Earlier this month, Representative Adam Schiff was reported to have doctored a text message between former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Republican representative Jim Jordan in the ongoing investigations of the House January 6 Committee. This report should hardly come as a surprise.

On the House floor, Schiff was confronted by Republican Congressman Jim Comer for peddling the “Russia hoax.” He responded by launching into a tirade of circumstantial evidence that was supposed to prove Trump-Russia collusion. Given Schiff’s most recent ethically questionable choice in the January 6 Commission, it is worth recounting his central role in the collusion investigations.

Schiff was one of the main proponents of the collusion theory from day one. Throughout the 45th president’s tenure, the congressman continuously assured the Trump-deranged media that there was “plenty of evidence” of collusion with Russia hiding “in plain sight”, and that the proof was “more than circumstantial.” Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, he also continued to maintain the legitimacy of the legally abominable FBI application for surveillance warrants on then-Trump aide Carter Paige, one of the main premises justifying the subsequent Mueller investigation.

Schiff was undeterred when House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes released a memo in 2018 that detailed this corrupt FISA process. Nunes, a Republican congressman also from California, presented damning proof that the entire application was largely predicated on the now-debunked dossier by Christopher Steele—in reality, a political operation funded by the Clinton campaign through research firm Fusion GPS. Nunes’ memo was immediately denounced by the entire Democrat establishment as false, and Schiff subsequently responded with a memo of his own. The latter purported to document the errors of its Republican-derived counterpart.

Naturally, the Schiff memo was the story that stuck for the zealots of the Russia collusion cult in Washington and their media enablers; this, despite the fact that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz would go on to confirm the veracity of the very claims on which Schiff was attempting to cast doubt. The Wall Street Journal previously documented the exact falsehoods in the Schiff memo and the inspector general’s refutations here.

When Schiff was called out by Comer on the House floor, the former launched into a series of “Are you aware?” questions that were ostensibly meant to maintain support for the Trump-Russia thesis (outside of the Steele Dossier). Yet Schiff’s statements are still based on, to use his own words, mere “circumstantial evidence.” It is worth considering Schiff’s reasoning behind each claim:

“Are you aware that the president’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, met with an agent of Russian intelligence and provided Russian intelligence with internal campaign polling data, as well as strategic insights about their intelligence in key battleground states?”

The “agent of Russian intelligence” to whom Schiff is referring here is Manafort’s longtime Ukrainian business associate Konstantin Kilimnik. According to the Washington Times, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s final report on Russian election interference—a more than 900 page report of which Kilimnik and Manafort are central focuses—states that Kilimnik was “a Russian intelligence officer.” Manafort’s lawyer responded to the accusation by claiming that there are classified documents that would, if released, prove this to be false; however, if Kilimnik is indeed a Russian asset as stated by the Senate report, then he “may have been connected to the GRU [Russian state intelligence service]” responsible for hacking into the DNC in 2016.

In the second part of his statement, Schiff refers to Manafort’s providing polling data to Russian intelligence (Kilimnik, on the presumption that he is a Russian agent). The Mueller report had already cast doubt on this being connected to “Russian interference,” however, as the meeting in which this transaction took place is purported to have happened only after the reports of a Russian cyber attack had already been released by the U.S. media. Collusion would thereby be assumed only on the evidence that Manafort had an ongoing relationship with Kilimnik, and must have subsequently known about the latter’s speculative ties with the GRU and its attempt to influence the U.S. election. Circumstantial indeed.

“Are you aware that while the Trump campaign chairman was providing internal polling data, that Kremlin intelligence was leading a clandestine social media campaign to elect Donald Trump?”

In 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report defending a 2017 intelligence community assessment that there was “unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.” The report finds that the essential task of the Russian interference was to sow discord in the United States, primarily through social media posts and advertisements that were aimed at denigrating Hillary Clinton and undermining trust in U.S. democracy.

This is in part contrary to the 2018 House Intelligence Committee report, which found that the intelligence community’s assessment on “Putin’s strategic intentions” were insufficient. When viewing the various posts, advertisements, and accounts (examples available for download from the House Report here) attributed to Russian intelligence agents, it is evident that there was a clear intention to sow discord; however, the sheer number of social justice posts related to racial equality and police brutality seem to suggest that the Russian influencers may have sought social tension as the goal in itself, rather than a means to get Trump in particular elected.

Regardless, Schiff’s two statements together allude to the notion that Manafort was giving polling data in battleground states to Kilimnik, ostensibly all in an attempt to then have Russian hackers specifically target voters in politically purple areas.

“I am aware of President Trump’s son meeting secretly in Trump Tower New York with a Russian delegation with the purpose of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian delegation represented was part of the Russian government’s effort to help elect Donald Trump in 2016.… And when asked about that secret meeting, both the president and his son lied about it.”

Donald Trump Jr. did indeed meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting is reported to have been short and fruitless, with then-candidate Trump having had no knowledge of it. Although this is not illegal, it is ethically questionable, even given the fact that politics is indeed a dirty game; however, it also incidentally sheds light on another strange development in the Trump-Russia saga. Veselnitskaya is documented as having met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson just hours before the Trump Tower meeting, and then again after. Recall that Fusion GPS is the Clinton-financed firm responsible for compiling the Steele Dossier, seeking to tie Trump to Russia. While Trump Jr. meeting with Veselnitskaya under the pretenses of getting dirt on a political opponent may not be considered honorable (even though that was the very mechanism working against Trump at that exact moment), the surrounding circumstances raise just as many, if not more, questions about Clinton corruption as they do Trump collusion.

Although not mentioned by Schiff in this specific instance, also consider his maintaining the guilt of Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. In another supposed tie between Trump and Russia, Flynn was caught in a carefully set perjury trap arranged by James Comey’s FBI. Comey actually bragged in an open forum about his taking advantage of the hectic Trump transition—which unelected bureaucratic forces and Obama holdovers mobilized to make as difficult as possible—to get agents into the White House and attempt to interrogate various officials, of whom Flynn was foremost.

Schiff is not unique in his views among the Democratic Party or its political allies in relation to the Russia narrative, and no one can question the congressman’s determination in investigating corruption stories related to Trump—regardless of how scant or shoddy the hard evidence that the allegations are based on may be. It is important, however, to consider the circumstances he presents in support of his ongoing belief in collusion, as it is telling of how the congressman treats evidence that is politically inexpedient to his predetermined conclusions. This is relevant given his central position on the House January 6 Committee, and may have very real consequences for the fate of the American citizen’s upon whom the latter’s deliberations are focused.

theamericanconservative.com

On its face, the question seems absurd. Not only is Schiff himself Jewish, but, as far as anyone knows, he’s never uttered an unkind word in his life about Jews as a nation, religion, or ethnic group. So he seems to get a clean bill of health. Yet when it comes to Russia, his thinking hews so closely to the classic anti-Semitic model that one hesitates to let him off the hook.

Basically, Schiff obsesses about the Kremlin the way people used to obsess about a mythical entity known as the elders of Zion. According to the notorious czarist forgery known as the “secret protocols,” this was a hidden Jewish cabal with a mysterious grip on world affairs. Neither left nor right, socialist nor capitalist, it was above such petty concerns and was merely Jewish. Thus, the elders might use their secret powers to foment revolution in one country, economic crisis in another, or a monopolistic takeover in a third, and even though such events might seem at odds with one another, they each in their own way advanced the goal of Jewish world domination. The invisible Jewish hand was thus everywhere, behind the Comintern and the Soviets, behind the Rockefellers, and behind the Rothschilds too.

Such thinking was once common. But if that’s no longer the case, it’s because it’s become all too clear where it leads – not only to horrors like the Holocaust, but down a rabbit hole of circular reasoning. After all, if the Jewish conspiracy is all-powerful, then it must be everywhere. If it’s everywhere, then everything must be its fault. If your boss lays you off, therefore, if your wife runs off with another man, or if your kid gets polio, then the lesson is clear: the Jews did it! It doesn’t matter if there’s no proof. Since there’s no proof the conspiracy doesn’t exist, who’s to say it isn’t so?

But where such logic is now verboten as far as Jews are concerned, it’s positively de rigueur in certain quarters when it comes to the Russians. Take the furor over Hunter Biden emails and texts indicating that he and his father have engaged in the time-honored Washington game of influence peddling. No sooner did the story appear than the cry went out that Russia was to blame. Despite a complete and total absence of evidence, the chorus only grew louder and louder.

Then Schiff, the California congressman who has spearheaded the Democratic campaign against Russian collusion since early 2017, decided to pump the flames up even more. In an Oct. 16 interview after with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, he treated listeners to a display of free-form paranoia that would have been funny if it wasn’t so scary:

Blitzer: Does it surprise you at all that this information Rudy Giuliani is peddling [about the laptop] very well could be connected to some sort of Russian government disinformation campaign?

Schiff: Well, we know that this whole smear on Joe Bien comes from the Kremlin. That’s been clear for well over a year now, that they’ve been pushing this narrative about the vice president and his son, and the idea that the president, the White House counsel, and others were made aware that Giuliani was being used by Russian intelligence, and using Russian intelligence in the sense of meeting with an agent of the Kremlin and pushing out this Kremlin false narrative, the idea that they were knowing and still on the floor of the Senate during the impeachment trial pushing this Kremlin narrative is pretty breathtaking. But I guess we at this point can’t be shocked by anything this administration does, no matter how craven. But clearly the origins of this whole smear are from the Kremlin, and the president is only too happy to have Kremlin help in trying to amplify it.

Blitzer: It’s not like Rudy Giuliani is peddling this information in a vacuum, congressman. Take a look at this picture of the president in the Oval Office holding up a copy of the New York Post touting this conspiracy theory. It’s made its way all the way to the commander in chief with a big smile on his face.

Schiff: Yes, well, look, you know, I think we know who the driving force behind this smear has been all along, and it’s been the president and the Kremlin. The Kremlin has an obvious interest in denigrating Joe Biden, they want Donald Trump to win, they recognize he’s been a weak president, he’s been unwilling to stand up to Putin and other autocrats, he has diminished NATO, he has criticized and weakened our alliance with our transatlantic partners, he’s the gift that keeps giving for the Kremlin. So clearly they want to help him….

And so on. If Schiff offered nothing by way of evidence, it’s because he didn’t feel he had to in the fact-free world of CNN. All he knew is that the laptop story hurts the Biden candidacy and that hurting Biden is supposedly the Kremlin’s goal (another fact-free assertion, by the way). So it’s clear in his book that Moscow must be the guilty party.

But imagine if Schiff had said something similar about the elders of Zion – that the whole smear comes not from the Kremlin, but from the Jews, that a secret Jewish cabal is twisting Giuliani around its little finger, that the influence-peddling story is a Jewish narrative, etc. What would the reaction have been? The answer is obvious: total outrage. Yet because it’s the Russians, no one cares.

Of course, a skeptic might respond that if no one cares, it’s because times have changed. Where Jews were once vulnerable, Russians live far away in a nation-state of their own and are therefore in no danger of being lynched from the nearest lamppost. Since war with one of the world’s two top nuclear powers is out of the question, Russia-bashing can’t possibly lead to violence. So it’s all harmless fun. Besides, if it helps undermine someone as odious as Trump, then why not whale away for all it’s worth?

But it’s not harmless. War with Russia may be unthinkable, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. After all, wars don’t break out because people want them to. They happen because people stumble into them. They talk big, they threaten and bluster, and they engage in provocations that are supposedly risk-free. But then someone crosses an invisible line, and the bullets – or, in this case, missiles – start flying. People may not have started out wanting to go to war. But war is where they end up regardless.

This is what happened in 1914, and it’s far from impossible that it might happen again if Democrats take power in 2021. If so, we’ll look back and say that baseless anti-Kremlin paranoia peddled by nationalist demagogues like Adam Schiff was a big part of the reason why.

By the way, the more Schiff engages in such magical thinking about Russia, the greater the likelihood that others will take his logic, tweak it a bit, and use it against the Jews. So we may look back and say that’s something that little Adam Schiff helped create as well.

The Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee is reportedly perplexed by the lack of official interest in what might have been a foreign intelligence operation that had major impact, all too plausible given that it is assumed that Moscow would have welcomed Brexit as a first step that will eventually put an end to European political and economic unity.

So, no one knows if Russia or anyone else interfered in Britain, which is perhaps just as well as inquiries into voting in the U.S. also in 2016 have likewise created nothing but confusion and no smoking pistol. And, of course there is a question of definitions of interference. Millions of pounds were spent on advertising by those pro- and con-Brexit, just as billions were spent in political adverts in the United States. Much of the “information” provided in that fashion was deliberately misleading, often fearmongering, both in the U.K. and the U.S., suggesting that the problem is much bigger than one country’s possible attempt to influence the vote, if that even took place.

There were similar claims about Russian generated fake news and “a massive hacking attack” in the French presidential election in 2017, while Germany’s Federal Election was notable for a lack of any identifiable Kremlin interference in spite of warnings from some observers that Berlin would be targeted.

So, while claims of Russian interference in elections are fairly common, they are difficult to prove in any serious way. And one should recognize that the “victimized” governments and political parties have strong motives to conjure up a foreign enemy to explain to the public why things are going wrong, be it for coronavirus fumbling or for general political ineptitude. To be sure, as the allure of blaming Russia has faded China is increasingly being targeted by American politicians as a scapegoat, indicating that there must always be a foreigner available to blame for one’s problems.

The most recent nugget to come out of the U.S. Congress on foreign interference in elections originates with Adam Schiff, the sly head of the House Intelligence Committee. In an interview with MSNBC, Schiff revealed that U.S. intelligence has obtained information suggesting multiple nations could be trying to meddle in the 2020 U.S. elections, to include feeding or “laundering” possible disinformation through Congress.

Schiff explained how various nations us different tactics to get “fake news” messages through to the American voters. Some governments openly support a particular candidate or policy, while others like the Chinese provide misinformation during their trade negotiations with Washington. He observed that “The Russians may get involved in hacking and dumping operations or social media campaigns. The Iranians may have their own tactics and techniques like the North Koreans may have theirs.”

A letter signed by Schiff, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner, D-Va has asked for a counterintelligence briefing for Congress regarding foreign efforts to interfere in the upcoming election. It includes “We are gravely concerned, in particular, that Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November.”

Democratic Party presidential candidate presumptive Joe Biden also has confirmed that he has received briefings about Russian alleged plans to interfere in November saying “The Russians are still engaged in trying to delegitimize our electoral process. China and others are engaged as well in activities that are designed for us to lose confidence in the outcome.”

Of course, there are a number of things to say about the claims that other nations are possibly planning to meddle in the voting. First, the list of possible players being presented by Schiff and others is all too convenient, kind of like a Congressional dream list of bad boys. Russia pops up because of longstanding claims about it, but China is a new entry in the game because it all ties up into a neat package, including the “Wuhan virus” and its challenges both to American economic supremacy and to U.S. naval power in the South China Sea. And of course, there are Iran and also North Korea.

One should ask what exactly China, Iran and North Korea stand to gain by attempting to “interfere” in the election? What message could they possibly be sending and what would be the mechanisms they would use to get their points of view across to a skeptical American public? In a campaign that will undoubtedly cost hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising and other “messaging,” what exactly is the possible place of Iran and North Korea?

There is also a lack of “realism” in the Schiff comments. By far the country that interferes the most in U.S. politics is Israel. Israel and its domestic Lobby initiate legislation relating to the Middle East and Israeli diplomats, lobbyists and soldiers all have free access both to Capitol Hill and to the Pentagon. If a Congressman dares to speak up against the Jewish state’s crimes he or she is smeared in the media and eventually forced out of office by a well-funded pro-Israel opponent. No other country gets away with all that. As it is highly likely that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be pulling out all the stops to reelect Donald Trump in November, why isn’t the Jewish state included on Schiff’s list?

And then there is the tantalizing bit about concerns over disinformation being “laundered” through Congress. It is difficult to imagine what exactly Schiff is referring to as the corrupt gasbags in Congress already constitute one of the world’s biggest sources of false information, second only to the fully coopted U.S. mainstream media.

In any event, if some countries that are accustomed to being regularly targeted by the United States are taking advantage of an opportunity to somehow diminish America’s ability to meddle globally, no one should be surprised, but it is a politically driven fantasy to make the hysterical claim that the United States has now become the victim of some kind of vast multi-national conspiracy to interfere in its upcoming election.

It was a violation because it because it interfered with Congress’s exclusive spending powers. But it was purely technical because presidents traditionally have wide latitude in determining how expenditures are made. Back in 1801, Thomas Jefferson’s treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, argued that the executive branch should be allowed “a reasonable discretion” while, 160 years later, John F. Kennedy had no scruples about unilaterally moving more than $1 million – a lot of money in those days – from one budget account to another to pay for a pet project known as the Peace Corps. No one thought much of it at the time, so Trump’s decision to hold up an appropriation in 2019 doesn’t seem like a big deal.

And it wasn’t, as the December 18 articles of impeachment made clear. Rather than dwelling on the blockage itself, they quickly moved on to the real question at hand, which is why it occurred. The answer, of course, was to pressure newly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation into why a notorious oligarch named Mykola Zlochevsky had given Joe Biden’s son Hunter a lucrative no-show job and why the then-vice president had then pushed for the firing of a prosecutor looking into Zlochevsky’s company, Burisma Holdings.

Since any such investigation would have reflected poorly on Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Democrats charged that Trump was seeking to “obtain an improper personal political benefit” by “enlist[ing] a foreign power in corrupting democratic elections.” After welcoming Russian interference in 2016, he was now angling for Ukrainian interference in 2020 – or so they maintained. But the charge never made sense for one all-important reason: however much Trump might benefit, the public had a legitimate interest in learning why Biden had allowed his son to enter into an obviously corrupt relationship at a time when he was supposedly serving as Obama’s point man in rooting out Ukrainian corruption.

It’s as if 1920s Chicago crime buster Eliot Ness had looked the other way while a close relative took a job with Al Capone. So while Democrats made a big show of moral indignation, Senate Republicans were unmoved with the partial exception of notorious featherbrain Mitt Romney, and Trump was acquitted.

But now let’s take a look at Schiff’s sins and see how they compare. Back in 2017, he was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and therefore the man Democrats counted on to lead the charge that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin in order to steal the election. He did so with gusto. Quoting from a dossier prepared by ex-British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, he regaled a March 2017 committee hearing with tales of how Russia bribed Trump adviser Carter Page by offering him a hefty slice of a Russian natural-gas company known as Rosneft and of how Russian agents boosted Trump’s political fortunes by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails and passing them on to WikiLeaks. Conceivably, such acts could have been purely coincidental, Schiff acknowledged.

“But it is also possible,” he went on, “maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected, and not unrelated, and that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, not yet, and we owe it to the country to find out.”

Hours later, he assured MSNBC that the evidence of collusion was “more than circumstantial.” Nine months after that, he informed CNN’s Jake Tapper that the case was no longer in doubt: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help, the Russians gave help, and the president made full use of that help.” In February 2018, he told reporters: “There is certainly an abundance of non-public information that we’ve gathered in the investigation. And I think some of that non-public evidence is evidence on the issue of collusion and some … on the issue of obstruction.”

The press lapped it up. But now, thanks to the May 7 release of 57 transcripts of secret testimony – transcripts, by the way, that Schiff bottled up for months – we have a better idea of what such “non-public information” amounts to. The answer: nothing. A parade of high-level witnesses told the intelligence committee that either they didn’t know about collusion or lacked evidence even to venture an opinion. Not one offered the contrary view that collusion was true.

“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting [or] conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,” testified ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the committee that no one in the FBI or CIA had informed her that collusion had taken place. Sally Yates, acting attorney general during the Obama-Trump transition, was similarly noncommittal. So were Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes and former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. David Kramer, a prominent neocon who helped spread word of the Steele dossier in top intelligence circles, was downright apologetic: “I’m not in a position to really say one way or the other, sir. I’m sorry.”

But rather than admit that the investigation had turned up nothing, Schiff lied that it had – not once but repeatedly.

Let that sink in for a moment. Collusion dominated the headlines from the moment Buzzfeed published the Steele dossier on Jan. 10, 2017, to the release of the Muller report on Apr. 18, 2019. That’s more than two years, a period in which newspapers and TV were filled with Russia, Russia, Russia and little else. Thanks to the uproar, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein secretly discussed using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to force Trump out of office, while an endless parade of newscasters and commentators assured viewers that the president’s days were numbered because “the walls are closing in.”

Schiff’s only response was to egg it on to greater and greater heights. Even when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issued his no-collusion verdict – “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” his report said – Schiff insisted that there was still “ample evidence of collusion in plain sight.”

“I use that word very carefully,” he said, “because I also distinguish time and time again between collusion, that is acts of corruption that may or may not be criminal, and proof of a criminal conspiracy. And that is a distinction that Bob Mueller made within the first few pages of his report. In fact, every act that I’ve pointed to as evidence of collusion has now been borne out by the report.”

So Trump colluded with the Kremlin, but in a non-criminal way? Even if Mueller got Schiff in a headlock and screamed in his ear, “No collusion, no collusion,” the committee chairman would presumably reply: “See? He said it – collusion.”

The man is an unscrupulous liar, in other words, someone who will say anything to gain attention and fatten his war chest, which is why contributions flowing to his re-election campaign have risen from under $1 million a year to $10.5 million since the Russia furor began. The man talks endlessly about the Constitution, patriotism, his father’s heroic service in the military, and so on. But the only thing Adam Schiff really cares about is himself.

Trump’s sins are manifold. But with unerring accuracy, Schiff managed to zero in on the one sin that didn’t take place. Considering that the $391 million was destined for ultra-right military units whose members sport neo-Nazi regalia and SS symbols as they battle pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Ukraine, Schiff’s crimes are just as bad, if not worse. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the next candidate for impeachment, the congressman from Hollywood – Adam Schiff!

The fact that opinion polls in Europe suggest that many Europeans would rather have Vladimir Putin than their own hopelessly corrupt leaders is suggestive. One can buy a whole range of favorable t-shirts featuring Vladimir Putin on Ebay, also suggesting that most Americans find the official Russophobia narrative both mysterious and faintly amusing. They may not really be into the expressed desire of the huddled masses in D.C. to go to war to bring true U.S. style democracy to the un-enlightened.

One also must wonder if the Democrats are reading the tea leaves correctly. If they think that a slogan like “Honest Joe Biden will keep us safe from Moscow” will be a winner in 2020 they might again be missing the bigger picture. Since the focus on Trump’s decidedly erratic behavior will inevitably die down after the impeachment trial is completed, the Democrats will have to come up with something compelling if they really want to win the presidency and it sure won’t be the largely fictionalized Russian threat.

Nevertheless, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment. His “closing arguments” speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as “magisterial,” “powerful,” and “impressive.” The Washington Post’s resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it “a grand slam” while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it “dazzling.” Gail Collins of the New York Times dubbed it “a great job” and added that Schiff is now “a rock star.” Daily Beast enthused that the remarks “will go down in history” and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it “a closing statement for the ages.” Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting “I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country.”

Actually, a better adjective would have been “scary” and not merely due to its elaboration of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump, much of which was undeniably true even if not necessarily impeachable. It was scary because it was a warmongers speech, full of allusions to Russia, to Moscow’s “interference” in 2016, and to the ridiculous proposition that if Trump were to be defeated in 2020 he might not concede and Russia could even intervene militarily in the United States in support of its puppet. Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to “assure the integrity” of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”

Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said “As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that “Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power.” Aaron Mate at The Nation added that “For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let’s assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke.”

Over at Antiwar Daniel Lazare explains how the Wednesday speech was “a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to [Democratic Party] dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they’ll be driven from the fold.”

The orthodoxy that Lazare was writing about includes the established Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer narrative that Russia invaded “poor innocent Ukraine” in 2014, that it interfered in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton, and that it is currently trying to smear Joe Biden. One might add to that the growing consensus that Russia can and will interfere again in 2020 to help Trump. Absent from the narrative is the part how the U.S. intervened in Ukraine first to remove its government and the fact that there is something very unsavory about Joe Biden’s son taking a high-paying sinecure board position from a notably corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while his father was Vice President and allegedly directing U.S. assistance to a Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.

On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that “Russia is not a threat … to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again.” Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the “United States” for “Russia” and “Kremlin” and changes “Ukraine” to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible.

The compulsion on the part of the Democrats to bring down Trump to avoid having to deal with their own failings has brought about a shift in their established foreign policy, placing the neocons and their friends back in charge. For Schiff, who has enthusiastically supported every failed American military effort since 9/11, today’s Russia is the Soviet Union reborn, and don’t you forget it pardner! Newsweek is meanwhile reporting that the U.S. military is reading the tea leaves and is gearing up to fight the Russians. Per Schiff, Trump must be stopped as he is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to overthrow everything the United States stands for. If the Kremlin is not stopped now, it’s first major step, per Schiff, will be to “remake the map of Europe by dint of military force.”

Donald Trump’s erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

With complete disregard for the consequences of their actions, the Democrat House Intelligence Committee under Adam Schiff has abandoned all pretense of democratic procedure in their effort to remove the 45^th President of the United States from office.

Indeed, the Democrats have provided the Republicans with a Machiavellian crash course on the subtle art of decadent behavior for getting what you want, which of course is ultimate political power, and to hell in a proverbial hand basket with the consequences. The Republicans have been snoozing through a game of 2D checkers, holding out hope that Sheriff Billy Barr and his deputy John Durham will round up the real criminals, while the Democrats have been playing mortal combat.

The dark prince in this Gothic tale of diabolical, dare I say biblical, proportions is none other than Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, who, like Dracula in his castle dungeon, has contorted every House rule to fit the square peg of a Trump telephone call into the bolt hole of a full-blown impeachment proceeding. Niccolò Machiavelli would have been proud of his modern-day protégé.

As if to mock the very notion of Democratic due process, whatever that means, Schiff and his torch-carrying lynch mob took their deliberations down into the dank basement, yes, the basement, of the US Capital where they have been holding secretive depositions in an effort to get some new twist on the now famous phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky back in June. But why all the cloak and dagger theatrics when the transcript has long been available for public consumption?

At one point, the frazzled Republicans bared a little backbone against this bunker mentality when they crashed the basement meetings for some really outstanding optics. Schiff, betraying a lack of foresight, could not defenestrate the well-dressed hooligans since the meetings, as mentioned, are being held inside of a windowless dungeon. The Republican troublemakers were ushered back up the stairs instead.

Considering what Prince Schiff has managed to pull off over the course of this not-made for television impeachment process is astounding, and could not have happened without the drooling complicity of the lapdog media corporations. Schiff got the ball bouncing when he performed a Saturday Night Live skit of the Trump-Zelensky phone call on the hallowed floor of Congress. The imaginary voices in Schiff’s head made the president sound like a mafia boss speaking to one of his lackeys.

Not only did Schiff survive that stunt, it was revealed that he blatantly lied, not once but several times, about his affiliation with the White House insider, reportedly a CIA officer, who, without ever hearing the Trump-Zelensky phone call firsthand, blew the whistle anyways. The Democrats claim Trump was looking for some ‘quid pro quo’ with Kiev, which would dig up the dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter in exchange for the release of $400 million in military aid. The transcript, however, points to no such coercion, while Zelensky himself denies that he was pressured by Trump.

Meanwhile, Schiff has taken great efforts to keep the identity of the whistleblower a ‘secret’ out of “safety concerns.” The Republicans in the House said they will subpoena the whistleblower for the public impeachment that starts next week, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters. Yet Schiff has awarded himself the power to reject any witnesses the Republicans may wish to grill.

“We’ll see if he gives us any of our witnesses,” Jordan said.

A person need not feel any particular fondness for Donald Trump to find these circumstances surrounding the impeachment show trial as disgraceful, dishonorable and beneath the dignity of the American people. And whether they want it or not, the fallout from Schiff’s shenanigans will have repercussions long into the future of the US political system, which is groaning under the weight of corruption and deceit.

It is doubtful the Republicans will soon forgive and forget what the Democrats have put them through ever since Trump entered office in 2016. From Russiagate to Ukrainegate, the Trump White House has been held hostage by a non-stop, media-endorsed hate campaign to oust a democratically elected POTUS. Although it would be difficult for the Republicans, who lack the support of the media, an overwhelmingly left-leaning propaganda machine, to exact an equal amount of revenge on the Democrats when the latter have one of their own in the White House, they will certainly try. This will lead the Republic into an inescapable vortex of infighting where the sole function of the political system will be based on that of vengeance and ‘pay backs’ and more waste of time and money as the parties investigate the crimes of the other side.

The public, which is slowly awakening to the problem, will ultimately demand new leadership to break the current two-party internecine struggle. Thus, talk of a civil war in the United States, while possible, is being overplayed. The truth will be much simpler and far less violent. Out of the dust and ashes of the defunct duopoly that is now at war with itself, the American people will soon demand fresh political blood in Washington and this will bring to the forefront capable political forces that are committed to the primary purpose of politics: representing the needs of the people, once again.