Impeachment inquiry

Cuomo, alongside Christie, says ‘leftists’ forced impeachment inquiry

By RYAN HUTCHINS

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, sitting down for a chat about bipartisanship with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, said he thought Congress’ impeachment investigation was opened because of pressure from “leftist” Democrats and predicted it would create total gridlock in Washington.

In what appeared to be a reversal of his comments on Wednesday, when he said “you’re darn right there should be an inquiry,” Cuomo said Thursday evening that the nation was headed “down a very long and unproductive road” that will not end with President Donald Trump being removed from office. The three-term Democratic governor implied Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced into opening the probe.

“Speaker Pelosi was dealing with pressure from her caucus and, when you talk about pressure from the left, there is a highly leftist component to the Democratic Party that she was feeling pressure for,” Cuomo said during the live, one-on-one conversation at Seton Hall Law School. “She is a deliberate, responsible person. She’s not a knee-jerk person. And I think she resisted the pressure in her caucus admirably for a long period of time.”

Cuomo, who did not comment on the substance of the whistleblower complaint or the partial transcript of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, referred to the House’s investigation as “their quote unquote inquiry.”

“I think the Ukraine issue raises a lot of questions and I think it is, for an investigatory committee, fodder they can spent months, one witness after another, one witness after another, on all sort of different tracks,” Cuomo said. “Where does it go ultimately? Nowhere, because even if they vote for impeachment, it goes to the Senate.”

The remarks came during an hour-long discussion about civility in politics, in which Cuomo and Christie, a Republican, discussed their close friendship and time spent working together on bistate issues.

Christie, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 before endorsing Trump and leading his transition team, attempted to downplay the significance of the president’s July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. A partial transcript of the call, released on Wednesday, showed Trump pushing Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

Christie trashed Democrats in the House for how they‘ve handled the matter so far, saying they “lose credibility when they announce an impeachment inquiry before they read the transcript.”

Just before the transcript was released, Christie — a former U.S. attorney in New Jersey — said on ABC News that it would be bad if the president had said, “listen, do me a favor, go investigate Joe Biden.” It turned out the president had, in fact, asked Zelensky to do him a favor before making his requests, according to that partial transcript.

Christie called it a “coincidence” that he had used those words, but then backed off of his suggestion that such phrasing may have justified the sort of investigation now being undertaken.

“This is the president, who he is and how he talks, and how he does business. And this is no mystery to anybody who’s known him, even just as a public servant over the last three years, let alone me knowing him for 18 years,” Christie said. “So, yeah, I wouldn’t have said something like that. But that’s the way he talks. That’s the way he does business. I don’t think that’s a mystery to the American people.”

But Christie, who in the past has criticized aides to the president while avoiding criticizing the president, said he was troubled by other allegations in the anonymous whistleblower complaint about how the transcript of that call was handled by officials at the White House. Asked if he thought there was a cover up, Christie said, “I don’t know.”

“I think right now we have to take a look at exactly what went on there,” he said. “The conduct of some of the people potentially around him regarding that transcript, I think, is something that has to be answered given the allegations that are in the complaint.”