WASHINGTON —— House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants said Sunday that he time isn’t right for the new Democratic-led House to pursue impeachment of President Trump, despite a push in their party’s ranks for such action. But they didn’t rule it out, either.

“If and when the time comes for impeachment, it will have to be something that has such a crescendo in a bipartisan way,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said CBS’ Sunday Morning.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., of California suggested that Senate Republicans would have to be on board to make an impeachment to be anything more than symbolic. He said there’s “no point” in pursuing impeachment before special counsel Robert Mueller presents the findings of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“What’s the point if you don’t know the full case and can’t make the case to the Senate?” Schiff said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that an impeachment process isn’t inevitable and that talk about it now is a distraction. He said Democrats will pursue priorities that include ethical reforms and protecting voting rights.

“We’ll have to see what the Mueller report says,” Hoyer said. “What we want to do is concentrate on our substantive agenda.”

The comments came as party fissures over impeachment became more public last week. Freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., drew attention with her expletive-filled call to impeach Trump, and two House Democrats, Brad Sherman of California and Al Green of Texas, reintroduced articles of impeachment in the new Congress.

Schiff downplayed criticism, including from Trump, of Tlaib’s coarse language. Schiff said Trump “is not in the position to talk about the use of profanity.”

Schiff said he understood the desire of those in his party who want to act against Trump now, and he insisted that his committee will not just wait for Mueller.

One of its first acts under Democratic control will be to release dozens of transcripts of witness testimony during the committee’s Russia investigation last session, when the panel was led by Republicans, Schiff said.

He said some testimony could potentially open up cases of perjury or lying to Congress, but didn’t provide specifics. “Some of these people thought they had some sort of immunity with the GOP majority at the time,” Schiff said.

Schiff also said his committee will be “reaching out to private institutions to get records,” and he has previously indicated that those could include banking records.

The Intelligence Committee’s first public hearing, not yet scheduled, will touch on the rise of authoritarianism around the world, Schiff said. “We don’t have a president who is willing to stand up to these autocrats,” he said.

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