Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee, Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, Majority Council Sam Dash, Sen. Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia and Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii of the Watergate select committee.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, The Washington Post reports, wants to "keep the impeachment investigation narrowly focused on President Trump and his dealings with the president of Ukraine." She urged her fellow Democratic leaders to do so in a private meeting Wednesday morning, according to five Democrats the Post talked to.
According to those sources, Pelosi "told colleagues that keeping the inquiry narrowly focused on the Ukraine allegations could help keep the investigation out of the courts, where a slew of investigative matters have been bogged down for months—though she did not rule out ultimately including other episodes in a potential impeachment package." Which is good, because the House hasn't even seen the complaint from the whistleblower that kicked this whole Ukraine thing off. There is, reportedly, more to that complaint than just the phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky.
Politico reports that "Democratic leaders emerged from the closed-door meeting declaring that their impeachment inquiry was urgent." However, "multiple lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, confirmed that there was still no specific timeline, and that the House would not cut short its scheduled two-week recess." There's been a lot of talk in Democratic circles about this being done expeditiously, about it being done before 2020. That needs to go out of the window, because the scope of this whole thing is really as of yet unknown, as bad as the phone call memo is.
Now, there's a lot that we know from that phone call. But consider the fact that this memo, so, so damning to Trump is what the White House thought was fine to release. Imagine how much worse the stuff we haven't seen yet from the whistleblower complaint could be. Until that complaint is seen by Congress, and until both House and Senate hear from Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire and from the inspector general who alerted Congress to the existence of the memo when the White House was stonewalling, Pelosi and team simply can't be putting restrictions on what this inquiry will be about and when it will be finished.
She's already ruled out a select committee, which could be a big mistake. The American people deserve what we got in Watergate, a dedicated and professional hearing of the evidence, with actual lawyers and prosecutors leading the way. That's what the Mueller report required, that's what the entire Trump enterprise requires. The nations deserves—demands—transparency. From the White House and from Congress. Give us those hearings, on our TVs, every day until the case is made.
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![WASHINGTON, : US Rep. and member of the House Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham, R-SC, talks to reporters 29 December after a meeting of the "House Mangers" at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. The "House Managers" are the members of the House Judiciary Committe who will serve as prosecutors in the impeachment trial against US President Bill Clinton to be held in the US Senate in early January 1999. AFP PHOTO/TIM SLOAN (Photo credit should read TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images)](https://images.dailykos.com/images/721414/story_image/GettyImages-51623351.jpg?1569436868 "WASHINGTON, : US Rep. and member of the House Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham, R-SC, talks to reporters 29 December after a meeting of the "House Mangers" at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. The "House Managers" are the members of the House Judiciary Committe who will serve as prosecutors in the impeachment trial against US President Bill Clinton to be held in the US Senate in early January 1999. AFP PHOTO/TIM SLOAN (Photo credit should read TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images)")
