WASHINGTON — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called President Trump a “loose cannon,” perhaps unwittingly, saying of his reported decision to reveal an Israeli intelligence op to Russian officials in the Oval Office that it draws into question whether he “is he fit to be president of the United States when he would do such a thing.”
“This is a dedication. You really have to read your stuff, know your stuff, be briefed constantly. You cannot connect the dots if you’re a helter skelter,” Pelosi said Tuesday at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference. “And that’s what he has been. He hasn’t even taken his briefings.”
“So, without being political, I think, because we try not to be it in terms of intelligence, what the president did was totally outrageous. Totally outrageous. If it was unwitting, that would be pathetic and dangerous. If it was intentional, that would even be — I don’t know what’s worse,” she added.
Pelosi further mused about “what do the Russians have on him politically, personally, financially.”
“It’s very important that we get to the bottom of it. And there is so much evidence. I, myself, do not think that the attorney general should be the attorney general,” she said. “He’s already violated the recusal.”
She described the current state of affairs in Congress as an “all-out war.”
“I’m very proud of my caucus. They’re very unified. People say, oh you keep them all together. I don’t. Our values are what unifies our caucus. And they have been brave and courageous and out there fighting for the Affordable Care Act in terms of that current battle,” Pelosi continued.
“But this is really almost an all-out war. I don’t like using those kinds of belligerent terms. But an all-out war on the values that we do not share the same values. And I’ve been there 30 years almost, and this is the way it used to be. This is a different breed of cat.”
Later, she added that “we all have to be humble enough to accept all the new ideas, whether they’re left, right, middle or wherever they’re from, for the good of the American people.”
“And hopefully that debate will either change who’s in office or change the minds who are in office on the other side,” Pelsoi said. “Because nothing less is at stake than the great middle class, which again, is the backbone of our great democracy, the greatest country that ever existed in the history of the world.”
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