Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., finally waved the white flag and released transcripts pertaining to the Russia hoax falsely implicating President Donald Trump on claims of collusion.
And based on the documents, Schiff has some explaining to do.
He had nothing all along, and he knew it.
At best, the documents reveal a lawmaker who wasn’t forthcoming about the evidence – or rather, lack of evidence – in his endless public appearances over the past three years.
At worst, critics say these documents show Schiff was flat-out lying with his repeated claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia to help beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton win the election.
Neither option looks good.
“Schiff is in panic mode,” an unnamed senior administration official told Fox News.
The reason?
The transcripts show no evidence of collusion, contradicting his constant claims about the president.
Further, the documents show that from the start the FBI was actually skeptical of the infamous “Steele dossier” full of hyper-sensational allegations against Trump.
And even former director of national intelligence James Clapper — a vocal Trump critic in the media – admitted during his interview that “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
The 53 interviews conducted by the House Intelligence Committee were actually declassified long ago.
“All of the transcripts, with our required redactions, can be released to the public without any concerns of disclosing classified material,” Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell wrote to Schiff in a letter dated May 4 obtained by the Washington Examiner.
That includes interviews with Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Michael Cohen, Hope Hicks and more in 2018, when Republicans still controlled the House and completed their own investigation into collusion allegations.
Yet despite being cleared for public release, Schiff sat on the documents as the days went by.
He waited so long that impeachment trial defender Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, charged that Schiff was hiding something.
As both Fox News and the Examiner report, what the papers reveal flies in the face of much of what Schiff has falsely claimed about collusion over the past several years. There were 3 occasions where he played up the collusion findings to hysterical hyperbole.
- Schiff in 2017 claimed the evidence that Russia offered to help – and that the Trump campaign accepted the offer – is “pretty damning.”
- In 2018, he claimed the scandal was of “a size and scope probably beyond Watergate.”
- And last year, he claimed to have “ample evidence of collusion in plain sight.”
Now, it looks like that evidence simply doesn’t exist.
But these new documents shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been really paying attention.
While the left has accused Trump and his campaign of collusion since before he even took office, no evidence of any such scheme has ever turned up despite multiple investigations by the House and special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Attorney General William Barr last year summed up the Mueller investigation by saying the extensive and seemingly endless probe “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
The new documents will no doubt lead to mounting pressure on Schiff, whose rocky tenure as chair of the House Intelligence Committee has been marked by unsubstantiated claims against the president and a failed impeachment.
“He should first apologize to the American public and he should step back from the chairmanship,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said last year.
Now, he might not only lose his chairmanship… but if the public decides they’ve been deceived, the revelations could even cost the Democrats their House majority in November.
You can take a look at all 57 transcripts, archived here.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”