Yesterday the View hosted Rep. Adam Schiff where he was asked about a photoshopped anime video posted by Rep. Gosar depicting an attack on AOC. But after that, he was also asked about his long promotion of the Steele dossier by conservative guest host Morgan Ortagus. Ortagus is a former spokesperson for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“You defended, promoted, you even read into the congressional record the Steele dossier,” Ortagus said. She continued, “Last week the main source of the dossier was indicted by the FBI for lying about most of the key claims in that dossier. Do you have any reflections on your role in promoting this to the American people?”
Schiff replied that anyone who lied to the FBI should be prosecuted. “At the beginning of the Russia investigation I said that any allegations should be investigated; we couldn’t have known, for example, that people were lying to Christopher Steele,” he said.
“And let’s not forget what we learned in that investigation. We learned that the Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was giving internal polling data to Russian intelligence, while Russian intelligence was helping he campaign,” he added.
“But you may have helped spread Russian disinformation yourself for years by promoting this,” Ortagus argued. In case you haven’t paid attention to this, that’s not a crazy right-wing talking point. Even the NY Times has reported there has concern that material in the dossier could have been Russian disinformation. And we later learned from a declassified version of the Horowitz report that the FBI itself was concerned that the dossier was unreliable and could contain disinformation.
“I completely disagree with your premise,” Schiff replied. “It’s one thing to say allegations should be investigated and they were. It’s another to say that we should have forseen in advance that some people were lying to Christopher Steele, which is impossible for us to do.”
This is the same kind of answer he gave back in 2019 about the FISA applications:
Oh, I’m certainly willing to admit that the Inspector General found serious abuses of FISA that I was unaware of. 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. But yes, there were very serious abuses of the FISA process.
Adam Schiff is always shocked by other people’s bad behavior. He apparently walks through life as an innocent naif who just believes whatever he is told. Anyway, stay for the end of this exchange where Ortagus suggests his credibility is at question and he snaps back that her question’s credibility is the problem.
And then Sunny Hostin goes on to ask about unconfirmed reports about Jan. 6 which just shows that the left-leaning media has learned exactly nothing from the collapse of the Steele report.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member