After three years of grasping at straws, Democrats finally have a chance to convincingly charge President Trump with abuse of power. But by letting Adam Schiff keep the gavel, they’re on the cusp of obliterating their opportunity.
The House Intelligence Committee chairman opened up the first day of public impeachment investigation testimonies with an inoffensive monologue dinging Trump on the obvious points. But when Republicans began to bait him with their obsession with the whistleblower’s identity, Schiff jumped right into the gutter with them.
“I do not know the identity of the whistleblower,” Schiff said, lying through his teeth on national television.
As a point of integrity for the impeachment proceedings, Democrats ought to have ousted Schiff long ago. He withheld knowledge of the whistleblower’s complaint from the rest of his committee and lied about his knowledge of it to the press and the public. From an ethical perspective, Schiff’s unfitness to run the Intelligence Committee isn’t even a question.
But Speaker Nancy Pelosi ought to be seething right now as a matter of pure strategy. The easiest response to Republican huffing and puffing over outing the whistleblower is the most obvious: The whistleblower’s entire complaint has already been independently corroborated. Unless Schiff knows something we don’t, the identity of the whistleblower — who only had second-hand knowledge of key details in his report — is less important than the material of the complaint and that of now thousands of pages of first-hand witness testimonies.
Instead, Schiff chose to ignore the most low-hanging fruit and straight up lie to the public and his fellow committee members.
The whistleblower himself did nothing wrong in going to an office of a member of the House Intelligence Committee for assistance in navigating the inspector general process to file his complaint. But we know that he went to Schiff’s office, and we know that Schiff was teasing the report on Twitter before it ever went public. The odds of the whistleblower having gone to Schiff’s office with a paper bag on his head are nonexistent. Schiff knows the whistleblower’s identity, and instead of relying on the truth as a refutation to Republicans grasping at straws, he lied, making a mockery of a process sacred in our Constitution.
