Blue State Blues: A Republican House Must Investigate Adam Schiff

Admire, if you will, Adam Schiff’s ability to cling to a complete fraud, long after everyone else has realized that it is so.

On Wednesday, Schiff told CNN that the Steele dossier, the phony oppositionresearch document that was the flimsy basis for the “Russia collusion” hoax, was still true: “[S]ome of those allegations proved to be all too accurate.” Which? He did not specify. Perhaps he meant the claim that Moscow is the capital of Russia, because it was about the only true statement in the file.

But Schiff is more than a partisan hack or a willful fool. He is still the chair of the House Intelligence Committee — and amazingly so, after he destroyed his credibility over “Russia collusion” and drove the impeachment of President Donald Trump to its inevitable failed conclusion.

As chair of that committee, Schiff is one of the most powerful human beings in America — and he has abused that power. And under Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), he has gotten away with it.

That is why one of the first orders of business under the new Republican majority, which now seems almost inevitable, must be to investigate Schiff’s role on the committee.

There is already evidence that he abused his access to classified information to mislead the public for partisan purposes. And that is only the beginning. Much more remains unknown, hidden behind a veil of secrecy that can no longer be tolerated, because Schiff has continued his abuses on the so-called January 6 committee.

Any investigation needs to start with Schiff’s emphatic lie in March 2017 that there was “more than circumstantial evidence” that Trump associates had colluded with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. He implied that he had seen that evidence, thanks to his unique access to classified information.

It was a fraudulent claim, one that Special Counsel Robert Muller could never substantiate, despite tens of millions of dollars and two years of effort with a team of rabid, pro-Clinton prosecutors.

Schiff must be brought to testify, as he has so often forced others to testify, and explain what the basis was for his claim that there was “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion. Did he violate any House rules, rising to a standard of contempt?

But there is more.

Schiff must be asked about his own collusion — the plot that he and his committee staff evidently hatched with the so-called “whistleblower” who initiated the complaint that led to the impeachment inquiry.

At first, Schiff claimed that his committee had no contact with the “whistleblower.” That, too, was a lie. Schiff also backed off an earlier promise to produce the whistleblower for testimony, meaning that the president was denied the basic civil right of facing his accuser.

The public must know the name of the whistleblower, who has no legal right to anonymity, and the House must know if its rules were broken as Schiff and his staff procured the information they needed to instigate an effort to oust the president.

Furthermore, Schiff violated fundamental civil liberties — and perhaps the law — when he secretly subpoenaed the phone records of Republican members of the Intelligence Committee, as well as the president’s attorney at the time, Rudy Giuliani.

Every House member, Schiff included, swears an oath to defend the Constitution — but he violated it, brazenly. His lackey, former committee counsel Daniel S. Goldman, is now running for New York Attorney General: let him face questions, too.

The need is urgent, because Schiff’s behavior has not been deterred by failure. He is repeating his abuses on the January 6 committee, subpoenaing innocent people who had nothing to do with the riot and demanding their personal information.

Everything Schiff did to others should be done to him — subpoenas, demands for phone records, threats of prosecution — measure for measure.

Let Congress find out the truth — and let Schiff finally face the consequences for what he has done.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.