Adam Schiff's ongoing dishonesty

Adam Schiff, the corrupt chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, aka HPSCI, should learn the definition of character. Preferably, he'd learn from retired Congressman J.C. Watts. During his keynote speech to the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996, Watts defined character, aka integrity. Specifically, Watts said "I've got a pretty simple definition of character. It's simply doing what's right when nobody's looking." That's a concept that's foreign to Schiff. Schiff's more dishonest than Richard Nixon.

This morning, Schiff went on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press. When he was asked about the Steele/Clinton Dossier, Schiff started making excuses like he usually does. He said "I don't regret saying that we should investigate claims of someone who, frankly, was a well-respected British intelligence officer. 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."

Actually, the Schiff Memo stated emphatically that "FBI and DOJ officials did not "abuse" the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign."

Schiff then had the audacity to call then-Chairman Devin Nunes a liar. Schiff said "The Committee's Majority memorandum, which draws selectively on highly sensitive information, includes other distortions and misrepresentations that are contradicted by the underlying classified documents, which the vast majority of the Committee and members of Congress have not had the opportunity to review and which Chairman Nunes chose not to read himself."

This is from DOJ IG Michael Horowitz's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

When the Crossfire Hurricane team first proposed seeking a FISA order targeting Carter Page in mid-August 2016, FBI attorneys assisting the investigation considered it a "close call" whether they had developed the probable cause necessary to obtain the order, and a FISA order was not requested at that time. However, in September 2016, immediately after the Crossfire Hurricane team received reporting from Christopher Steele concerning Page's alleged recent activities with Russian officials, FBI attorneys advised the Department that the team was ready to move forward with a request to obtain FISA authority to surveil Page. FBI and Department officials told us the Steele reporting "pushed [the FISA proposal] over the line" in terms of establishing probable cause, and we concluded that the Steele reporting played a central and essential role in the decision to seek a FISA order.

The next paragraphs are vitally important:

In light of these concerns, Congress through the FISA statute, and the Department and FBI through policies and procedures, have established important safeguards to protect the FISA application process from irregularities and abuse. Among the most important are the requirements in FBI policy that every FISA application must contain a "full and accurate" presentation of the facts, and that agents must ensure that all factual statements in FISA applications are "scrupulously accurate." These are the standards for all FISA applications, regardless of the investigation's sensitivity, and it is incumbent upon the FBI to meet them in every application. That said, in the context of an investigation involving persons associated with a presidential campaign, where the target of the FISA is a former campaign official and the goal of the FISA is to uncover, among other things, information about the individual's allegedly illegal campaign-related activities, members of the Crossfire Hurricane investigative team should have anticipated, and told us they in fact did anticipate, that these FISA applications would be subjected to especially close scrutiny.

Nevertheless, we found that members of the Crossfire Hurricane team failed to meet the basic obligation to ensure that the Carter Page FISA applications were "scrupulously accurate." We identified significant inaccuracies and omissions in each of the four applications: 7 in the first FISA application and a total of 17 by the final renewal application.

For example, the Crossfire Hurricane team obtained information from Steele's Primary Sub-source in January 2017 that raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele reporting that was used in the Carter Page FISA applications. This was particularly noteworthy because the FISA applications relied entirely on information from the Steele reporting to support the allegation that Page was coordinating with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities. However, members of the Crossfire Hurricane team failed to share the information about the Primary Sub-source’s information with the Department, and it was therefore omitted from the three renewal applications.

Then there's this:

All of the applications also omitted information the FBI had obtained from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior relationship with Page, including that Page had been approved as an operational contact for the other agency from 2008 to 2013, that Page had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers (one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application), and that an employee of the other agency assessed that Page had been candid.

Despite all this information, Adam Schiff still made this opening statement to a committee hearing:

Here's the transcript of Trump's call with Ukraine President Zelensky. What Chairman Schiff said in the Intelligence Committee isn't close to what President Trump said to President Zelenskyy. They aren't close because Schiff is a lie factory. Schiff's association with the truth is superfluous at best.

Despite all that, Schiff said "[Igor] Danchenko lied to Christopher Steele and then lied to the FBI," Schiff said. "He should be prosecuted. He is being prosecuted. And I'll tell you this, if he's convicted, he should not be pardoned the way Donald Trump pardoned people who lied to FBI agents, like Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. There ought to be the same standard in terms of prosecuting the liars. But I don't think there ought to be any pardon, no matter which way the lies cut."

That's rich, especially coming from someone who intentionally misled people in an Intelligence Committee hearing. Finally, there's this oldie but goodie:

It's amazing that the Mueller team never found the evidence that Schiff talked about.