House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday she will meet with President Donald Trump next week to talk about possible infrastructure legislation, following days of members of her own party urging her and other House leaders to pursue impeachment.
“We’ll be meeting with the President next week, when we come back, to talk about what the prospect is for the size in terms of resources and scope of what that might be,” said Pelosi, a California Democrat, at the Time 100 Summit in New York.
Infrastructure, along with efforts to lower prescription drug prices, is considered one of the few areas of potential bipartisan agreement this Congress, though it has long been elusive for leaders in both parties.
Pelosi said she is “optimistic” about the prospects of accomplishing legislation on infrastructure and lowering prescription drug prices. She said infrastructure, “in a green way,” has “never really been partisan.”
But the chances of bipartisan collaboration seemed to be overshadowed by some in Pelosi’s own party calling for Trump’s impeachment. When asked whether special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was an impeachment referral, Pelosi said, “There are many ways to hold the President of the United States accountable, and the Mueller report sort of led the way to that by not making an indictment.”
Mueller’s investigation into possible obstruction of justice could not clear Trump, according to a redacted version of Mueller’s report released earlier this month. Mueller wrote he accepted the Justice Department opinion that a sitting President cannot be indicted, but he rejected the argument made by Trump’s legal team that a President cannot commit obstruction of justice, leaving the door open for Congress to continue to investigate Trump.
Pelosi said it “doesn’t matter” whether the President is indictable, “what matters is the truth, and the investigations that our committees will conduct will take us down a fact-finding path.”
The Mueller report showed “the President of the United States engaged in behaviors that was unethical, unscrupulous, and beneath the dignity of the office that he holds,” Pelosi said Tuesday.
When asked if she believes Trump committed obstruction of justice and if his behavior was criminal, Pelosi said, “That remains to be seen, when we see the rest of the report.”
“I do believe that all of us in public office … have a duty to the American people to keep us together,” Pelosi said, when asked about the next steps and how Congress was going to hold the President accountable. She said “impeachment is one of the most divisive forces, paths that we could go down to in our country.”
“But if the facts, the path of fact-finding takes us there, we have no choice,” Pelosi said. “But we’re not there yet.”
CNN’s Phil Mattingly contributed to this report.