When it comes to the Democrats latest faux-scandal, this one regarding a phone call President Donald Trump had with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, the man leading the charge (Adam Schiff) just can’t stop lying.
There was already reason to be skeptical of the whistleblower complaint against Trump because it’s a second hand account, and because the rules for submitting a whistleblower complaint were lowered right before this one was submitted. Why couldn’t these U.S. officials who heard Trump’s call firsthand (and there were multiple) simply submit a complaint themselves? Why the need to launder the information through an intermediary? Surely the answer to those questions isn’t good news for Schiff and his cabal.
Even liberals are catching him in lies now.
Schiff said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe during an interview on September 17that that “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to. But I am sure the whistleblower has concerns that he has not been advised, as the law requires, by the inspector general or the director of national intelligence just how he is supposed to communicate with Congress, and so the risk to the whistleblower is retaliation.”
He also said on the 19th that “we might not have even known there was a whistleblower complaint alleging an urgent concern” if the inspector general hadn’t contacted the House Intelligence Committee.
But both those claims are nonsense.
As the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler noted regarding the September 17th comment:
This is flat-out false. Schiff… says the committee had not spoken to the whistleblower. Now we know that’s not true.
“Regarding Chairman Schiff’s comments on ‘Morning Joe,’ in the context, he intended to answer the question of whether the Committee had heard testimony from the whistleblower, which they had not,” a committee spokesman told The [Washington Post] Fact Checker. “As he said in his answer, the whistleblower was then awaiting instructions from the Acting DNI as to how the whistleblower could contact the Committee. Nonetheless he acknowledges that his statement should have been more carefully phrased to make that distinction clear.”
The spokesman pointed to an interview with Schiff by the Daily Beast, in which he said that he “did not know definitively at the time if the complaint had been authored by the same whistleblower who had approached his staff.” But he added that he “should have been much more clear.”
Of the September 19th comment:
Schiff says that if not for the IG, the committee might never have known about the complaint. But his committee knew that something explosive was going to be filed with the IG. As the New York Times put it, the initial inquiry received by the committee “also explains how Mr. Schiff knew to press for the complaint when the Trump administration initially blocked lawmakers from seeing it.”
Schiff, however, does qualify that this was a complaint alleging “an urgent concern,” and it’s not clear whether the initial inquiry had tipped off the committee staff that it would rise to that level. Still, Schiff’s phrasing was misleading because he gives no hint that the committee was aware a potentially significant (“privileged”) complaint might have been filed.
As a result, Kessler gave Schiff’s comments “Four Pinocchios,” their fact checkers worst rating.
Before this whistleblower complaint was made public it’s a strong possibility that Schiff had leaked information to the media from it, as evidenced by his tweets in early August paying keen attention to Ukraine out of the blue.
Trump is withholding vital military aid to Ukraine, while his personal lawyer seeks help from the Ukraine government to investigate his political opponent.
It doesn’t take a stable genius to see the magnitude of this conflict.
Or how destructive it is to our national security. https://t.co/X4yhTS2q1Z
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 29, 2019
Russia was kicked out of the G8 because they invaded and annexed part of Ukraine.
Then Russia attacked US elections. They used chemical weapons in the UK.
Now Trump wants to let them back in.
Why reward their behavior?
Sometimes the simplest answer is the right one:
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 22, 2019
Schiff’s alleged leaks here are reminiscent of Christopher Steele’s dossier, parts of which were leaked to the media before the dossier was made public, which was then used as “proof” of those prior claims when it was really circular reasoning at work.
A new question now remains – is there anything that Schiff has been truthful about?
