"This will go down as one of the greatest political mistakes the speaker has ever made," Fleischer declared. "When you have the momentum of impeachment because your party earnestly believes in it and thinks it's the right thing to do, and it's urgent that they remove the president from power because the peril he presents, and then you sit on it, all you're doing is showing that this was a hollow exercise all along."

"Democrats, since they took the House, are going to been known for one thing, and that was wasting the nation's time with an impeachment," he said.