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Dem House Intelligence Chair Signals He's Going To Milk Mueller Investigation for All It's Worth

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The Mueller investigation is finally in the hands of Attorney General William Barr. We don’t know what it says yet, but what we do know is that there are no more indictments coming.

That’s not going to stop Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democrat chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, from milking the Mueller report for all it’s worth — whatever it may say.

In fact, Robert Mueller could be dragged before the House Intelligence Committee, according to Fox News.

“If necessary, we will call Bob Mueller or others before our committee, I would imagine the Judiciary Committee may call the attorney general if necessary,” the California Democrat said during a CNN interview.

“At the end of the day, the department is under a statutory obligation to provide our committee with any information regarding significant intelligence activities, including counterintelligence. And it’s hard to imagine anything more significant than what Bob Mueller has been investigating,” he said.

“We have a right to be informed, and we will demand to be informed about it.”

Of course, Schiff will be informed. He’s part of the so-called “gang of eight” — the eight congressmen who receive sensitive intelligence information — the two party leaders in the House and Senate, plus the ranking members of the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

When he was asked if it was enough if “the most sensitive information” was only shared with the gang of eight, however, Schiff was adamant that wouldn’t be adequate.

“No, it would not suffice,” he said.

“Now, there may be a select sub-section of information they feel they can only share because of the very sensitive sources which derived the information, but (t)he volumes of information that has been found needs to be shared with the whole committee so we can evaluate what steps have to be taken to protect the country.”

“We’re going to need to have the same sort of discovery that we saw during the last Congress, and indeed it may be far more extensive than that, to make sure that U.S. policy is driven by U.S. interest and not because the president or anyone around him is looking to make money from the Kremlin on a tower or anything else.”

And not only that, despite the fact that the Mueller investigation will yield no more indictments, Schiff told MSNBC it’s “entirely possible, if not likely, that there will be” more of them.

“Well, what it means is that the office of the special counsel, which is essentially a contract attorney to the Justice Department, that that office won’t be bringing any further indictments,” Schiff said.

“It doesn’t mean, of course, that main justice or the Seventh District of New York and the Eastern District or others may not bring indictments,” he continued.

“In fact, given the lengthy redactions in many of the pleadings of the special counsel eluding to other investigations, I think it’s entirely possible if not likely that there will be other indictments.”

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Do you think Adam Schiff is going too far?

And then came the funniest line of the interview, if you’ve paid attention to the Mueller investigation and its satellites in New York and the Eastern District: “Now, how central or peripheral they’ll be to the core issues of potential conspiracy is yet to be determined.”

“(T)he core issues of potential conspiracy” with the Russians — the raison d’être of the Mueller investigation, you may recall — have almost certainly been addressed and the fact that there are no more indictments coming from the special counsel’s office indicates that they don’t exist. But hey, why not drag Mueller in front of the committee? Why not drag this whole thing out as long as possible?

After all, it’s not like we haven’t spent considerable time and money on this investigation to begin with.

When conservatives talk about the Russia investigation being a witch hunt, this is what they mean. It’s not even about Russia anymore, but that doesn’t matter to Adam Schiff. He knows a good thing when he sees one.

This is nothing more than obfuscation, folks. Odds are that Mueller doesn’t have anything linking the Trump campaign to the Russians, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to make as much out of this as they possibly can.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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