Nancy Pelosi Expects Public Impeachment Hearings to Begin This Month

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she expects the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump to begin public hearings this month but insisted there’s no deadline to finish the investigation.

“I would assume there would be public hearing in November,” Pelosi said in a roundtable with Bloomberg reporters and editors. Any case that is made to impeach the president “has to be ironclad.”

Pelosi spoke a day after the House voted to set up a formal process for public hearings in an investigation of whether Trump used his office to pressure Ukraine to open a politically motivated investigation in exchange for releasing military aid.

Pelosi said the closed-door depositions of witnesses will continue as long as they are “productive.”

“I don’t know what the timetable will be -- the truth will set us free,” she said. “We have not made any decisions on if the president will be impeached.”

If the House takes a formal vote on articles of impeachment, possibly before the end of the year, it would take a two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate to convict the president, and therefore remove him from office. That’s an outcome viewed at this point as highly unlikely.

Pelosi has staunchly defended Thursday’s mostly straight party-line vote to formally initiate the investigation, though she had been saying for months such a vote was unnecessary.