Nadler says Congress could impeach Trump 'late in the fall'

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said during an interview on Monday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the House of Representatives could impeach President Donald Trump as soon as late fall of this year.

What did he say?

During the interview, Nadler said that Mueller's report gave a basis for impeachment, but that the Judiciary Committee intended to hold public hearings to present further evidence in support of impeachment.

When Morning Joe contributor Mike Barnicle asked Nadler if these impeachment hearings would "bump into the election cycle," Nadler shrugged it off.

"The calendar is whatever it is," he responded. "We can't let the election calendar dictate. I think that we will probably get the court decisions by the end of October, or maybe shortly thereafter. We will have hearings in September and October, with people — witnesses who are not dependent on the court proceedings — and we will do it through the fall. And, if we decided to report articles of impeachment, we could get to that in the late fall perhaps, in the later part of the year."

Nadler also said that if the Democrat-controlled House voted to impeach, only to have the Senate vote in favor of the president, "then we'll defeat a lot of Republican senators next year, because they will show themselves to be lapdogs of the president." He added that House Democrats would not vote for impeachment if they did not believe that there was public support for it.

Nadler may be overly optimistic

While support for impeachment has grown among Democrats in the House, it's still not clear that Nadler could get enough votes to actually make it happen. A majority of Democrats (118 out of 235) in the House currently support impeachment, but that's 100 short of the simple majority who would have to vote to impeach.

But the most powerful Democrat in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is still not on board. In fact, Pelosi has argued that pushing impeachment could be politically damaging to her party.

An attempt by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) to bring articles of impeachment to the floor on July 17 failed by a vote of 332 to 95.

The House Judiciary Committee is also facing legal battles in its attempt to get documents related to Trump and his administration. Trump allies have been ignoring the committee's subpoenas. Nadler said on Monday that once his committee won a legal case to enforce one subpoena they would likely win all of them "because they're basically the same legal questions."