Flashback: Nadler's Clinton impeachment comments from 1998 surface as he leads Trump efforts

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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., is pushing for President Trump to be impeached just days before his term ends, despite warning years ago about "divisiveness and bitterness" during the 1998 Clinton impeachment hearings.

"There must never be a narrowly voted impeachment or an impeachment supported by one of our major political parties and opposed by the other," Nadler said when Clinton was in office.

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"Such an impeachment will produce a divisiveness and bitterness in our politics for years to come and will call into question the very legitimacy of our political institutions," he said.

Nadler and his staff released a report explaining why Trump "is unfit to remain in office a single day longer" on Tuesday.

"President Trump committed a high Crime and Misdemeanor against the Nation by inciting an insurrection at the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election," the report reads.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) attends a news conference on April 9, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

However, Nadler said politically motivated impeachments "call into question the very legitimacy of our political institutions" when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, faced such a threat from House Republicans.

"The effect of impeachment is to overturn the popular will of the voters," Nadler said on the House floor during the Clinton impeachment hearings more than 20 years ago. "We must not overturn an election and remove a president from office except to defend our system of government or constitutional liberties against a dire threat, and we must not do so without an overwhelming consensus of the American people."

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Nadler's report comes as some Republicans, including high-profile Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., support impeachment.

"Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing," Cheney said.

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Some have pointed out that Nadler had a very different reaction to plotting against the U.S. Capitol when he pushed for a pardon for former Weather Underground member Susan Rosenberg. In 1988, Rosenberg was charged for her role in the 1983 Senate bombing that killed no one but caused roughly $250,000 in damage (the charges were later dropped), according to Politico.

She was already in prison because of her connection to a robbery that resulted in the murder of two police officers and faced a 58-year sentence before she was pardoned thanks to Nadler's help, RealClear Politics reported.

Fox News' Adam Shaw contributed to this report.