OPINION:
One characteristic of the career of censured House member Adam Schiff is that he sticks by his stories, even the most outlandish.
The bogus Russia conspiracies he spouted in 2017, 2018 and 2019 are the same, he says today in trying to win a Senate seat representing deep blue, deeply anti-Trump California.
Here is Mr. Schiff’s Russia history.
On March 20, 2017, Donald Trump had been president for just two months when the House Intelligence Committee convened a hearing on Russia, with the prideful FBI Director James Comey at the witness table.
Mr. Schiff, the top Democrat, proceeded to praise and endorse the Democratic Party-financed and -circulated collection of Kremlin gossip known as the Steele dossier.
Adam Schiff lacked so much self-awareness that he quoted unproven Kremlin chatter to prove that Mr. Trump who colluded with Russia in the 2016 election campaign. Only a Democrat could get away with actually colluding while they falsely accuse the other side of colluding.
It didn’t matter that the Intelligence Committee is supposed to be a fact-based panel and that none of the dossier “facts” had been confirmed by Mr. Schiff or even, we later found out, by the dossier-giddy FBI. It did not stop Mr. Schiff and thus his liberal journalistic coterie from extolling former British spy Christopher Steele and his 35 pages of supposed crimes committed by Mr. Trump and his men.
Mr. Comey, like Mr. Schiff a dossier fan, quickly volunteered that the whole Trump campaign was under investigation.
Today, we know the dossier, spread across Washington power centers by operatives for Hillary Clinton, was a hoax.
In fact, as Mr. Schiff heaped dossier praise on that day in March, Mr. Steele’s main source, Igor Danchenko, a Russian once suspected by the FBI of being a Kremlin agent, had told the FBI in January and March, before the hearing, that what Mr. Steele wrote was based on “hearsay” and “just talk.” The infamous Ritz-Carlton dossier tale was “rumor and speculation.”
In other words, Adam Schiff, a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was trying to bring down a president with unconfirmed gossip.
We had to wait for the Danchenko debunking in a 2019 Department of Justice inspector general report. DOJ Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz accused the FBI of dossier crimes in its zeal to acquire judge-approved wiretaps.
We would later learn, thanks to special counsel John Durham, that Mr. Danchenko’s professed source for a key dossier phrase (“Well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership”) did not exist. It was a dossier ghost.
I tell Mr. Schiff’s and the FBI’s sorry history because Mr. Schiff is at it again.
He leads all the candidates to become California’s next U.S. senator. At the Senate contest’s first campaign debate, on Jan. 23, Mr. Schiff declared: “The evidence is pretty clear. …. So you’re darn right, there’s evidence of collusion.”
He listed two inconsequential contacts and then, as the dossier also did, tied Mr. Trump to Russian computer hacking of Democrats. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report said he and his team of Democratic Party-aligned prosecutors did not establish such a conspiracy.
A year after the infamous March 2017 hearing, two House memos appeared.
Then-Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, California Republican, investigated the FBI and accused the bureau of abusing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to persuade judges to let it spy on Trump volunteer Carter Page.
An offended Mr. Schiff, his pro-dossier storyline challenged, then issued his own memo clearing the FBI — and himself. I don’t have to tell you on which side the liberal media aligned.
Today, Mr. Schiff’s memo stands as a testament to his reckless partisan devotion to the Russia hoax. His report, with the misleading title “Correcting the Record,” was filled with inaccuracies as he justified the FBI’s reliance on his own political party’s fake dossier.
Let’s look at some of Mr Schiff’s pronouncements and compare them with the reality of the subsequent 2019 Justice Department report by Mr. Horowitz, the inspector general.
Mr. Schiff: “FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign. … DOJ met the rigor, transparency and evidence basis needed to meet FISA’s probable cause requirement.”
Mr. Horowitz: “Our review found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate.’ We identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.”
Mr. Schiff: “DOJ told the court the truth. Its representation was consistent with the FBI’s underlying investigative record, which current and former senior officials later corroborated. … In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
Mr. Horowitz: “We found that the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele’s reporting when it relied upon his reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications.”
Mr. Schiff: “DOJ’s October 21, 2016, FISA application and three subsequent renewals carefully outlined for the court a multi-pronged rationale for surveilling Page.”
Mr. Horowitz: “We identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications.”
The Schiff report was embarrassingly wrong. A judge later accused the FBI of deliberately misleading the FISA court.
At Mr. Danchenko’s subsequent trial, where a jury acquitted him of lying to the FBI, the Russia investigation’s senior intelligence officer testified the FBI did not confirm even one of Mr. Steele’s conspiracy claims. Not one. There were about a dozen. The FBI offered Mr. Steele $1 million for proof. He had none.
You would think that an honest man who had vouched for the Steele dossier would admit his mistake.
As I say, Mr. Schiff sticks by his stories. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” in 2022, Mr. Schiff said, “I don’t regret saying that we should investigate claims of someone who frankly was a well-respected British intelligence officer.”
Once Republicans retook the House in 2023, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy kicked Mr. Schiff off the Intelligence Committee for lying to the public. In June, House Republicans voted to censure Mr. Schiff, 213-209.
The resolution said in part, “Whereas on March 20, 2017, Representative Schiff perpetuated false allegations from the Steele Dossier accusing numerous Trump associates of colluding with Russia into the Congressional Record.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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