(CNN) In a closed-door meeting with Democratic leaders on Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi sought to quell the rising calls for the impeachment of President Donald Trump by reportedly telling her colleagues, according to Politico: "I don't want to see him impeached. I want to see him in prison."

Which, as you might guess, got a lot of press attention!

On its face, you can see what Pelosi was trying to do. She has been a leading voice -- the leading voice, actually -- warning her Democratic colleagues to avoid rushing into calls for Trump's impeachment. Pelosi's argument is that Trump wants nothing more than for House Democrats to impeach him, knowing that the Republican-controlled Senate won't convict him -- and he will be able to cast himself as a victim of an out-of-control liberal party come November 2020.

While Pelosi has effectively held that line, and kept the party's other leaders and influential committee chairmen on board, there's no question it's getting harder and harder for her to do so, particularly as the Trump administration resists even the barest attempts at cooperating with congressional oversight investigations. And so, Pelosi says what she said on Tuesday -- that she doesn't just want to impeach Trump, she wants to imprison him. Because that, theoretically, send a message to her skeptical colleagues that she is no softy on Trump, but simply wants to avoid giving the President what he wants.

It makes sense for Pelosi to throw this sort of rhetorical grenade then, given her current somewhat tenuous position within her own caucus on Trump's impeachment. But it's important to understand that this is simply rhetoric from Pelosi -- and that any sort of critical analysis makes clear that the likelihood of Trump being impeached based on the current evidence greatly outpaces the chances of him being charged, much less incarcerated, down the line.

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