The House speaker's remark came as the congressional showdown with the president over executive privilege escalated sharply.
ADVERTISEMENTWASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Wednesday that President Donald Trump is "becoming self-impeachable" because of his administration's noncompliance with subpoenas and other requests by House chairs.
"The point is that every single day, whether it's obstruction, obstruction, obstruction — obstruction of having people come to the table with facts, ignoring subpoenas. ... Every single day, the president is making a case — he's becoming self-impeachable, in terms of some of the things that he is doing," she said at a Washington Post Live event in Washington.
According to three lawmakers, Pelosi made a similar comment to House Democrats in their closed-door weekly conference meeting Wednesday morning.
Pelosi has largely veered away from discussing the prospects of impeachment proceedings publicly, telling the Post in March that impeaching Trump is "just not worth it." After the release of the redacted Mueller report, Pelosi held a conference call with other Democratic leaders and rank-and-file members and while leadership promised to pursue aggressive investigations into Trump, they did not commit to beginning impeachment proceedings.
"Trump is goading us to impeach him," she said at an event in New York City hosted by the Cornell University Institute of Politics and Global Affairs. "That's what he's doing. Every single day, he's just like taunting, taunting, taunting because he knows that it would be very divisive in the country, but he doesn't really care. He just wants to solidify his base."
Pelosi's remark came shortly before the White House took the significant step of exerting executive privilege over all materials related to the Mueller investigation, and as the House Judiciary Committee was set to vote on a resolution over whether to recommend that the House hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress.