The Unseemly Canonization of Saint Schiff By David Harsanyi
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-unseemly-canonization-of-saint-schiff/
In his unyielding hatred of Trump, a ‘conservative’ writer overlooks the many destructive lies Schiff knowingly peddled for years.
G abriel Schoenfeld’s obsequious review for the Bulwark of Congressman Adam Schiff’s semi-fictional memoir Midnight in Washington offers an unfortunate example of the selective moral blindness that infects so many Trump-obsessed writers, leading them to justify the most egregious abuses of power.
Schoenfeld nearly canonizes Schiff, noting that Trump had subjected the congressman to many insults, including “pencil neck,” “Shifty Schiff,” “Little Adam Schiff,” “crooked Adam Schiff,” and “Adam Schitt.” These “crude appellations tell us far more about the appalling character of Donald Trump,” explains Schoenfeld, before bizarrely attacking Bloomberg’s Eli Lake and the Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg — writers any politically sentient being would recognize as Trump critics — for having the temerity to also criticize Schiff as a mendacious partisan. Like the most zealous Trumpist, Schoenfeld demands completely loyalty to the cause.
Then again, even if Trump had been a Russian asset since 1987, it would not change the fact that Schiff remains one of the most dishonorable members of Congress. Granted, this is no small feat. Schoenfeld at least concedes, “It must also be acknowledged that Schiff has made mistakes in the course of his investigations,” but those trip-ups are mere “minor transgressions when measured against the entirety of Schiff’s record.” It’s true that the transgressions Schoenfeld mentions are minor. It’s the ones he ignores that are not.
Schoenfeld uncritically quotes Schiff’s contention that while “there was no way to know” whether Trump had colluded with Russia, he was “determined to find out.” Find out? Schiff not only read the fabulist Steele Dossier into the congressional record after he knew it was a partisan oppo file; but he also continued to declare that the central assertion of the document (that the Trump campaign had colluded and conspired with the Russian government to steal the presidency in 2016) was not only conceivable but a fact. He did so on numerous occasions and with certitude. Schiff famously claimed to be in personal possession of a “smoking gun” in the matter. Schiff has never shared any corroboration for his allegation that a seditious and clandestine conspiracy existed. Not in his speeches. Not in his memoir. Not anywhere. This transgression is so minor, apparently, that Schoenfeld didn’t see the need to mention it.
Special counsel Robert Mueller would spend roughly two years digging through accusations of coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. They came away with nothing illegal on that front. Likewise, the 25-person investigative staff Schiff inherited in 2019 when the Democrats regained the House failed to discover any evidence of collusion. Nor did Schiff, incidentally, attempt to impeach the president over criminal conspiracy, collusion, or coordination. Yet Schoenfeld claims that the record “remains incomplete.”
The villains in this story, for Schoenfeld, are those who fail to provide him with his happy ending — people such as Attorney General Bill Barr, who, Schoenfeld claims, served “as the president’s Roy Cohn,” and “skillfully misled the public about what Mueller had found.” People like Devin Nunes. Schoenfeld tells us that Schiff was highly troubled by the idea that Nunes would conceal “the truth” with his own counter-narrative. “In this,” Schoenfeld notes, “Devin Nunes, in partnership with team Trump and conducting his bizarre ‘midnight run’ to the White House, led the way.” At the time, Schiff contended that Nunes’s memo “was unsupported by the facts and the investigative record.” But it was Nunes, whatever his reasons were, who turned out to be right. Indeed, it was Schiff who lied and then attempted to suppress the truth. When the House Intelligence Committee was finally compelled to release transcripts of interviews they’d conducted into Russian meddling, the public found out that the director of National Intelligence, Obama’s former attorney general, the former deputy attorney general, and the FBI deputy director, among others, had all told this committee, under oath, that they had no evidence of criminal conspiracy between Trump and the Russians.
It also seems to have slipped Schoenfeld’s mind to mention that, during the first impeachment trial, Schiff told national news media, not once, but twice, that his office hadn’t directly spoken to the “whistleblower” before he filed his complaint against the president. As the New York Times and others would later report, this was another lie. Schiff’s office had not only spoken with the whistleblower; it’s also likely that they advised him. Then, to show how seriously he took the impeachment, Schiff fabricated a conversation between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, which he read into the congressional record — later claiming that he was merely conveying the “essence” of Trump’s call with Zelensky as “parody.”
In another infraction, Schiff claimed that the New York Post’s blockbuster story about Hunter and Joe Biden’s unethical business dealings with international billionaires, now corroborated by Politico, was Russian disinformation. In 2018, Schoenfeld was incensed that Trump had used the Justice Department and the FBI “for his own political ends,” but he still has nothing to say about the fact that Schiff subpoenaed phone calls and unmasked journalists as well as the then-ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee. Can you imagine the blowback had Republicans done this to Schiff?
Worse, Schiff’s deceit helped perpetuate four years of paranoia that undermined voter trust in many of our institutions. You’d think that Trump’s most vociferous “principled” conservative critics would be mad at the congressman for leading them down such a dishonest and destructive path — diverting their attention from genuine issues. Instead, Schoenfeld justifies, omits — celebrates, even — abuses of power because they were aimed at the correct person.
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