After a four-year reign, California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff’s days as chair of the House Intelligence Committee, marked by abuse and grotesque politicization, are finally numbered. But it’s not just Schiff’s chairmanship headed out the door with the incoming Republican majority; it’s his seat on the committee altogether.
On Sunday, GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made clear a trio of liberal lawmakers were on the chopping block for their assignments after the chamber took the unprecedented step of dictating minority committee appointments under Democrat rule. Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene was kicked off of her committees just a month after her congressional inauguration.
“Should you become speaker of the House in January, what are you going to do in terms of these Democrats that you have on such important committees?” asked Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. “You’ve talked in the past about removing Ilhan Omar, you’ve talked about removing Adam Schiff, about Eric Swalwell. Will you deliver?”
In January, McCarthy told Breitbart News each would be removed from their respective positions on the Intelligence Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee if he were elected speaker with a Republican majority.
“I’ll keep that promise,” McCarthy told Bartiromo. McCarthy had already been calling for Swalwell’s resignation from the House Intelligence Committee since details surfaced of the Democrat’s close relationship with a since-vanished Chinese spy.
“Eric Swalwell cannot get a security clearance in the public sector,” McCarthy said Sunday. “Why would we ever give him a security clearance and the secrets to America?”
“Adam Schiff, who had lied to the American public time and again, we will not allow him to be on the Intel Committee either,” McCarthy added.
Schiff’s Rise from Russia
Schiff was appointed ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee six months before Donald Trump descended on the golden escalator in 2015. By the time Trump captured the White House, Schiff had become the Democrats’ point man on their prime conspiracy to take down the president and undermine democracy in the form of the Russia hoax. In fact, Schiff was the original Russia hoaxer who claimed repeatedly for years to have evidence that Trump colluded with Russia.
Schiff used his perch on the Intelligence Committee to foment fear that the new Republican president was in fact a Russian agent who colluded with the Kremlin for command of the Oval Office. He did so through leaks and testimony to the media which published claims unchecked, making Schiff’s office an apparent ground zero for the false and damaging narrative of Russian collusion.
In March 2017, Schiff said on MSNBC “there is more than circumstantial evidence” that Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government. Two months later, the Justice Department appointed a special counsel investigation to probe whether Trump was indeed guilty of collusion. The two-year investigation run with unlimited resources would eventually come up short of finding one person on the Trump campaign, let alone Trump himself, that colluded with the Kremlin. Schiff responded to Trump’s exoneration by castigating House Republicans and foreshadowing more to emerge that would implicate Trump in an apparent crime.
“In the coming weeks and months, new information will continue to be exposed through enterprising journalism, indictments by the Special Counsel, or continued investigative work by Committee Democrats and our counterparts in the Senate,” Schiff said in a press release. “And each time this new information becomes public, Republicans will be held accountable for abandoning a critical investigation of such vital national importance.”
Schiff was right on the money when he claimed more would emerge surrounding the politicized investigations of President Trump, but it’s not Republicans who would end up requiring accountability.
Subsequent revelations from courtrooms, The Federalist’s reporting, and the DOJ inspector general would find gross misconduct by the FBI as deep state actors themselves worked in cahoots with Russian operatives to undermine a presidential administration. The FBI even paid for Russian disinformation to frame President Trump.
[READ: Think The FBI Deserves The Benefit Of The Doubt? This Laundry List Of Corruption Should Make You Think Again]
As a 2019 report from the DOJ inspector general showed, Schiff himself had been lying about Russian collusion since the inception of the hoax. Booting Schiff from his gig as chairman of the Intelligence Committee is just the start of said accountability. Cutting his time short on the committee altogether is the bare minimum.
From Russia to Ukraine
Once the Democrats’ collusion narrative collapsed under its own weight, despite being bolstered by the Beltway press corps, government bureaucrats, and lawmakers from both parties on Capitol Hill, Schiff took the lead role in amplifying another fabricated scandal to accomplish the top item of their policy agenda: President Trump’s impeachment.
In 2019, Schiff became chair of the Intelligence Committee when Democrats reclaimed the House majority. By the fall, Democrats drew articles of impeachment to indict Trump on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress with claims the president illegally harnessed U.S. military aid to extract concessions from the corrupt foreign government in Ukraine. Trump, the story went, withheld $400 million in military aid from Ukraine until President Volodymyr Zelensky pledged to investigate his own country’s role in the Russia hoax which did irreparable harm to the United States. That investigation would inevitably center around Hunter Biden, son of now-President Joe Biden, who raked in tens of thousands of dollars in excess compensation for a seat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company despite no prior industry experience.
Schiff presided over the House impeachment hearings as if withholding hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in foreign aid until its recipients act in American interests was even a bad thing, let alone worthy of impeachment. As chair, Schiff’s deposition hearings were held behind closed doors while the committee selectively leaked snippets of testimony to amplify their own narratives to a complicit press. In fact, leaking on the Intelligence Committee became a favorite practice of the congressman, whose habitual leaks made their way uncritically into the pages of The New York Times.
When he wasn’t leaking to the allied press machine, Schiff was making up his own evidence to promote the Democrats’ fabricated narratives. In September 2019, Schiff created his own transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky which was supposed to be the smoking gun that warranted impeachment. In his own rendition, Schiff framed Trump as someone demanding a favor the president never actually requested, but he offered the media a storyline the press ran with, slicing and dicing Trump’s words to fit the pro-impeachment narrative.
Over the course of the first Trump impeachment saga, Schiff also flip-flopped on demanding testimony from the whistleblower who reported details of the presidential phone call to Schiff’s office on Capitol Hill.
“We’re in touch with counsel and look forward to the whistleblower’s testimony as soon as this week,” Schiff wrote in a Sept. 24, 2019 tweet. In fact, Schiff demanded the whistleblower’s testimony repeatedly until details became public that the whistleblower had coordinated with the California lawmaker, in discussions that were omitted from the official whistleblower process. It was then that Schiff moved to prevent testimony.
Schiff went on to be an impeachment manager litigating the case for Trump’s removal in the upper chamber. Trump was ultimately acquitted of all charges by the Senate, only to be impeached again a year later in a circus trial over the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Schiff Is a J6 Hoaxer
Schiff has remained laser-focused on Trump’s criminal conviction even after the president left office. True to form, the California Democrat and member of the Select Committee on Jan. 6 went on CNN in June as the panel proceeded with summer show trials to foreshadow evidence of culpability that never came.
“We’ll show evidence of the President’s involvement in this scheme,” Schiff said, presumably in reference to the plans Trump openly supported to halt certification of the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021, as if it were a cover-up for something illegal. (Never mind that Democrats objected to certification in 2001, 2005, and 2017.) Schiff refused to reveal his “evidence,” however, because he didn’t “want to get ahead” of the upcoming hearing.
It was routine commentary from the California congressman who has been at the center of practically every fabricated scandal against President Trump since the pair began to emerge into the national spotlight in 2015. Schiff’s work on the Jan. 6 probe, which wrapped up its hearings this fall with nothing to show, highlights the dishonesty of his tenure.
In December, Schiff doctored text messages between GOP Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Schiff manipulated messages presented at an official hearing to expose “a lawmaker” pressing the vice president to unilaterally deny certification of the electoral college votes as unconstitutional. The message, however, actually came from Washington attorney and former Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, and was merely forwarded by the Ohio congressman.
The message, which Schiff took out of context with added punctuation to make it appear complete and illustrated with a cooked-up graphic, was part of a four-page document that outlined Schmitz’s legal arguments for Vice President Mike Pence’s authority to object to electoral certification from a handful of states. The document was published publicly ahead of Jan. 6 on everylegalvote.com.
The Jan. 6 Committee even conceded that Schiff’s messages were manipulated.
McCarthy isn’t just within his rights as speaker to kick Schiff from the Intelligence Committee, but it would be irresponsible not to.
