It’s easy to use terms like disgraced, discredited, shamed and humiliated for the partisan hacks who for years falsely pushed a Russian collusion hoax, and its underlying sham Steele dossier, except for one major problem.
While all those terms certainly apply, they remain like water off a duck’s back to the likes of Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democrat from California who continues to believe, defend and promote the key role he played in duping the American public.
Put simply, Schiff has no shame; and that’s coming from liberal law professor and columnist Jonathan Turley.
“Schiff’s spin is enough to cause permanent vertigo,” Turley wrote. “Some of us have spent years being pummeled for questioning the obvious problems with the Steele dossier, including the long-denied connection to the Clinton campaign. Schiff was the main voice swatting down such criticism and his endorsements were treated as dispositive for media from MSNBC to the Washington Post.
“After all,” Turley noted, “he was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and assured the public that our criticisms were meritless and the dossier was corroborated. Schiff’s spin, however, continues to deny the obvious about the Russian collusion scandal.”
Turley’s rebuke came after Schiff spouted his nonsense during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press.
“I don’t regret saying that we should investigate claims of someone who, frankly, was a well-respected British intelligence officer,” Schiff said. “And we couldn’t have known, of course, years ago that we would learn years later that someone who is a primary source lied to him.”
Amazingly, Schiff’s disingenuous comments came mere days after an analyst behind the study was arrested for lying to the FBI about his sources.
And for all the years Schiff was peddling the Russian collusion nonsense, Turley noted, Schiff was aware that the FBI had severed Steele as an asset who provided wildly exaggerated information and distorted intelligence.
And Schiff refuses to take any blame or acknowledge any fault, even when likes of The Washington Post has issued retractions and corrections to its original flawed reporting on the Steele dossier.
Not Schiff, who instead doubled down during an appearance on The View, were he was grilled by former State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, who accused Schiff of spreading disinformation for years by promoting the false Steele dossier narrative. Schiff’s nonsensical reply:
“But let’s not use that as a smokescreen to somehow shield Donald Trump’s culpability for inviting Russia to help him in the election, which they did, for trying to coerce Ukraine into helping him in the next election, which he did, into inciting an erection, insurrection, which he did. None of that is undercut, none of that serious misconduct is in any way diminished by the fact that people lied to Christopher Steele.”
“No,” replied Ortagus, “I think just your credibility is.”
