Adam Schiff is a liar.
Like most Democrats, he cares more about ousting Trump than the facts—so much, in fact, he’s repeatedly turned a blind eye to the facts to smear Trump in the hopes of swaying public opinion against the man who dared to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
It’s already been proven that Democrats have plotted the impeachment of Donald Trump since he first took office. For over three years they threw anything they could at him, and Schiff was doing his part to advance the narrative that Trump should be impeached by pushing bogus information and outright lying to the public. Below are seven examples of Schiff’s lies designed to boost the impeachment of President Trump.
7. Promoting the bogus Steele dossier he knew was not credible
Any idiot could have read the Clinton-funded Steele dossier and known it wasn’t credible. Schiff also had to know the information in it was uncorroborated and full of inaccuracies, embellishments, and lies. Nevertheless, he promoted the dossier as a legitimate piece of anti-Trump intelligence.
Except it never was. According to Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on FISA abuse, the FBI had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting” and that the CIA “viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’” Rolling Stone even noted that the report “is especially hostile to Schiff’s claim that the FBI ‘provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.’”
Back then Democrats were hoping for collusion to be true so they could justify impeachment. Anything, even blatant lies, was on the table to make impeachment happen.
6. His repeated claims of having “ample evidence” of collusion
On several occasions, Adam Schiff declared there was “ample evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and that he had seen it. “There is already, in my view, ample evidence in the public domain on the issue of collusion if you’re willing to see it,” Schiff said back in February 2018. “If you want to blind yourself, then you can look the other way.”
Of course, we all know that the Mueller report found no evidence of collusion, so Schiff was lying every time he claimed to have seen evidence of collusion. Schiff’s goal of impeaching Trump would have to wait for another lie.
5. Denying FISA abuse even though he knew it happened
Back in 2017, then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) revealed that evidence of FISA “abuse” had been uncovered by investigators. “We have had an ongoing investigation into DOJ [Department of Justice] and FBI since mid-summer for both FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] abuse and other matters that we can’t get into too much. But it is very concerning,” he said.
A couple of months later, the House Intelligence Committee released a memo on surveillance abuses by the Obama administration. For Schiff, any abuse of the FISA court system might undermine any impeachment narrative that might present itself with regard to the 2016 election and Russian collusion. So, Schiff had to mock the Nunes memo relentlessly to keep the message on track. Schiff denied that any abuses had occurred in his own memo released shortly thereafter. As the ranking Democrat on the committee at the time, Schiff had access to the same information as Nunes, so he knew the Nunes memo was accurate.
When the Horowitz report ultimately proved Nunes was right and that Schiff lied, Schiff conceded there were abuses but claimed not to have seen evidence of this before, even though he had. He just lied about it. “Anyone who would still defend the FISA warrants of Carter Page after the Horowitz report is deceiving themselves or you. There’s no defending it. Nunes was right about that. Schiff was wrong,” said Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake.
4. Lying about having contact with the whistleblower
PolitiFact isn’t exactly known for being fair to Republicans, but when Adam Schiff claimed, “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower,” during an interview on MSNBC in September 2019, they couldn’t exactly cover for him when it was revealed by the New York Times that Schiff’s staff had been colluding with the whistleblower and was aware of the whistleblower’s concerns in advance of them going public. “While it was not publicly known that Schiff’s committee had communicated with the whistleblower ahead of the complaint’s filing, Schiff knew the truth,” explained Politifact. “When given the chance to say that the whistleblower had reached out to a committee aide, he did not.”
3. Misrepresenting a key text message
According to a report from Politico, Schiff “mischaracterized” impeachment evidence that was used during the House Democrats’ impeachment investigation. In a letter sent to House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, Schiff claimed that Giuliani associate Lev Parnas “continued to try to arrange a meeting with President Zelensky,” which was based on a text message from Parnas to Giuliani that read “trying to get us mr Z.” The rest of the exchange was redacted, but Schiff clearly knew that the redacted portion made it clear that “mr Z” actually referred to Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma.
2. Claiming Ambassador Sondland’s testimony proved there was a quid pro quo
On Tuesday, Schiff once again told a whopper by misrepresenting Ambassador Sondland’s testimony. “Ambassador Sondland also said…that—we’re often asked ‘was there a quid pro quo?’ the answer is ‘yes there was a quid pro quo,’ there was an absolute quid pro quo,” Schiff said.
Here’s the problem: by Sondland’s own testimony, he didn’t know definitively that there was a quid pro, he was presuming there was.
“Is that your testimony today, Ambassador Sondland, that you have evidence that Donald Trump tied the investigations to the aid? Because I don’t think you’re saying that.” Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) asked him.
“I said repeatedly […] I was presuming,” Sondland noted.
After questions, Turner asked more pointedly, “So, you really have no testimony today that ties President Trump to a scheme to withhold aid from Ukraine in exchange for these investigations?”
“Other than my own presumption,” Sondland said.
1. His fictional version of the Trump-Zelenksy phone call
Remember when the transcript of the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky was released and Democrats were falling over each other claiming the transcript was even more “damning” than they imagined? Well, it wasn’t damning enough to Adam Schiff, who, when claiming to read the transcript on the House floor, fabricated the entire transcript into something far more sinister than it actually was.
Criticism over the deception caused him to backpedal and claim that his reading of the transcript was meant as a parody.
“If the conversation were as damning as Schiff et al would like, he would have simply read directly from it, instead of making up dialogue,” Fox News’s Brit Hume wisely observed it a tweet. “Probably not surprising in light of the extravagant collusion claims he made for 2 years.”
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
Note: This post has been updated to include additional information.
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