Adam Schiff claimed over the weekend that he shouldn’t be held accountable for his own previous efforts to discount the numerous errors in the FBI’s FISA application on Carter Page. “I’m certainly willing to admit that the Inspector General found serious abuses of FISA that I was unaware of,” Schiff told Fox News’ Chris Wallace. He added, “Had I known of them, Chris, yes, I would have called out the FBI at the same time. But I think it’s only fair to judge what we knew at the time, not what would be revealed two years later.”
As Ed wrote yesterday, Schiff’s explanation for his failure to see what was presented in the Nunes memo is “nonsense on stilts.” I wrote a comparison between the information contained in the Nunes memo and the conclusions from the Horowitz report here. Every major point of the memo was substantiated by Horowitz’ report while Schiff’s response memo was cut off at the knees.
Fox News’ Brit Hume wasn’t too impressed with Schiff’s attempt to avoid accountability on this point. I wanted to highlight this clip of Hume taking Schiff to task because it focuses attention on a problem the media has yet to acknowledge with any seriousness, i.e. Adam Schiff repeatedly demonstrated lack of credibility.
Asked about Schiff’s comments, Hume replied, “What he says flies in the face, of course, of the IG report but it also flies in the face of the much derided Devin Nunes memo that grew out of the Nunes-led House Intelligence Committee investigation…and the whole Trump-Russia affair.” He added, “For Schiff now to claim, when he not only saw what Nunes said but published a memo of his own rebutting it, that he didn’t know about those abuses is preposterous!”
“That was February of 2018. They clearly were having the conversation then,” Shannon Bream said.
“And he says he didn’t know about that stuff. Well of course he knew about it,” Hume replied.
“Do you think he’ll get called on the carpet by anybody who has been following this story for two years?” Bream asked.
“Well, one of the wonders, to me, of modern media is the failure of my colleagues in this business to see through this guy Schiff,” Hume said. “He has been dishonest repeatedly. He made extravagant claims about the amount of evidence he had of Russia collusion, evidence that it turned out that not even the Mueller team with all of its investigative powers did not discover and that he, Schiff, never specified. Of course the report came out and basically blew up this whole Russia collusion theory.
“Now comes this whole question of FISA abuse and he’s still telling whoppers about that. It’s amazing that he isn’t called out. And then of course he gets tapped by Nancy Pelosi to lead the impeachment inquiry. Wow!”
Wow, indeed. And Hume doesn’t mention it in this clip, but you could add Schiff’s Ukraine call parody or his denial that he’d had any advance contact with the whistleblower when in fact his office had directed the whistleblower to a left-wing attorney to help build his case. Bottom line, Schiff has repeatedly been revealed to be more interested in partisan point scoring than sticking to the facts, but he still gets treated like a truth-teller by the media.
Here’s the Brit Hume interview cued up to the segment about Schiff:
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