Because Schiff served on the House intelligence committee and enjoyed access to a great deal of classified information, a lot of people believe, or believed, he knew things the rest of us didn’t. (Keep in mind, members of the intelligence panel can see sensitive information that other members of the House cannot.) Schiff knew darn well that people believed this, and abused people’s faith that he knew things that the general public would eventually learn. …

When you have access to classified information, clarity in communications matters. There is no good committee for the House to assign its most notorious liars, but the intelligence panel is a particularly bad one to have an incorrigible fabulist, offering his more dramatic and fanciful version of events and promoting his preferred narratives.

[Schiff engaged in flat-out McCarthyism, and his fellow Democrats cheered him for it yesterday. One would hope that history will judge Schiff just as harshly as it has Joe McCarthy, but it won’t happen with this generation of journalists and academics. They have too much invested in the same motives that drove Schiff. — Ed]