House Republicans made good on their threat to call Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, as witnesses this weekend, setting up a confrontation with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), who will almost certainly reject the witnesses.
Because Democrats have control of the Intel committee, they have final say-so on which witnesses will be called and which won’t. But Schiff’s rejection of witnesses that Republicans request will only lend strength to the argument that he’s running a wholly-partisan impeachment inquiry geared more towards smearing President Trump than finding the truth.
“We expect that you will call each of the witnesses listed above to ensure that the Democrats’ ‘impeachment inquiry’ treats the President with fairness, as promised by Speaker Pelosi,” wrote Devin Nunes (R-CA) in a letter to Schiff. “Your failure to fulfill Minority witness requests shall constitute evidence of your denial of fundamental fairness and due process.”
In reporting the story, the Washington Post (naturally) tried to shade it as Republicans distracting from the much more important business of throwing Trump out of the White House.
“Republicans want to publicly question witnesses who would divert the conversation away from questions about Trump’s behavior to allegations only tangentially related to the case, such as unfounded claims that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and that the Bidens acted nefariously in their dealings with Ukraine,” they reported.
They don’t even bother to sound objective anymore, do they?
In a statement, Schiff left little doubt as to what his decision would be.
“This inquiry is not, and will not serve, however, as a vehicle to undertake the same sham investigations into the Bidens or 2016 that the President pressed Ukraine to conduct for his personal political benefit, or to facilitate the President’s effort to threaten, intimidate, and retaliate against the whistleblower who courageously raised the initial alarm,” Schiff said.
Courageously? Yes, it takes a ton of courage to hide in the shadows and repeat stories you’ve heard second-and-third-hand from people you work with. Why would we give a medal of bravery to Conan the dog when we could give one to Mr. Anonymity over here?
With Democrats in charge of the process, though, you can count on these public hearings being turned into a three-ring circus of lies, smears, and attacks on President Trump. Schiff has about as much interest in the truth as Michael Cohen – the last guy the Democrats put on the witness stand for a public sideshow. And we expect these hearings will be more of the same. At the end of the day, it comes down to whether or not Americans can be convinced that asking Ukraine to investigate very real corruption concerns can really be considered an impeachable offense. The media/Democrats will do everything they can to make that case, but we’re not sure it has the weight to it that they think it does.
And even if it does, impeachment eventually has to go to the Senate. And there won’t be any Adam Schiff in the north wing of the Capitol to prevent Republicans from calling any witness they want. If Democrats have any sense about them, they’ll drop this whole matter long before that point.
But that’s a pretty big “if.”
Comments are closed.