Norm Eisen, the counsel chosen by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee to question “expert” witnesses Wednesday at its first impeachment inquiry, founded an organization funded in part by billionaire left-wing financier George Soros.
Eisen founded Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) before going on to work for President Barack Obama as the White House “ethics czar,” where he oversaw the opening of visitor logs (though administration officials simply responded by taking meetings with lobbyists offsite).
He was later appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic, and returned to take up a post at the liberal Brookings Institution. He was also a CNN political commentator until this year, and appeared on television frequently to attack the Trump administration.
Open Society Institute was an early funder of CREW, which quickly developed a reputation for left-wing bias. As recently as 2017, the Washington Times noted, Soros’s Open Society Foundations “donated $1.35 million in 2017.”
Eisen bought into the “Russia collusion” hoax, co-authoring a New York Times op-ed in December 2018 in which he referred to “new evidence of collusion with Russia” in the investigation of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller ultimately found no such evidence of collusion after two years of investigating — though Eisen also referred to Michael Cohen in his questioning of witnesses on Wednesday, suggesting that Trump might have committed an impeachable offense by considering a pardon for Cohen and for others accused of wrongdoing.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.