Plenty of would-be whistleblowers go to members of the House Intelligence Committee for help navigating the ropes of the inspector general process. What the one in the case of President Trump’s Ukraine call did was par for the course. Absent any new information, it is seemingly beyond reproach.
What Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff did was not. Rather than inform his fellow committee members and let the process play out accordingly, he withheld knowledge of the complaint, used cable news to make the seeds of the complaint into public knowledge while the complaint was withheld from Congress, lied about his knowledge of the complaint to the press, and then used his post as chairman to turn testimony by acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire into a performative disaster rather than a substantive exploration of the contents of the complaint itself.
The revelation prompted Republican committee member Elise Stefanik to say what any honest witness would realize in the wake of Schiff’s dishonesty rivaling that of the president himself: Schiff must step down as chairman.
Democrats control the House, and if they want to go forward with impeaching Trump in earnest that’s their prerogative. But such proceedings cannot be taken lightly, and Schiff cannot be trusted not to continue to make a mockery of a process enshrined with the severity of a last resort in our Constitution.
The best case to make to the public in support of impeachment is bipartisan in theory: Trump, it seems, is a uniquely norm-destroying president, and his lies and flagrant pursuit of self-interest over that of the people constitute something that vaguely fits under the umbrella of high crimes and misdemeanors. A sound legal argument? Hardly. A compelling appeal to pathos? Absolutely.
But when Schiff is an equally norm-destroying House Intelligence chairman, it undercuts the fundamental case against Trump entirely. If Democrats want to use their most brutal lever of power to convince the public that their 2016 vote ought to be overridden, that’s their right. But to do so with someone as deeply unserious and dishonest as Schiff at the helm makes a mockery of the process and the Constitution.
