Pelosi: Trump's 'Charm Offensive Rather Offensive'

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this morning that she finds President Trump’s “charm offensive rather offensive” when it comes to the White House trying to get things out of lawmakers.

Pelosi was asked on MSNBC if there are some issue on which she’d be willing to work with Trump.

“Well, we have always worked on infrastructure together. It’s never political until President Obama made some suggestions that they would block,” she replied. “But I think we have to step back for a moment and just observe what one of the branches of government is doing.”

“We have someone in the White House who really is disrupting the checks and balances system, whether it is the courts, whether it’s the Congress. And New Yorkers had said to me, you watch his behavior, this is how he operates and you judge it,” she added. “First, he will try to charm you; if that does not work, he bullies you. If that doesn’t work, he walks away from you, just walks away from the deal. And if that does not work, he sues you.”

Pelosi said “part of that responsibility” of people in Washington “is to find common ground, not to just say, ‘I didn’t even know what was going on here. I didn’t know this is going to be so hard.'”

She also panned House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) saying Thursday that Trump “probably wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI and White House” in his interactions with former FBI Director James Comey. “He’s just new to this,” Ryan added.

Pelosi quipped, “For the Speaker to say, well, he’s new at this, no. He’s not new at obeying the law.”

The interactions described by Comey at his Thursday Senate hearing, the Dem leader said, constitute “abuse of power” but special counsel Robert Mueller would determine beyond that.

“In terms of obstruction of justice, I think there’s reason to believe and that Mueller should look into this,” she said. “…If you’re the president of the United States, in the Oval with this pattern of behavior that we have seen, while the Justice Department — their tradition is not to indict the president of the United States, it is certainly in the court of public opinion very incriminating.”

Pelosi had given some advice to Trump: “Get some sleep.”

“When he called me the night of the Syria invasion — not to go into the conversation — it was late at night, like at midnight, well after it was all finished. He was going on and on, and I said, well — it was like midnight — and I said, why don’t you go to sleep?” she said. “I think that — I think there is something not — more sleep might be a solution for him.”