Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Witchhunt) has once again been caught manipulating evidence: the House Jan. 6 committee on Wednesday admitted that Schiff had altered a text message from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, making it appear much more damning than it actually was. After The Federalist exposed the deception, the House committee claimed that Schiff’s editing was “inadvertent.” Sure, and the next time Adam Schiff appears in public, he will be wearing a MAGA hat.
But there really wasn’t much of anything else that the Jan. 6 committee could have said, short of admitting that Schiff is a hate-filled hyper-partisan fanatic with scant regard for truth or accuracy. During Monday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing, Schiff announced that he had proof that a Congressman, who turned out to be Jordan, had texted Meadows, urging him to tell Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the 2020 presidential election results. It was dramatic stuff, as so many of Schiff’s past announcements have been, except for the unpleasant fact that it shared a flaw of those past announcements: it was false.
“I want to display just a few of the message[s] [Meadows] received from people in Congress,” Schiff proclaimed grandly. Then he displayed a graphic that he represented as a text from a member of Congress to Meadows. Schiff declared: “This one reads, ‘On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’ You can see why this is so critical to ask Mr. Meadows about. About a lawmaker suggesting that the former vice president simply throw out votes that he unilaterally deems unconstitutional in order to overturn a presidential election and subvert the will of the American people.”
Schiff did not mention, however, that he had truncated Jordan’s message, which was actually forwarded by Jordan and was written by former Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz. Schiff left out a significant part of it and added punctuation to make it appear as if nothing had been deleted. According to The Federalist, the original text “included an attachment of a four-page draft Word document drafted by Schmitz that detailed Schmitz’s legal reasoning for suggesting that Pence had the constitutional authority to object to the certification of electoral votes submitted by a handful of states. The piece that Schmitz had sent to Jordan was published at the website everylegal.vote the next day and even included the same ‘DISCUSSION DRAFT’ heading and timestamp on the document that Schmitz sent to Jordan.”
Schmitz wrote: “On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence.” Schiff included only what had been written up to “at all,” and added a period after that to make the message seem complete, without giving any indication that he had altered the message at all.
The Federalist also reported that “according to a source familiar with the matter, Schiff never approached Jordan to discuss the text messages prior to chopping them up and misrepresenting them during Monday night’s hearing. Had he done so or bothered asking Jordan about the text message, Schiff would have known that Jordan was merely relaying to Meadows, without comment, an attorney’s summary of that attorney’s own legal argument as to what Pence should or shouldn’t do.”
This is, of course, not at all the first time that Schiff has been caught altering the data. In Trump’s infamous phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said: “I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are…I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.” Schiff represented this statement as: “Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the President communicates. We’ve been very good to your country. Very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what? I don’t see much reciprocity here. I hear what you want. I have a favor I want from you, though. And I’m going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent. Understand? Lots of it, on this and on that.”
Schiff made up the bit about Trump telling Zelensky “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent” out of whole cloth, as Trump himself noted in calling Schiff out for his dishonesty. Schiff insisted he was simply summarizing the call, but there was actually nothing in it to suggest that Trump was demanding that Zelensky fabricate dirt on Joe Biden.
Caught red-handed, the Jan. 6 committee sent this statement to The Federalist: “The Select Committee on Monday created and provided Representative Schiff a graphic to use during the business meeting quoting from a text message from ‘a lawmaker’ to Mr. Meadows. The graphic read, ‘On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’ In the graphic, the period at the end of that sentence was added inadvertently. The Select Committee is responsible for and regrets the error.”
Come on, man! How does a period get added “inadvertently”? But it is refreshing at least that the committee is admitting that Schiff’s presentation wasn’t truthful. Jordan spokesman Russell Dye asked: “Is anyone surprised that Adam Schiff is again rifling through private text messages and cherry-picking information to fit his partisan narrative and sow misinformation?” Why, no. No one who has been paying attention to the career of Adam Schiff is surprised at all.
Source: PJ Media
