WASHINGTON--President Donald Trump on Wednesday abruptly cut short a White House meeting with Democratic lawmakers on infrastructure, then ripped into them over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's accusation that he is engaged in a cover-up and asserted that he could not work with them unless they dropped multiple investigations.
"I don't do cover-ups," the Republican president, clearly agitated, told reporters at a previously unscheduled Rose Garden appearance after his brief meeting with Democratic congressional leaders that Pelosi described as "very, very, very strange."
Unleashing a familiar litany of gripes about Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe and the follow-up congressional inquiries that he has been stonewalling, Trump also complained that Democrats had met to discuss whether to impeach him - or, as he called it, "the I-word."
The rupture bodes ill for any possible cooperation between the president and the Democrats who control the House of Representatives on legislation on infrastructure or other matters as Trump seeks re-election in 2020, signaling deepening political gridlock in Washington. Pelosi, the top congressional Democrat, did not back down afterward and pointedly mentioned the possibility of impeachment, the U.S. Constitution's process for the House and Senate to remove a president from office.
"The fact is, in plain sight in the public domain, this president is obstructing justice and he's engaged in a cover-up - and that could be an impeachable offense," Pelosi said in an event at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington policy advocacy group.
The president is stonewalling congressional investigations by ignoring subpoenas, refusing to let current and former advisers testify and not handing over documents in the aftermath of the April release of Mueller's report that detailed Russian interference in the 2016 election to boost Trump's candidacy. After the blow-up of the meeting and Trump's diatribe, Democrats accused him of setting them up and expressed concern about his conduct and the long-term outlook.
"The president has made it clear he doesn't want to consider any substantive issue as long as he's under investigation," Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, told Reuters in the U.S. Capitol after the turbulent events at the White House.
"I've got news for the president: Every president is under investigation. That's the nature of our Constitution," he said.
