'Totally Oblivious or in Denial': Schiff's Response to Being Kicked Off of Intel Committee Shows It Was the Right Move
He’s been kicked off the House Intelligence Committee, but Rep. Adam Schiff is still insulting America’s intelligence.
The California congressman, a leading, loathsome voice of the contemporary Democratic Party, took to social media on Wednesday to bemoan being booted from the committee he abused for years in his party’s political warfare against former President Donald Trump.
To do it, he used TikTok, a social media platform so suspected of being ridden with Chinese spyware that it’s been banned from use on official devices by multiple states, almost the entire U.S. military and even the federal government Schiff is part of. And the blowback was brutal.
In his video, Schiff claimed that he’d been banned from the intelligence committee he once chaired “for doing my job, for holding Trump accountable and standing up to the extreme MAGA Republicans.”
WATCH: Congressman Adam Schiff posts a TikTok video after being removed from the House Intelligence Committee pic.twitter.com/Dw4CjBwqxY
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) January 26, 2023
As anyone even slightly familiar with Schiff’s record of deception might assume, not a word of that was true.
As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made clear on Wednesday, Schiff and fellow California Democrat Eric Swalwell were removed from the committee because their presence in a sensitive position posed a particular hazard to the American people.
Schiff, McCarthy said, had used the prestige of the Intelligence Committee, and the presumption that it had access to knowledge unavailable to the public, to build a propaganda war against the Trump White House.
In 2019, he claimed there was evidence “in plain sight” that Trump had “colluded” with Russia to win the 2016 election when the Democrats’ own special counsel investigation found no such thing.
Schiff was also the point man for the first Trump impeachment over a cause so ludicrous it would probably take most Americans a few minutes to remember what it was about. (Hints: Ukraine, corruption, Joe Biden.)
In the process, Schiff used the Intelligence Committee as his personal Star Chamber to gather “evidence” to be used in Trump’s 2020 Senate impeachment trial and served as the lead prosecutor in that trial.
Schiff, in other words, richly deserved to be thrown off the committee — and possibly thrown in jail. But his use of TikTok, of all possible platforms, to complain about the supposed injustice of it all takes the cake.
TikTok is a social media platform owned by a company in China — the country that’s the greatest global rival to the United States in the world today.
(It’s also the homeland of Fang Fang, the suspected Chinese spy with whom Swalwell was entangled, but that’s another story).
The platform is widely suspected of being a vehicle for Chinese espionage — so widely suspected that it has been banned from downloading on most military devices since 2019, as The New York Times reported in January 2020.
It has been banned from official devices in at least 15 states because of its potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Yet this is the platform the man who wants to help lead the House Intelligence Committee chose to make his plea.
The blowback was brutal:
The ex-Intelligence Committee appointee goes on a Chinese asset to spew political propaganda about why he’s no longer on the Intelligence Committee.
What a pile of Schiff.
— Jack Lombardi II (@JackLombardi) January 26, 2023
Oh dear God. Of all the dumb dumb dumb things to say/ways to respond. He had to do this from TikTok?!? China is laughing at us, but what else is new.
— Rebecca Downs (@RebeccaRoseGold) January 26, 2023
The fact he’s on tiktok sort of defends the idea of taking him off a security committee.
— Bradley Laborman (@BradmanTV) January 26, 2023
One commenter wrote that Schiff was among American officials who “remain totally oblivious or in denial or apathetic about CCP threats to America.”
Adam Schiff’s continued use of a CCP tech weapon is a really useful moment actually. There are some elected officials who remain totally oblivious or in denial or simply apathetic about the CCP threats to Americans despite having the intel that shows precisely what they’re doing.
— Rebeccah Heinrichs (@RLHeinrichs) January 26, 2023
Now, Schiff is obviously a liar. Over and over, he’s demonstrated a singular lack of decency that would cause disgrace in a man or a political party that was capable of embarrassment.
He’s the kind of guy who should make all American conservatives glad he’s not on their side.
But he’s not stupid. And even if he were stupid, he would have no choice but to know the official view of TikTok as a data-stealing espionage threat, given that the budget President Joe Biden signed on Dec. 29 includes a provision that specifically prohibits TikTok use on federal phones, according to an NPR report from Dec. 30.
(The government has 60 days to come up with a framework for enforcing the ban, NPR reported. So if Schiff was using his government phone to record Wednesday’s video, he was on shaky ground, but running out of time.)
He clearly didn’t care and clearly relied on the blind partisan hatred he’s milked for years to carry him. Plus, for a politician of Schiff’s persuasion, reaching an audience with no real respect for the security of the United States is hitting a target-rich environment.
The TikTok angle wasn’t the only contemptible aspect of the video. Nor was it Schiff’s willingness to brazenly lie to his countrymen about his ouster from the Intelligence Committee.
He also ended the flagrantly dishonest statement with a flagrantly shameless plea for money:
“This is not the end of my fight for our democracy,” Schiff said. “This is just the beginning. Please join us and contribute today.”
Any halfway sensible person who’s followed the news for the past few years knows that Schiff’s fight isn’t for “democracy” — it’s for the Democratic Party, and for power for men like himself. The fact that Schiff on Thursday officially announced his bid for the Senate seat now held by the doddering Dianne Feinstein just goes to prove the point.
Even liberals watching Schiff lie, tamper with evidence and fabricate quotations have to understand that the man is a snake who just happens to be on their side. His presence on Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked committee to “investigate” the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion proves that.
Schiff no doubt understands that. But he’s also betting that his flagrant dishonesty is going to be disregarded by liberals who care about nothing but power.
He’ll lie straight to the eyes of voters. He’ll use a technology to do it that’s so compromised the federal government, the United States military and numerous state governments have banned its use on their devices.
Schiff’s career is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. It’s an insult to the concept of honest governance. It’s an insult to the idea of honesty itself. And he’s betting he’s going to not just get away with it, but get even more powerful.
The hell of it is, he’s a Democrat doing this in California. He might just be right.
But he doesn’t have to be allowed on the Intelligence Committee to do it.
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