Nancy Pelosi praises the 'exquisite' indictments against Trump: 'They're beautiful and intricate'

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at Nationals Park on June 6, 2023. Rob Carr/Getty Images

• Pelosi praised the two federal Trump indictments as "exquisite," "beautiful," and "intricate."
• "They probably have a better chance of conviction than anything that I would come up with," she said.
• The former speaker arguably played a key role in the indictment by creating the January 6 committee.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is offering high praise for the two federal indictments against former President Donald Trump.

"The indictments against the president are exquisite," she said in an interview with New York Magazine. "They're beautiful and intricate, and they probably have a better chance of conviction than anything that I would come up with."

In that interview, Pelosi reflected more broadly on the role that the January 6 committee — a select committee that Pelosi created after Senate Republicans blocked the creation of a bipartisan 9/11-style commission — played in setting the stage for Trump's indictment over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

"I knew on January 6 that he had committed a crime," said Pelosi.

While Trump's first federal indictment — which includes 37 charges in relation to his handling of classified documents — had little to do with the work of the committee, the second indictment brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith last week arguably would not have happened without the work of the January 6 committee.

"I did want them to pay attention, and I hope that we got their attention," Pelosi said of the Department of Justice. "That's why the presentation — the narrative — had to be the way it was."

Even as the committee laid out a narrative making the case that Trump engaged in criminal behavior, the DOJ was not yet undertaking efforts to investigate the former president. Nonetheless, the narrative laid out in last week's 45-page indictment bore a strong resemblance to the narrative laid out in the report that the committee released at the end of the last Congress.

Pelosi noted that she made her appointments to the committee with the idea of building that narrative.

"When people were accepting the offer to be on the committee, they knew that it wasn't going to be every five minutes that they'd be speaking," said Pelosi. "It would be part of the plan [to present] a narrative for the public to understand."