Pelosi Changes Tune on Impeachment, Has Aggressive New Stance

Over the weekend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said the Democrat Party’s failure thus far to get President Donald Trump out of the White House amounted to a major “national scandal.”

Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) appeared to change her tune on Sunday — and suggest a “whole new stage of investigation” could be approaching.

Pelosi has long resisted calls to go after Trump.

She has stressed caution, care — and has said the move would be divisive for the country and that many Americans don’t want to go down that path.

She has said the move would imperil the electability of moderate Democrats in the House as well, as Fox News pointed out.

In a statement on Sunday, Pelosi now specifically said a whistleblower who reportedly alleged that Trump acted improperly during a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy must be allowed to speak to Congress — and that the full whistleblower complaint must be provided.

Her aggressive new stance collides with top Republicans’ positions: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), for example, predicted such a move would backfire for Democrats.

Related: Biden’s Campaign Could Be Coming to an End, Predicts Nunes, Over Possible Misconduct

And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Sunday, “I think every president would have a lot to worry about if this phone call is handled the way they’re talking about. Can you imagine future presidents having a phone call with a foreign leader and it winds up going to Congress? If that’s not an executive privilege moment, I don’t know what would be.”

The GOP senator also said on “Sunday Morning Futures” with anchor Maria Bartiromo, “So the foreign minister of the Ukraine said there’s no pressure. They have got the money. Nothing’s happened. But here’s something that really did surprise me. [Former Vice President] Joe Biden said everybody’s looked at this and found nothing. Who is everybody? Nobody’s looked at the Ukraine and the Bidens,” added Graham.

“Nobody’s looked at the role the Ukraine played in the 2016 election. Do you think the media in America would really look at it and report on it if there was something bad for the Bidens or [that] they unduly interfered in the 2016 election?”

Related: Lindsey Graham Calls for DOJ Inquiry into Biden-Ukraine

Later on Sunday, Trump himself said the “real story” was that “Sleepy Joe Biden” had “forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son’s company by the threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine.”

The whistleblower drama escalated after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Trump repeatedly had asked Zelenskiy to investigate Hunter Biden, who had a key role in a natural gas firm that a Ukrainian prosecutor had been investigating as part of a corruption probe.

At a conference two years after he left office, Joe Biden openly bragged about successfully pressuring Ukraine to fire that prosecutor when he was still vice president.

For her part, AOC wrote to her large Twitter following late on Saturday that Democrats’ “refusal” to bounce Trump out of office was a “bigger national scandal” than what she insists is the president’s “lawbreaking behavior.”

She also wrote this: “It is one thing for a sitting president to break the law. It’s another to let him. The integrity of our democracy isn’t threatened when a president breaks the law. It’s threatened when we do nothing about it. The GOP’s silence & refusal to act shouldn’t be a surprise. Ours is.”

Read more on this unfolding drama here — and share your thoughts.