‘If the Democrats are going to attack their political opponents … by publishing their phone records, you’d really think they’d at least get the phone numbers right…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Once again, Democrats’ own brazen and egregious abuse of power has far eclipsed that of President Donald Trump as they seek to impeach Trump for allegedly abusing his power while calling for Ukraine to investigate abuses of power by former Vice President Joe Biden.
Evidence presented by Democrats this week in a House Intelligence report failed to show that Trump broke any laws.
“At the end of a one-sided sham process, Chairman Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump,” White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement, according to Fox News.
“This report reflects nothing more than their frustrations,” Grisham continued. “Chairman Schiff’s report reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing.”
The lack of substance has led some radical Democrats, like Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, to insist that no unlawfulness is needed to impeach.
Meanwhile, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., sought to bolster his case by himself toeing the line of legality—and clearly abusing ethical norms—in releasing the private phone records of several of his political adversaries, including his own committee’s ranking minority member, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.
Schiff—who has been caught lying about his role in colluding with the so-called whistleblower whose complaint launched the latest impeachment effort—faced immediate backlash for his devious release of the subpoenaed phone records.
Breitbart, for one, pointed out the sad irony that his attempt to interfere in the 2020 election by coercing compliance from telecom companies like AT&T to investigate his rivals was a far greater abuse than pressing a foreign ally like Ukraine to cooperate in a valid investigation of past corruption involving the Obama administration.
“But Schiff didn’t simply ask AT&T for dirt on his opponents. He forced it to hand over the records,” wrote the conservative website. “And he did so without giving Nunes any warning, or any opportunity to respond to the claims he would later sneak into his 300-page impeachment report.”
Schiff acted, characteristically, through underhanded deception by subpoenaing people who may have called Nunes rather than the congressman himself.
Additionally, he released the phone records of a journalist, John Solomon, whose reporting on the Biden Ukraine scandal has undermined considerably the Democrats’ false narrative. And he also released the records of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Both open the door to problematic issues of breaching confidentiality and violating First Amendment rights, creating a chilling effect on the levers and mechanisms of American democracy and jurisprudence—which was, of course, precisely what Schiff intended.
Sadly for Schiff, at least one of those records resulted in him being called out for another lie.
He falsely claimed that Giuliani had been in communication with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget—overseen by acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney—with the insinuation being that Giuliani may have directed the withholding of Ukraine funds.
However, the Wall Street Journal reported that the number that Democrats claimed to be an OMB line was, in fact, a general White House switchboard.
“If the Democrats are going to attack their political opponents, staff members, and even journalists by publishing their phone records, you’d really think they’d at least get the phone numbers right,” said Nunes’s communications director, Jack Langer, mocking the botched effort, according to Fox News.
Schiff’s report states that it was a number commonly “associated” with the OMB, but later goes on to refer to it, misleadingly, as the “OMB number.”
The deception echoes Schiff’s opening of the impeachment hearings, when he used a blatantly misleading paraphrase of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which he later claimed he had intended to be “satire.”