House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named seven impeachment managers on Wednesday morning as she prepares to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate. The head of the team will be House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.
That Pelosi chose Schiff is unsurprising. He played a significant role in the House’s impeachment investigation, and he presided over the House Intelligence Committee’s many hearings on the matter. But he did so dishonestly, lying about his staff’s past connections to the anonymous Ukraine whistleblower and concealing knowledge of the whistleblower’s complaint from his congressional colleagues.
Democratic leadership has said repeatedly that the Senate’s impeachment trial must be fair, and Pelosi has lambasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for rejecting impartiality and turning the trial into a political “sham.” But if fairness was Pelosi’s principal concern, she would not have chosen Schiff to lead the managing team.
Schiff is anything but open-minded, having made up his mind about impeachment before the House began inviting witnesses. Then it became apparent that Schiff played a role in orchestrating the entire scandal, leaking knowledge about the whistleblower’s complaint to the media while reportedly advising the whistleblower.
Pelosi said Wednesday that she chose the impeachment managers based on who could prosecute the case against President Trump best. “The decision to come down in favor of litigators is necessitated by the clear evidence that we should have witnesses and that we should have documentation,” she said during a press conference.
But Schiff cannot be trusted to accurately litigate this case without making a mockery of it. He failed to make a legal case against the president during the House’s impeachment investigation: Schiff first accused the president of engaging in a quid pro quo. Then, Schiff said Trump had committed acts of bribery and extortion. And after failing to prove that either accusation had legal merit, the House settled for two charges against the president — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — neither of which had anything to do with Schiff’s original allegations.
If Pelosi wants the public to take impeachment seriously, she should have chosen a serious person to lead it. Instead, she chose Schiff.
Luckily, Schiff won’t have as much say in the Senate as he did in the House. He now has McConnell to reckon with, and the results are bound to be different this time around.
