House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has done almost exactly what he and fellow Democrats accuse President Donald Trump (falsely) of doing: he abused his power to ask an outside entity to investigate political opponents.
Schiff subpoenaed phone records from AT&T that he then used to claim his Republican counterpart, Ranking Member Rep. Devin Nunes (D-CA), was part of a plot to smear a U.S. ambassador.
What Schiff did is arguably worse than what he claims Trump did in his telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. AT&T is an American company, not a foreign government.
But Schiff didn’t simply ask AT&T for dirt on his opponents. He forced it to hand over the records. And he did so without giving Nunes any warning, or any opportunity to respond to the claims he would later sneak into his 300-page impeachment report.
Schiff’s strategy was not to go for Nunes’s phone number directly, but to subpoena the records of numbers of people who might have called him. So when he showed Nunes his unilateral subpoena — which he is required to do — Nunes had no idea what Schiff was doing. Nor did Schiff explain it to the public: the footnotes in his report simply refer to “AT&T Document Production” with no further explanation. – READ MORE