CLAIM: Former National Security Council official Tim Morrison reported the Ukraine phone call right away because it was political.
VERDICT: FALSE. Morrison saw nothing illegal — or political — about the call.
Lead House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) claimed during President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial on Thursday that several officials listening to his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reported “came forward in real time to report the president’s conduct.”
He specifically noted Morisson, though Morisson testified in the House Intelligence Committee that he saw nothing wrong with the call.
Morrison testified that he approached a National Security Council attorney about the call because he was worried that it would be misused, politically, by the president’s opponents in Washington — a prediction that has come true.
Schiff acknowledged that Morrison did not think there was anything illegal about the call, but played a clip of his public testimony in which the Democrats’ staff counsel tried to pressure Morrison to offer something more useful:
Note that Morrison did not agree with the Democrats’ characterization of the call. But Schiff presented it that way to the Senate during his presentation in the impeachment trial. Schiff knew he was lying to the Senate — because Tim Morrison told Schiff himself that he saw nothing political about the call, in his previous closed-door testimony – READ MORE