And when people are panicking, they make foolish mistakes. Richard Grenell’s public threat to release the House Intelligence Committee transcripts has pushed committee chair Adam Schiff to desperation, Fox News reported overnight, apparently worried about having his remaining credibility stripped from him. The testimony makes clear that Schiff and others knew that the Trump campaign never colluded with Russia, and the transcripts allegedly can easily show Schiff knowingly lied when he repeatedly claimed otherwise:

Transcripts of House Intelligence Committee interviews that have been cleared for release show top law enforcement and intelligence officials affirming they had no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, senior administration and intelligence community officials told Fox News on Wednesday.

This would align with the results of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — which found no evidence of illegal or criminal coordination between President Trump, the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016 — but the numerous transcribed interviews could raise further questions about committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s past statements saying that there was “direct evidence” of collusion.

“Schiff is in panic mode,” a senior administration official told Fox News.

Just how panicked has Schiff become? According to Fox, Schiff tried shaping the public-relations battlefield for a Grenell release by linking Grenell directly to the redactions made within the transcripts. The idea was apparently to make it look like Grenell was acting on Donald Trump’s orders to manipulate the transcripts for Trump’s political aims and to make Schiff look bad.

There was just one small problem with that narrative:

Schiff has had his subcommittee staff director reaching out to heads of intelligence community agencies asking how Grenell was involved and what role Grenell — a known Trump ally — may have played in the declassification and redaction process.

Fox News is told, however, that the redactions were completed before Grenell took the helm as acting director this past February.

The process, according to an intelligence community official, took place under both former directors Dan Coates and Joseph Maguire, and was conducted by career intelligence officials.

D’oh! Grenell had already noted in his letter to Schiff that review and redaction had been completed on 43 of the 53 transcripts before his arrival as acting DNI. The other ten were also in the pipeline well before his arrival after Coats’ retirement and Maguire’s time ran out. All Schiff accomplished was strengthening the credibility of the review before the release of the transcripts.

The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra hears from his own source that this isn’t the last of Schiff’s panic-driven mistakes, either:

A source close to the White House told The Daily Wire, “Schiff really is panicking In a state of panic, Schiff has been making sloppy mistakes. It was a colossally stupid mistake on his part to send his staff out to find out what role Grenell had in the process, it gave Grenell’s allies in the Intelligence Community the perfect opportunity to disclose that the redactions took place before Grenell got there. Some of Schiff’s other mistakes will play out over the next couple of days.”

Won’t that be fun! Of course, we still don’t know for sure exactly what was said in those transcripts. If it was that bad, one has to wonder how Democrats joined Republicans on the committee to unanimously vote to release them in 2018; by that time, Schiff had already and repeatedly promised that he had direct evidence of collusion. They must have known that the transcripts would come out before the election, which could make their case against Trump worse by undermining their credibility on their Orange Man Bad approach. Or perhaps they relied on the intel community’s distaste of Trump to keep the transcripts bottled up while Democrats kept their own political skirts clean — and could characterize them in absentia any way they pleased.

If so, that was a serious miscalculation. And that also isn’t the only one Schiff has made, or will make, when it comes to the Russia-collusion hoax.