Speaking in an interview with NBC, Trump shared his opinion on why Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi held off the impeachment caucus. According to the president, he believed Pelosi “feels that I will win much easier. I've been told that by many people.”
"I think I win the election easier," the president continued. "But I'm not sure that I like having it. I did nothing wrong. I was spied on. What they did to me was illegal [...] So impeachment's a very unfair thing because nothing that I did was wrong."
Some Democrats have been pushing for Trump’s impeachment since he was elected to the presidency. The calls became stronger after US Special Counsel Robert Mueller published his report on Russian collusion allegations, saying that he found no basis to accuse Trump of collusion, but would not make a decision on obstruction of justice charges.
Pelosi, who kept acting as a moderate and did her best to quell the impeachment calls from fellow Democrats, eventually joined the choir and held closed-door talks on the “i-word” with fellow lawmakers.
Speaking about the averted retaliatory strike on Iran, Trump disclosed that the Pentagon had a strike plan ready, which had to be approved by the commander in chief. The generals came to the White House and told Trump they were ready to conduct the strike and needed the president’s approval.
When asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd whether US warplanes were already in the air at that moment, Trump said "No, but they would have been pretty soon.”
If he gave the strike order, “things would have happened to a point where you would not turn back, you could not turn back,” he said.
According to Trump, he asked the generals, "I want to know something before you go. How many people would be killed - in this case Iranians?"
The generals made calculations and said they estimated some 150 Iranian people would be killed as a result of a retaliatory strike.
"I thought about it for a second and I said, you know what, they shot down an unmanned drone, plane, whatever you want to call it, and here we are sitting with a 150 dead people that would have taken place probably within a half an hour after I said go ahead," Trump continued. "And I didn't like it, I didn't think, I didn't think it was proportionate."
After Trump called off the strike, former CIA Director John Brennan, a frequent critic, publicly praised the president for his decision to avert a “dangerous escalatory spiral.”
“I’ve been a very tough critic of the Trump administration’s policy towards Iran in terms of pulling out of the Iranian nuclear agreement as well as this policy of economic strangulation,” Brennan told MSNBC on Friday. “But I do applaud Trump’s decision not to carry out what would have been a disproportionate strike that would have led to 150 or so fatalities.”
“That could have had a very dangerous escalatory spiral following it that could have brought that region to greater military conflict. So I do think that Trump recognized that he needed to explain to his critics exactly why he pulled back,” Brennan said.
