CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday resurfaced a 2008 interview he conducted with President Trump, then a New York business mogul, in which Trump says Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should have sought impeachment against former President George W. Bush.
Blitzer shared a clip from the exchange with Trump as the House — again led by Pelosi — prepares to vote on two articles of impeachment against him.
Trump initially praised Pelosi, who also served as Speaker from 2003 to 2007, calling her “impressive.”
“I like her a lot. But I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush,” Trump said. “It just seemed like she was really going to look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing … for the [Iraq] war.”
In the interview with Blitzer, the “Apprentice” star then pivoted to defending former President Clinton, calling his impeachment “nonsense.”
“Look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant and they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense,” Trump said. “And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.”
Clinton became the second U.S. president to be impeached in 1998 when he was accused of lying under oath and obstructing justice, only to be later acquitted in a Senate trial.
Trump has called the impeachment inquiry against him a politically motivated “sham” and on Wednesday lashed out at Pelosi over the expected vote, claiming she “will go down in history as worst Speaker.”
The Democratic-controlled House is widely expected to pass the two articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — against Trump. It all but guaranteed that the president will ultimately be acquitted in a GOP-majority Senate trial under the leadership of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).