House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins weighed in Sunday on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continuing to withhold articles of impeachment against President Trump from the Senate, saying he thought “she had a bad Christmas carol, if you want to use the analogy of the last couple weeks.”

The Georgia Republican told “Sunday Morning Futures” that Pelosi “had a ghost of Christmas past, where she trashed all the rules to try and impeach this president and rush it before the end of the year.”

Collins continued, “She has a president sitting here now with a bad case, bad articles of impeachment that have no basis in reality to impeach the president and she’s looking at a future in which she has no legislative agenda.”

MCCONNELL CALLS PELOSI’S IMPEACHMENT DELAY ‘ABSURD,’ PREDICTS SHE’LL BACK DOWN ‘SOONER OR LATER’

He went on, “There’s nothing in the House for her to do because [Democrats] have wasted so much time and taxpayer dollars on impeaching this president that we’re sitting here literally waiting on her to send articles over to try and influence the Senate decision in which she has no control over.”

“That’s how sad we’ve become and how sad this speaker’s legacy is so far.”

Pelosi surprised many in Washington last month with her decision to withhold articles — which accused Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over his dealings with Ukraine — as she sought to pressure the Senate to agree to certain terms for a trial. In an unusual news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., defended her decision while calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a “rogue leader.”

McConnell last month said Pelosi’s delay in sending articles of impeachment was an “absurd” position to take, saying the speaker “apparently believes she can tell us how to run the trial.”

“Let the American people understand something,” Collins told host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. “The speaker got up there and gave this grand show of being solemn and it’s our duty and it’s our conscious vote, but yet the minute after she forced them into this impeachment vote on the weakest case in history, she went out and then basically turned it into a political document.”

He continued, “She took a sham vote for them to actually say impeachment was needed and then went out and said, ‘Well no, I’m going to hold this.’”

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Pelosi said last month she hoped the Senate would find a bipartisan agreement on how to conduct the trial. “We would hope that they can come to some conclusion like that, but in any event, we’re ready when we see what they have.”

Collins continued Sunday, “She pulled the curtain back, showed everybody that this is simply a political statement against this president to affect the 2020 election because they have nobody that can beat the president. The economy, everything is working.”

Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo contributed to this report.

Michael Cohen was supposed to provide “bombshell” testimony against President Trump. Well, the bombshell didn’t explode.

Not long ago, many were speculating that Cohen might have recorded conversations with Trump admitting that he had made payments to Stormy Daniels for political purposes, instructed Cohen to lie to Congress, colluded with Russia or knew in advance about the infamous Trump Tower meeting. It turns out Cohen didn’t have anything like that. His testimony was certainly embarrassing for the president, but Cohen offered no evidence to advance the cause of impeachment.

To the contrary, some of his testimony was exculpatory. While Cohen testified that Trump ordered him to pay off Stormy Daniels “as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws,” elsewhere in his testimony he declared that Trump did not care about winning the election. He said Trump saw the campaign as an “infomercial” for the Trump brand, adding that “He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign — for him — was always a marketing opportunity.”

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Well, if Trump didn’t care about winning, that undermines the case that the payments were a campaign finance violation. Indeed, Cohen offered evidence that Trump’s motivation was in fact keeping his affair from his wife. “He asked me to pay off an adult film star with whom he had an affair, and to lie to his wife about it,” Cohen said. “Lying to the first lady is one of my biggest regrets. … She did not deserve that.” Paying hush money because he did not want his wife to find out he was having an affair with a porn star is sleazy, but it is not a crime.

Cohen also cleared Trump of the charge that he had directed Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow Trump Tower project. Cohen declared that “I lied to Congress” and Trump “did not directly tell me to lie.” Cohen said he assumed Trump wanted him to lie, so he did what he thought Trump wanted. Sorry, that’s not evidence of a crime.

Nor did Cohen provide proof of collusion with Russia. Indeed, he told the committee “I wouldn’t use the word ‘colluding'” though he thought there was “something odd about the back-and-forth praise with President [Vladimir] Putin.” So did many of us. But while saying nice things about the Russian dictator may be evidence of bad judgment, it is not evidence of a criminal conspiracy to collude with Putin to steal the election.

Cohen provided no evidence that Trump knew about the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Last July, CNN breathlessly reported that Cohen had told Mueller that “Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower in which Russians were expected to offer his campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton” and that “he was present, along with several others, when Trump was informed of the Russians’ offer by [Donald] Trump Jr.” That’s not what Cohen told Congress on Wednesday. He testified he didn’t know about the Trump Tower meeting in advance — he “read all over the media” about it — but that in retrospect he thought that Trump Jr. might have been telling Trump about the Russia meeting when he walked into Trump’s office and whispered into Trump’s ear in front of Cohen “the meeting is all set.” Big difference.

Cohen testified he was in the room when Roger Stone called Trump and told him that WikiLeaks was going to release emails damaging to Hillary Clinton, and that Trump “responded by stating to the effect of ‘wouldn’t that be great.'” Trump knowing in advance that WikiLeaks, acting on its own, was going to put out dirt on Clinton is not illegal.

In other words, Cohen’s testimony was a dud. That does not exonerate Trump, not by a long shot. The Mueller report is still yet to come, and Cohen testified there were elements of his cooperation with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York that he could not discuss.

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But we did learn something disturbing at Wednesday’s hearing — how shameless the new Democratic House majority will be in their efforts to undermine the Trump presidency. Democrats scheduled the Cohen hearing on the very same day the president was in Vietnam trying to broker a deal on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. We all had a stake in the president’s success. They could have waited one day to avoid creating a distraction during a critical diplomatic moment. But they didn’t, because for Democrats it seems that embarrassing Trump is more important than disarming a tyrant.

Talk about sleazy.

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