House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that she expected public hearings on Donald Trump's impeachment to start as soon as this month, but she put no constraints on how long the proceedings would take. “I don’t know what the timetable will be—the truth will set us free,” Pelosi told Bloomberg TV.
Pelosi also suggested that at least some of the Robert Mueller-led Russia probe was under consideration for inclusion in the articles of impeachment. "There were 11 obstruction of justice provisions in the Mueller report. Perhaps some of them will be part of this," Pelosi said during the interview. But she also noted that Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky had provide a certain “clarity” for the public. “It changed everything in the public mind.”
Mueller's report famously detailed nearly a dozen cases in which Trump sought to obstruct the investigation but stopped short of concluding that he had broken the law. But Mueller notably didn't exonerate Trump either, and many observers concluded that he was effectively putting the ball in Congress' court, since the Justice Department policy says that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Pelosi is indicating that House Democrats are at least considering folding some of Mueller's findings into an article of impeachment that is perhaps more broadly aimed at Trump's obstructive acts.
The Bloomberg roundtable of reporters and editors also grilled Pelosi on how impeachment might affect the stock market, and Pelosi basically said, sorry, but the stock market is irrelevant to our examination of whether Trump has violated the Constitution and committed impeachable offenses.
"You can’t be the United States of the markets. It’s not that. It’s the United States of America," Pelosi offered, responding to a question inspired by a Trump tweet that impeachment was "hurting" the stock market. “If the president of the United States wants to say the market is up or down because of what you’re doing, so be it for him.”
Pelosi also skewered Trump’s repeated assertion that his phone call with the Ukrainian president was perfect. “No, it’s perfectly wrong—you can’t do that,” she asserted.