House Speaker Nancy Pelosi meets with reporters at the Capitol in Washington on Wednesday. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo White House White House feigns surprise at Pelosi 'prison' comments

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comment this week that she would rather see President Donald Trump “in prison” than impeached “shows the true colors of the Democratic Party,” the White House said Thursday.

“How shocking," White House director of strategic communications Mercedes Schlapp said sarcastically in an interview on Fox News. "The Democrats are radical and out of touch. They're more focused on attacking this president, undermining this president, than they are to solving the major problems that we're seeing in the United States.”


Pelosi made the comment during a meeting Tuesday night in which she clashed with House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler about whether to open an impeachment inquiry into the president. Pelosi, who’s resisted a growing chorus of calls for impeachment from her caucus, remained firm in that she wants to see Trump defeated at the ballot box next year, when he would then be free from the Justice Department’s restraints on indicting a sitting president.

“I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison,” Pelosi said at that meeting, multiple Democratic sources familiar with the meeting told POLITICO.

“I think it clearly shows the true colors of Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic Party that are focused and obsessed with investigation after investigation despite the fact that the president and this administration has been transparent through the whole process,” Schlapp contended Thursday.

Asked whether Pelosi’s leaked comments would further imperil the White House’s willingness or ability to work with congressional Democrats on things like infrastructure, Schlapp indicated that not much has changed.

“Look, I think that this president, this administration has tried time and time again to work with the Democrats,” she said, though it has been Trump who orchestrated several high-profile walkouts of meetings with Democrats. “The Democrats have continuously refused to work with our administration in solving the major problems we see in our country.”

She pointed in particular to the surging number of Central American migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and cast Trump as doing what he’s able with his hands tied.

“Have we seen any cooperation coming from the liberal Democrats? Absolutely not,” she said. “They continue to live in this world where they believe this border crisis is a manufactured crisis. The president is doing what he can from an administrative standpoint to ensure we're able to deal with the overwhelming crisis we're seeing at the border.”