OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
After California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff promised that he had evidence of Russian collusion with the campaign of former President Donald Trump since close to the start of his administration there is now a call to remove him from the House of Representatives.
On Wednesday Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna introduced a measure to remove Schiff from the House because, she said, “he lied to us” and “cost taxpayers millions of dollars.”
“Knowingly using your position on House Intel to push a lie that ripped apart our country, cost taxpayers millions of dollars, and authorized spying on a US President and then proceeding to double down on the lie within days of the Durham report coming out makes you unfit for office. Ethics should investigate,” she said on Twitter.
Schiff lied to the American people. He used his position on House Intel to push a lie that cost American taxpayers millions of dollars.
He is a dishonor to the House of Representatives. pic.twitter.com/mg1005S8B6
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) May 17, 2023
Schiff has a long history of claiming that there was “direct evidence” that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, but that evidence has never been produced, The New York Post reported.
“I can certainly say with confidence that there is significant evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia,” he said on March 13, 2018.
A year later on the CBS show “Face The Nation he said, “I think there is direct evidence in the e-mails from the Russians through their intermediary offering dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of what is described in writing as the Russian government effort to help elect Donald Trump.”
And when the Durham report was released this week and said that the investigation should have never been started Rep. Schiff said that it was “flawed.”
“This was an investigation that started in a flawed manner, it was conducted in a flawed manner, and its conclusion is a flawed conclusion,” he said Tuesday on MSNBC.
And it is not simply one lone Republican Congresswoman who wants Schiff removed. Speaker of the House and California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy has entertained the idea.
“It raises the question about Adam Schiff,” McCarthy said on Tuesday. “Remember when Adam told the American public he had proof? Remember when he said he didn’t know the whistleblower?
“What he put America through when he openly lied to us,” McCarthy said. “It raises questions about his character and whether he should be in Congress.”
Still, the fact that the FBI and DOJ so willingly participated in it has brought new scrutiny.
“The Russia-collusion hoax was concocted and brought to life only because the most powerful people in the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community wanted an excuse to weaponize the federal government against Donald Trump,” explained The Federalist’s senior editor John Daniel Davidson. “They didn’t want him to be president, simple as that. It didn’t matter to them what voters wanted; they thought they knew better. So they felt any abuse of power was justified in preventing Trump from winning the White House.”
Davidson continued, “It means, too, that it would be better if we had no FBI at all than the corrupt agency we have now, which sees fit to traffic in actual disinformation, spread conspiracy theories, and throttle the democratic process whenever a candidate comes along who threatens the status quo. That’s the real lesson of the Durham report, and we ignore it at our peril.”
“The big takeaway from the report is that the Obama-era FBI launched a full investigation of the Trump campaign, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, in the summer of 2016 despite having zero evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia.”
He noted further: “Not only that, but officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government, including President Obama, knew that the entire false narrative that Trump was colluding with Moscow was completely made up by the Clinton campaign in an effort to weaponize the federal government against Trump and distract from Hillary Clinton’s own email server scandal.”
