House Intel Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is used to conducting the investigations.
Friday, the roles were reversed — and it’s Schiff that is being accused of playing fast and loose with the rules.
His role in the Democrat-led impeachment proceedings is under fire. Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr is taking on Schiff for alleged abuses in power.
Chairman Schiff has been collecting Americans’ private call records through a secret & partisan process.
He even published some of them in the Impeachment Report.
These sensitive records are protected by federal law.
His conduct raises serious concerns & I’ve asked for answers https://t.co/WrdGf1n1P2
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) March 12, 2020
According to reporting done by Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel, Carr sent a personal letter to Schiff, criticizing his decision to dig through American call records “without judicial review.”
During the impeachment investigation, Schiff subpoenaed major phone companies for access to phone calls, which contained sensitive information of a handful of Americans, including Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
Strassel claims that Schiff knowingly published sensitive information from his political rivals, which Carr stated in both the tweet and in his letter.
According to Carr, although Congress may (in some circumstances) have the right to subpoena phone companies for personal records, the problem was that Schiff did so secretly.
Schiff never gave his political targets an opportunity to address the moves in court, Carr charges.
In other words, Nunes and Giuliani, among others, never had a chance to legally defend themselves.
And because of this, Strassel agrees with Carr’s assessment, saying that Schiff’s actions with the phone companies have set a dangerous precedent that infringes upon civil liberties of Americans.
If a phone company could release the information of a House member, it could do the same for an ordinary citizen.
Conservative lawmakers have been asking for action on this for months now.
Nunes had been aware of Schiff’s secretive investigation methods for quite some time. In December 2019 he appeared on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” where he and host Tucker Carlson discussed how Schiff obtained access to the personal phone records.
Nunes mentioned that Schiff had bottled up the subpoena records from AT&T so that Congress “can’t talk about it.”
He and Carlson agreed, that it was problematic that AT&T never went to court to understand if what it was doing was wrong.
You can view a video of that segment below:
Instead, Schiff and AT&T kept it under wraps, never to see the light of day again.
But if the FCC’s Carr has any say, his letter may be the first step to shedding some light on Schiff’s murky actions.
The Horn editorial team