Rep. Adam Schiff, surely the most odious of politicians even when compared with a few other prize specimens among his fellow California Democrats, richly deserved the censure he received on June 21 from a 213-209 House vote punishing him for peddling his Russia-collusion fairy tale.
After the vote, Democrats yelled “shame” and “disgrace,” which would have been apt if the words had been aimed at their colleague, but they were, naturally, directed at Republicans. Schiff himself mocked and denounced the GOP, saying of his condemnation, “You honor me with your enmity. You flatter me with this falsehood.”
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It was neither an honor nor flattery, but it suits Schiff to dress it up that way because then it fits his ceaseless, disreputable efforts to backfill justification for dishonest investigations with which he undermined the last Republican administration. He could get away with it when his party held the majority, but no longer.
On the same day as receiving censure, Schiff displayed his modus operandi for making a case by twisting the truth. Grilling special counsel John Durham, who was testifying to Rep. Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee, the Californian said: “You thought it appropriate for you to intervene in an independent investigation by the [Department of Justice] inspector general because he was reaching a conclusion you disagreed with. You thought that was appropriate.”
To this, Durham replied: “[Your] premise isn’t right. The inspector general circulated a draft memo to a number of agencies and persons. Our group was one of them. We were asked to review the draft and bring to his attention any concerns that we had or disagreements.”
In short, it was the inspector general who thought it appropriate for Durham to “intervene” and invited him to do so. Schiff turned the facts on their head because he wanted to taint the special counsel for saying the FBI investigation into alleged collusion was improper (to put it mildly). It was, as Durham’s report made plain, grossly biased and corrupt (to put it straight).
After Durham’s clarifying retort, Schiff scurried on in his humiliating exchange to accuse the special counsel of violating department policy. But the brief passage of dialogue above gets to the kernel of the congressman’s instinctive technique, which is to present evidence dishonestly if he wishes to trash someone he regards as a nuisance or impediment to his political stardom.
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He reverses facts as tendentiously, if not quite as absurdly, as Politico did with its headline on another of the week’s main stories: “Alito picks a fight with ProPublica.” It was, of course, the other way around. It was the “investigative” journalism outfit that initiated hostilities with a hatchet job on the conservative justice presented as a straight-down-the-line set of factual revelations.
It is headlines like that one and distortions like Schiff’s that make people so detest Washington and its mostly slavish news media. The gulf is widening between ordinary people on the one hand and, on the other, the political leaders who want their votes and the partisans of the press who purport to tell them what is going on.