Adam Schiff Should Be Censured for His Media Statements
By Jenny Beth Martin
October 17, 2019
https://web.archive.org/web/20191017222926/https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/10/17/adam_schiff_should_be_censured_for_his_media_statements_141521.html

Rep. Adam Schiff’s behavior as President Trump’s chief antagonist has gone so far over the top that he has violated the rules of the House of Representatives. His violations are so egregious that it’s time to sanction him and remove him from his position as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. To that end, I recently filed a formal complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics, demanding that the office launch an official investigation.

Congressman Schiff’s violations, according to media reports, are not new – in fact, they have been going on for years, since long before he took over as chairman of the intelligence committee.

In early April of 2017 – less than three months after President Trump took office, and before his removal of then-FBI Director James Comey led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel – Congressman Schiff was the butt of a prank phone call by Russian radio comics who offered to give him what they called “compromat” (compromising information) on President Trump. According to the Russians, who posed on the call as a Ukrainian politician, they had “obtained recordings and documents that proved Vladimir Putin was blackmailing Trump with naked photos taken during an affair between the president and a Russian glamour model,” as The Daily Mail reported. Schiff took detailed notes on the call, asking for names to be spelled properly, so that he could follow up.

Schiff’s staff said later that he knew all along it was a prank. But if that were true, why would one of his intelligence committee staffers have followed up with an email to the Russia radio comics describing the call as “productive” and asking “how best to arrange a pick-up of those materials from your Embassy here in Washington, DC?”

More recently, Congressman Schiff lied on multiple occasions when he told reporters for at least three different news outlets that he and his committee staff had had no contact with the so-called “whistleblower,” when, in fact, they had.

On Sept. 16, Schiff told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that neither the whistleblower nor his lawyers had contacted him. But Schiff also deflected, saying, “I don’t want to get into any particulars. I want to make sure that there’s nothing that I do that jeopardizes the whistleblower in any way.”