Americans should be concerned about the power that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) has over the now-official impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, says Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).
In an interview with Breitbart’s Alex Marlow on Thursday, Scalise expressed his very real concerns about what the House’s Thursday resolution to outline procedures for their inquiry will mean for Trump and his allies — including that Schiff “is empowered to block testimony from Republican-called witnesses” in Intelligence panel hearings, according to Breitbart.
Impeachment “at the whim of the chairman”
The House voted largely along party lines on Halloween to authorize the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Part of that vote included setting up rules for how the inquiry would be conducted — but Scalise says there are significant issues that need to be addressed.
“There are sections of the resolution that allow [Adam Schiff] to literally have veto power over Republican witnesses,” Scalise said, according to Breitbart. “There’s a section in the resolution that allows the chairman to literally kick the president’s legal counsel out of the room if he so chooses, not because there has been some wrong that was done…all at the whim of the chairman.”
According to Scalise, this is a break from what was done in the cases of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, both of whom also faced impeachment proceedings.
“Under the Clinton and Nixon impeachments, both sides had the ability to call witnesses [and] to subpoena witnesses,” Scalise said. “Also, the president had the legal power to have his legal counsel in the room to question witnesses. All of that, today, is at the discretion of [Schiff].”
And Schiff hasn’t been shy about using this to his advantage, the Republican congressman said.
“Just this week, [Schiff] directed the witness to refuse to answer certain questions that were asked by Republicans on the committee,” Scalise noted. “So [Schiff] literally is telling the witness not to answer certain questions Republicans are asking. That happened this week.”
Getting the “false story” out
Scalise maintained that Dems’ impeachment efforts are little more than an attempt to “nullify” the 2016 election, and he pointed to his own experiences to back that up. (Scalise was one of dozens of House Republicans to “storm” a closed-door impeachment hearing being led by Schiff last month, Fox News reported.)
“I took a few [Republican] members down there a week and a half ago,” Scalise recalled to Breitbart, “and we went just to see what was going on, and it was amazing how as soon as we walked in the room — and we were there just to watch, we’re voting members of Congress — [Schiff] gets the witness, runs out of the room, and they shut the thing down, because they don’t want people to see what’s going on in there.”
The congressman went on:
It’s almost like [this is] the only way that [Democrats] can get their false story out because if this was open to the public, my goodness, all the things that we’re hearing about what happened in that room completely go against all the reports that we’re reading in the media, because the media is only getting the things that Adam Schiff leaks to them.
Scalise is right. With the rules and the media on his side, Schiff seems to have everything he needs for a successful impeachment inquiry in the palm of his hand. The “witch hunt” is very much still on.
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