By Eli Lake
Monday, November 15, 2021
Adam Schiff was one of the star
attractions at Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. In his role as one of
the House impeachment managers, Schiff pressed his case on the Senate floor by
summoning an earnest indignation. He would at times get hoarse and weary. He
would jab the air and lower his voice. He was a showman playing the role of a
statesman.
The bulk of Schiff’s new memoir, Midnight
in Washington, focuses on the scandal that erupted when President
Trump sought to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The
whole affair was a gift from heaven for the Democratic congressman who
represents Burbank, California. Schiff claimed to be in possession of evidence
proving that Trump’s 2016 campaign conspired with Russia. When special prosecutor
Robert Mueller’s investigation yielded no evidence of such a conspiracy, Schiff
looked ridiculous—the supposedly dogged prosecutor had suddenly become the boy
who cried collusion.
Then the House Intelligence Committee, of
which Schiff became chairman in 2019, received a whistleblower’s complaint that
alleged a sordid scheme to strong-arm the new Ukrainian president into
cooperating with Trump crony Rudy Giuliani’s “investigation” of Hunter Biden.
Schiff’s career was revived. And this time, he had the goods.
We never learn the identity of the
whistleblower Schiff once promised would testify. Nor does Schiff acknowledge
that Hunter Biden did indeed entangle himself in seedy foreign dealings. But he
does share details of the sheepish conversation he had with reporter Sam Stein,
during which he had to walk back his earlier comment that the whistleblower had
not had contact with the House Intelligence Committee he chairs.
“I had been thinking about securing the
whistleblower’s testimony before the committee, not any prior contact with my
staff,” he recalls telling Stein. “But I screwed up and wanted him to know it.”
As Schiff hung up the phone, he felt sick to his stomach, he says.
This passage gives the reader the false
impression that Schiff is reflective and honest about his mistakes. But it’s
best to read this admission as calculated contrition. For most of his memoir,
Schiff writes as though he actually did reveal a Trump-Russia collusion
scandal—and he ignores the ample public evidence of its debunking.
Schiff makes no mention of Michael
Horowitz, the FBI inspector general who uncovered abuses so grave in his
agency’s surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page that the secret
court which had granted the bureau’s four surveillance warrants withdrew three
of them. Schiff and his committee’s Democrats waged an 18-month campaign to
defend the surveillance of Page, claiming without evidence that it was his
Republican counterpart, Devin Nunes, who had misrepresented the classified record.
Then there is the matter of the
Trump-Russia conspiracy itself. Schiff now maintains that his committee and
other investigations did find collusion, but that Mueller failed to find enough
evidence to prosecute the Trump campaign (or any U.S. citizen, for that matter)
for conspiring with the Kremlin’s election interference.
“The president’s campaign could, and did,
try to collude with the Russians to get help in the election,” he says in
explaining why he declined to apologize for his earlier accusations in an
interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. “Whether Mueller believed he
could satisfy a jury that all of the elements of the crime of conspiracy had
been met was another matter, and that would be up to him.”
Schiff’s argument rests primarily on a
meeting that took place in New York’s Trump Tower in 2016. Donald Trump Jr.,
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and campaign manager Paul Manafort all met
with a delegation led by a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya. Emails
between Don Jr. and a British promoter revealed that Veselnitskaya had promised
dirt on Hillary Clinton and that Don Jr. had been receptive to hearing her out.
Schiff describes Veselnitskaya as someone
with “ties to senior Kremlin officials but no official role.” He says she made
her approach as a way for Moscow to determine whether Trump’s campaign would be
open to cooperation down the road. Schiff neglects to mention that
Veselnitskaya had been lobbying the U.S. government for years to roll back
human-rights sanctions on officials tied to the imprisonment and death of the
Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The dirt she provided to the Trump campaign,
as I wrote in Commentary’s January 2021 issue, was provided not by Russian
spies but by American opposition researchers working for the firm Fusion GPS.1 In
the end, the meeting had nothing to do with enlisting the Trump campaign in
Russia’s hacking or social-media campaign; it was about gaining Trump’s support
for lifting the Magnitsky sanctions.
Fusion GPS was the same firm that
contracted the retired British spy Christopher Steele to develop the infamous
dossier that alleged the Trump campaign had struck a foul bargain with Russia.
Fusion did so on behalf of the Democrats. In 2017, Schiff ran wild with the
Steele dossier. During the hearing when then–FBI director James Comey confirmed
the existence of an FBI investigation into Trump’s campaign, Schiff asked Comey
about several claims Steele had made. Schiff specifically zeroed in on Page and
the now-discredited allegation that Page had been offered a hefty brokerage fee
for selling off a 19-percent stake in the Russian energy concern Rosneft during
a visit to Moscow in July 2016.
“Here are some of the matters, drawn from
public sources alone, since that is all we can discuss in this setting, that
concern us and should concern all Americans,” is how Schiff qualified his
remarks at the time. In this way, Schiff gave the impression that he knew more
than he could say in public because the evidence in question was classified. He
continued to play this game for the next two years, claiming in media
interviews that he had “more than circumstantial evidence” of collusion.
But in fact, Schiff didn’t know anything
more. In 2020, the Trump administration declassified the transcripts of
depositions given to the House Intelligence Committee. Every witness had been
asked whether or not he or she had seen evidence of collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russia. None of them—not James Clapper, not Sally Yates, not Susan
Rice—said they did. Schiff never accounts for the gulf between what witnesses
told his committee behind closed doors and what he claimed to know before the
cameras.
This is a shame. A more honest author
would have pondered how his prevarications on the matter of Russian collusion
ended up damaging his case with Republicans when it came to Trump’s impeachment
for pressuring Ukraine. A more honest author might have taken a few pages to
apologize to Carter Page and others he falsely accused. Doing so would have
given some credibility to the parts of his narrative about Trump’s very real
threats to our republic. But Schiff is a resistance leader, not a truth-teller,
and he knows the likely audience for his book will overlook a few fibs and
elisions for the greater cause of defeating the orange menace.
What Schiff and his admirers do not
understand is that in their resistance, they are simply mirror images of
Trump’s supporters. In 2016, Michael Anton said the choice between Trump and
Hillary Clinton constituted the “Flight 93 election”—meaning that true
conservatives had no choice but to support a deeply flawed candidate because
the republic was on the verge of extinction. That formulation gave Trump’s
supporters permission to explain away his lies and cruelty because the
alternative would be so much worse.
The difference between Anton’s nonsense
and Schiff’s is that Schiff doesn’t acknowledge the bargain he has struck. He
ends his book lamenting the perils of a political culture in which different
parties cannot agree on basic facts: “In the absence of that shared
understanding—if indeed each party is entitled to its own alternative
facts—then what basis is left for judging the merits of any particular agenda
or platform? If everything could be true, then nothing is true.” In the end,
then, Schiff is describing a problem he helped create.
1 “Framed and Guilty,” Commentary, January 2021
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