"Every single day the president is making a case — he's becoming self-impeachable, in terms of some of the things he's doing," Pelosi said during a public interview with The Washington Post.

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Pelosi, who has long sought to tamp down a liberal push to impeach Trump, said those actions are part of a larger White House strategy to lure Democrats into launching impeachment hearings before the public is behind it — a scenario that backfired politically on the Republicans when they impeached President Clinton in 1998.

"As I have said, the president is goading us, wants to goad us, into impeachment because he knows, as do I, that that's not a good thing for the country," Pelosi said. "Maybe he knows that, but he knows that I think that, let's put it that way."

Pelosi vowed not to take the bait, emphasizing the need to build a stronger case — and win more bipartisan support — before taking such an aggressive step.

"Impeachment is a very divisive, very divisive course of action to take," she said. "We shouldn't do it for passion or bias; it has to be about the presentation of fact. And it has to be about patriotism, not about partisanship."

Pelosi declined to say if she's planning to hold a floor vote on the contempt resolution, saying she's waiting for the recommendation of Nadler and the Judiciary Committee.

"The next step would be to bring it to the floor," she said. "We'll see what their recommendation is about that."

Some Democrats have pushed to impeach Barr — an idea Pelosi did not rule out.

"Nothing is ever off the table," she said.

But she also suggested the administration's stonewalling efforts are designed to distract the public's attention — and the media's — from broader efforts to undermine the Democrats' legislative agenda on issues even more pressing to the public, like health care, climate change and economic well-being.

"Everyday when they're doing these things, they're taking attention away from other things that they're doing, things we are doing," she said. "Last week, when the attorney general was before the Congress misrepresenting the facts, he was, at the same time, pressing his case to completely eliminate the Affordable Care Act.

"This has an impact on public policy because they are for the special interests."

Asked how far Democrats would go to get those documents, Pelosi suggested there would be limits.

"We do have a little jail down in the basement of the Capitol," she said to laughter in the audience. "But if we were arresting all the people in the administration, we would have [an] overcrowded jail situation, and I'm not for that."

"There are several options," she added. "One of them is to go directly to court."