It's time to kick Adam Schiff off the House Intel Committee

It hasn't been a secret that Adam Schiff isn't a trustworthy person. He's one of the most prolific leakers in the House of Representatives. He doesn't like getting exposed playing his little games. One such game was when he announced finding a whistleblower from the Trump administration who could highlight lots of juicy details of Trump's complicity with Russia! Russia! Russia!

When Paul Sperry reported that Eric Ciaramella was the whistleblower, Adam Schiff tried hiding Eric Ciaramella's identity by classifying documents related to Ciaramella as Special Compartmented Information. Working for RealClearInvestigations at the time, Sperry still published his article. As a result of Sperry's reporting, Schiff sent a request to Twitter management to have Sperry's Twitter account suspended. (This isn't disputable anymore because Matt Taibbi published Schiff's email to Twitter.)

Sperry found out about Schiff's request when Taibbi emailed Sperry, telling Sperry "Paul, just found a crazy email on Twitter — did you know Adam Schiff’s staff . . . asked Twitter to have you banned?" Here's the Taibbi Twitter File tweet highlighting Schiff's request:

27.They also received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned. Here, the office for Democrat and House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff asks Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry: pic.twitter.com/SXI1ekqi13

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023

That's pretty explicit. It doesn't leave much to the imagination. Jim Jordan confronted Schiff about when Republicans would be able to cross-examine the whistleblower:

Schiff, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, made his "request" to ban me through his staff in a November 2020 memo to Twitter. Three months later, in early February 2021, I was kicked off the platform.

Why would a congressional leader sworn to protect the Constitution and First Amendment want to muzzle a veteran journalist? Like authoritarians everywhere, Schiff did not like critical reporting. The man who vowed to "protect our Democracy" from Donald Trump wanted to censor a free press.

Schiff wanted Sperry suspended a) to hide the fact that Schiff is thoroughly corrupt and b) because Sperry exposed Schiff as utterly corrupt. Then there's this:

In articles for RealClearInvestigations, I outed his anonymous “whistleblower” from the first impeachment of President Trump. It was Eric Ciaramella, a Democrat who had worked in the Trump White House as an Obama holdover. I also exposed Ciaramella’s prior relationship with one of Schiff’s top staffers on the impeachment committee, Sean Misko.

My reporting cast fresh doubts on Schiff’s claims that the 2019 impeachment process happened organically. The New York Times had already busted Schiff lying about prior contacts with the whistleblower. Initially, Schiff publicly stated his office never spoke with the whistleblower before he filed his complaint against President Trump, when in fact a Schiff staffer had huddled with him, something Schiff’s spokesman Patrick Boland was forced to admit after the Times broke the story. (The staffer was never identified.) The prior contacts led to suspicions Schiff’s office helped the whistleblower craft his complaint as part of a partisan operation.

Schiff is tight-lipped when hiding his corruption but he's the world's best leaker when trying to hurt Republicans. People like Schiff can't be trusted with our nation's most sensitive information. He shouldn't be part of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and his security clearance should be limited.