolve russia from meddling in an election. and trump told the ukraine wherein president multiple times to talk to the man who had
totally wrong, made it up or the person giving the information to the whistleblower was dishonest. and this country has to find out who that person was, because that person s a spy, in my opinion. you ready? so when a whistleblower purposely or not gives something that s totally erroneous now, here s where i fooled them. they never thought i d release the conversation. they never thought in a million years that i d release the conversation. when little adam schiff saw the text, when he read it, he couldn t believe it. when nancy pelosi, who worked a day early, nancy pelosi called for essentially impeachment. let s impeach the president. before she saw the transcript and this is an exact word for word transcript of the conversation, right, taken by very talented stenographers. listen to me. so when she saw that, she i heard she went crazy. she said, we can t impeach him
an op-ed in the washington post overnight by a bunch of freshmen democrats was the thing that pushed nancy pelosi over the edge to decide if this time despite her own reluctance and i think she s very smart to be reluctant on that. we will look at the entire thing, unredacted and recall how mike unclassified. this makes the stakes even higher for nancy pelosi. and i have to tell you, i m sure for those at home they are seeing a circus with all speculation and no facts. as you mentioned earlier there should be an investigation. we should learn what happened before there s a line up of people saying, let s impeach the president. truthfully speaking, there are about 40% that supported and a lot of folks on the left that supportive and independence truly don t. unless there s something hard-hitting and this is setting themselves up for an election
you re not there yet. why? for the purposes on the law and constitution, where we are now is described as preliminary to a judicial proceeding. i say that because, you know, what we can of the constitution is, you know, what s the function of how we describe something? and right now the most important thing is to obtain the grand jury material to see the evidence and the standard the court has set is are we preliminary to a potential impeachment. i believe we are. where we should get to, the decision, okay, let s indict the president, let s impeach the president is if we re convinced we can make the case. and here, okay, there is no making the case to the president s personality that is the senate gop. right. but we should at least be able to make the case to the american people. i d like to see the evidence so i m confident that we can do that before we say we re ready to charge the president of the united states. as you know, that is
on impeachment because she wants to protect the democrat majority in the house and she knows that majority runs through districts that president trump won in 2016 and the problem for democrats is that president trump has two important things going for him. one an incumbent, two the economy is strong. so they have been desperately hoping that robert mueller and both the report and his testimony today would somehow do irreparable harm to president trump but it simply just did not happen. tucker: yeah. i understand the strategy completely but at some point, and it s not that far off, one of these, in fact it s a year from now. one of these candidates is going to be the democratic nominee and is going to have to pivot and appeal to the whole country. this is pretty late to pretend they can impeach trump. for us, an objecti be surfer yes. but if you re a part sane democrat who despises this president, you want to hear what you want to hear, let s impeach