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In late November 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump posted an inaccurate, late-night tweet in which he accused U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of stating that, It is dangerous to let the voters decide Trump’s fate. Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives are leading an impeachment inquiry against Trump based on whistleblower allegations that he attempted to extort the Ukrainian president by withholding crucial military aid while he pressed for dirt on a political rival. Trump has defended himself by characterizing impeachment proceedings as a political witch hunt. Pelosi never made the remark quoted in Trump's tweet, however. The words that Trump put in quotation marks and attributed to her were actually made by Fox News host Mike Emanuel. Emanuel said, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi circulating a memo to Democrats tonight, telling them it would be dangerous to let voters decide President Trump's fate when it comes to the Ukraine investigation. Emanuel made the comment during the Fox News program Fox News @ Night, which airs between 11 p.m. and 12 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Trump's tweet was posted shortly after the program aired. The memo that Pelosi sent doesn't state that it would be dangerous to let voters decide Trump's fate in office. Her exact statement reads as follows: It concludes, None of us comes to Congress to impeach a President, but rather to make progress for America’s working families. However, our first order of business is our oath to support and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. As such, we are custodians of the Constitution and, For The People, defenders of our democracy. Pelosi sees the upcoming 2020 election and the House impeachment inquiry separately. Her statement was a reflection of previous comments in which she has said legislators in Congress are duty-bound by the Constitution to move forward with impeachment proceedings, rather than dropping them simply because a presidential election is one year away. As the Washington Post reported, Pelosi made this distinction during a recent news conference: Democrats took the majority away from Republicans in the 2018 U.S. House midterm elections, which many saw as a referendum on Trump's tenure in office. U.S. Rep. Al Green, who was also mentioned in Trump's tweet, was one of the first Democratic lawmakers to come out in favor of impeachment.
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