People close to the speaker say that she has said privately what she often says publicly: She has never been eager to impeach the president. She worried that vulnerable moderates would lose their seats, that it would tear the country apart. And it was a distraction from the poll-tested agenda Democrats had campaigned on: lowering the cost of prescription drugs, raising the minimum wage, fighting corruption and gun violence…
“She’s fond of quoting Thomas Paine, ‘The times have found us,’” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview. “But they have found no one more than her. She really was made for this hour, but I think she also recognized when that hour was right for the country to go down this road to impeachment.”…
Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the Intelligence Committee, recalled how he had approached Ms. Pelosi in June — long before most Democrats had embraced impeachment — to inform her he was coming out in favor of an inquiry.
“She said, ‘You know, you need to do what you think is right for your district,’” Mr. Himes said. “She has been studiously neutral until the point of, you know, September, when it became clear that what the president had done was a very serious abuse of power.”
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