Adam Schiff Fails to Show Up at Impeachment Hearing

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) failed to show up at the presentation of his own committee’s impeachment report at the House Judiciary Committee on Monday.

“The star witness failed to show up!” exclaimed Ranking Member Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA).

Schiff’s 300-page report, released last Tuesday afternoon, is the only “evidence” to be presented in the impeachment inquiry.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) instructed Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) last Thursday to begin drafting articles of impeachment on that basis.

But the man who has driven the impeachment inquiry for several months — primarily behind closed doors, in the Special Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) in the basement of the U.S. Capitol — did not show up in person.

Ranking Member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) was present, as were counsel for both the majority and minority on the Intelligence Committee.

Collins observed: “Mr. Nunes is here! His staff is here! The leading headline is there: ‘Schiff Report’ — but where’s Mr. Schiff?”

He noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had testified about his report before the committee, earlier in the year, and that Independent Counsel Ken Starr presented his report in the 1998 impeachment inquiry into President Bill Clinton.

Schiff is under increasing scrutiny — not only for his staff’s early contact with the so-called “whistleblower,” but also because his committee’s reports included phone records of Nunes’s calls, along with calls involving the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and reporter John Solomon, among others.

Nunes and other Republicans have raised objections to the inclusion of the records, which they say were obtained improperly and which they say are inaccurate.

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.