WASHINGTON—The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, said Sunday that he believed President Donald Trump “richly deserves” to be impeached, the most forceful public comments yet from the leader of the panel that would open the proceedings to remove the president from office.

“He has done many impeachable offences,” Nadler, D-N. Y., said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He’s violated the law six ways from Sunday.”

But deflecting from his opinion, Nadler continued: “That’s not the question. The question is, can we develop enough evidence to put before the American people? We have broken the logjam. The president and the attorney general were lying to the American people consistently, saying that the Mueller report found no obstruction, no collusion and exonerated the president.”

Privately, Nadler had signalled to lawmakers and aides that he had gradually become convinced that his panel should proceed with impeachment hearings as expeditiously as possible. But he had not said so publicly, and his comments Sunday, after the congressional testimony last week of the former special counsel, Robert Mueller, only sharpened the divide among senior lawmakers over whether House Democrats should proceed with impeachment.

More than half a dozen lawmakers came out for beginning impeachment proceedings after Mueller’s testimony, including Rep. Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, vice chairwoman of the House Democratic Caucus, pushing the total number of lawmakers in favour of doing so to 100. But a majority of the caucus has remained skeptical of the political implications of such a move that would doubtless end with an acquittal in the Senate, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged caution. “We will proceed when we have what we need to proceed,” she told reporters Friday. “Not one day sooner.”

The Judiciary Committee has toyed with the idea of impeachment for months, holding hearings and subpoenaing witnesses. In an escalation carrying perhaps the most overt political implications yet, on Friday the panel asked a federal judge to unseal grand jury secrets related to Mueller’s investigation, using the court filing to declare that lawmakers had in effect begun an impeachment investigation of Trump.

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