Schiff Claims Underwhelming Trump Transcript 'Far More Damning' Than He Imagined
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff took his hyperbolic rhetoric against President Donald Trump to a whole new level on Wednesday, accusing him of acting like a “mafia boss” engaged in a “shakedown” of the Ukrainian president.
Schiff held a news conference on Capitol Hill to respond to the release of the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In the nearly half-hour-long call touching on a wide variety of topics, Trump said, “there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”
“Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me,” Trump added.
As the president has told reporters on multiple times, there was no quid pro quo. Trump did not demand that Ukraine take action or lose military aid, as Schiff himself alleged before the release of the transcript.
Further, according to the transcript provided by the White House, he did not refer the matter eight times as multiple media outlets reported but mentioned it only once along with another issue of public corruption, as well as a request to look into Democrats’ reported efforts to solicit Ukrainian assistance to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Schiff told reporters on Wednesday — with all the credibility of “Casablanca’s” Captain Renault — that what he saw in the transcript shocked him and displayed Trump’s true “depravity.”
.@RepAdamSchiff: “The notes of the call reflect a conversation far more damning than I or many others had imagined…What those notes reflect is a classic mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader.” pic.twitter.com/7YAz1mB1Xb
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 25, 2019
“The notes of the call reflect a conversation far more damning than I or many others had imagined,” the California Democrat said.
“It is shocking at another level that the White House would release these notes and felt that somehow this would help the president’s case or cause. Because what those notes reflect is a classic Mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader.”
Despite only mentioning the matter once to Zelensky, Schiff alleged Trump “would not let the subject go.”
He cannot possibly believe what he said.
The Daily’s Wire’s Ryan Saavedra is right: Schiff is either “lying or is delusional.”
The longer he talked the more the congressman’s claims went even more over the top.
With a straight face, Schiff said that Trump “betrayed his oath of office and sacrificed our national security in doing so.”
But delaying payment of $400 million in military aid to Ukraine for a little over a month (it was paid two weeks ago) does not constitute a national security crisis.
Further, given the hell Democrats have put Trump through for the past two-plus years over false charges of wrongdoing by his campaign during the 2016 race, it seems entirely reasonable for the president and the rest of the public to know the circumstances surrounding then-Vice President Biden’s leveraging $1 billion in U.S. aid to get a prosecutor investigating his son fired.
Biden is seeking the highest office in the land, after all, and the American public (and the Democratic primary electorate for that matter) ought to know if a candidate is corrupt.
Zelensky told reporters at the United Nations on Wednesday that “nobody pushed me.”
NEW: Ukrainian Pres. Zelenskiy says “nobody pushed me” to investigate Biden and his son.
He says call with Trump was “a good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things.” https://t.co/EU63L2mY3R pic.twitter.com/2SmelWxTUJ
— ABC News (@ABC) September 25, 2019
Schiff, not Trump, is the one who has problems letting things go.
In March, the congressman alleged Trump engaged in crimes “worse than Watergate” prior to the release of the Mueller report.
For the previous two years, he claimed that he had “ample evidence of collusion in plain sight” that Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 race, but never provided it.
The Ukraine transcript “scandal” is just the latest iteration of Schiff doing what he does best: making outrageous accusations against the president with nothing to back them up.
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