Blue State Blues: Censuring Schiff Is About Democracy, Not Trump

The U.S. House of Representatives formally censured Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) this week for his role in the “Russia collusion” hoax.

The resolution passed along party lines, with Democrats crying “Shame!” and claiming Republicans had acted out of loyalty to Schiff’s enemy, former President Donald Trump.

But the censure was well-deserved, and long overdue, and it was fundamentally about democracy, not about Donald Trump.

Schiff abused his position on the House Intelligence Committee, which grants him access to secret information, to claim publicly that he had seen “more than circumstantial” evidence that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.

But as Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded, and as other inquiries have confirmed, no one colluded with Russia, and there was never any real evidence to suggest that they had.

The “Russia collusion” theory was more than just a lie. It was worse than the lie told by the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in 2012 that then Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had not paid taxes for ten years.

Reid simply claimed he had a “source,” who was never identified, and had the mainstream media not run with the story as a legitimate claim to hurt Romney’s chances, it would have been mere partisan noise.

Schiff had privileged access to sensitive information, which ordinary members of Congress could not see. At the time, there was still residual public trust in the intelligence and law enforcement agencies (which the exposure of the “Russia collusion” hoax would largely destroy). So his claims were given even greater weight than Reid’s tax story, and the media, believing the proof would soon emerge, treated the Trump administration as a fraud.

Worse yet, Schiff’s false claims reinforced the determination of the intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, and Congress itself to investigate Trump and his associates.

One might have hoped that officials with access to secret information might have known better, but we have learned that they took their cues from the media.

Special Counsel John Durham testified in Congress Wednesday that one FBI supervisor became “emotional” and had to leave the room when informed that higher-ups like former FBI Director James Comey had suppressed information that the entire “collusion” idea had been planted by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Schiff’s lies polarized the public, poisoned the media, and weaponized the security apparatus of the state in an effort to undo the results of the 2016 election. It was an assault on democracy through leaks, whispers, and lies.

Schiff then had the chutzpah to lead an impeachment against President Trump for the supposed high crime of asking his Ukrainian counterpart about corruption involving Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

Though we were told Trump was trying to smear his likely 2020 opponent, Hunter Biden agreed this week to plead guilty to lesser crimes, and details of the Biden family’s shady links to foreign business interests continue to emerge.

And if investigating the leading opposition candidate in a presidential election is an impeachable offense, as Schiff told Congress it was, then the Biden administration has done exactly that by indicting Trump over “documents.”

Schiff also investigated fellow members of Congress without telling them, abusing the power of his committee to subpoena the phone records of then Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA), among others.

It was necessary for Congress to express, in a formal way, that what Schiff had done was unacceptable. In his attempt to undo an election, he betrayed the trust placed in him on the House Intelligence Committee; he lied to Congress and the public; he pursued a partisan impeachment process that eroded faith in constitutional checks and balances; and he violated the civil liberties of the president and members of the opposition.

Now Schiff is running for the Senate in California. He is the leading candidate; he is even fundraising off his censure, telling Democratic voters that he is the one Republicans are more afraid of than any other. But a Senator needs to work with the opposition party.

California voters should see the censure vote as a warning that Schiff will be totally isolated in the Senate. There have to be better candidates, on both sides of the aisle.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.