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.