Adam Schiff Has Submitted His Recommendation on Whether to Impeach President Trump

UPDATE: The White House has issued a response through Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham. 

“At the end of a one-sided sham process, Chairman Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump. This report reflects nothing more than their frustrations. Chairman Schiff’s report reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing.”

***Original post*** 

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has released a report summarizing two weeks of impeachment inquiry hearings and months of investigation into President Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“This report reflects the evidence gathered thus far by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in coordination with the Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Committee on Foreign Affairs, as part of the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States,” Schiff released in a statement attached to the report.

“The decision to move forward with an impeachment inquiry is not one we took lightly.  Under the best of circumstances, impeachment is a wrenching process for the nation. I resisted calls to undertake an impeachment investigation for many months on that basis, notwithstanding the existence of presidential misconduct that I believed to be deeply unethical and damaging to our democracy.  The alarming events and actions detailed in this report, however, left us with no choice but to proceed,” he said.

Schiff calls the report “evidence,” but hours of testimony about “presumed,” “I heard,” “I felt,” etc. don’t hold up to that claim. The report is essentially 72 hours of testimony repackaged by Schiff and his staff to justify impeachment.

“As this report details, the impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection.  In furtherance of this scheme, President Trump conditioned official acts on a public announcement by the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, of politically-motivated investigations, including one into President Trump’s domestic political opponent,” Schiff continued. “In pressuring President Zelensky to carry out his demand, President Trump withheld a White House meeting desperately sought by the Ukrainian President, and critical U.S. military assistance to fight Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine.”

As a reminder, Volodymyr has repeatedly stated he felt no pressure from President Trump to launch any kind of investigation into anyone, including the Bidens.

Schiff has promised to continue his own investigations, despite handing the report over to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler.

“There remain unanswered questions, and our investigation must continue, even as we transmit our report to the Judiciary Committee.  Given the proximate threat of further presidential attempts to solicit foreign interference in our next election, we cannot wait to make a referral until our efforts to obtain additional testimony and documents wind their way through the courts,” Schiff said. “The evidence of the President’s misconduct is overwhelming, and so too is the evidence of his obstruction of Congress.  Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a stronger or more complete case of an obstruction than that demonstrated by the President since the inquiry began.”

Schiff’s language about obstruction indicates the Judiciary Committee will draw up articles of impeachment on that issue.

The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is not the organic outgrowth of serious misconduct; it is an orchestrated campaign to upend our political system. The Democrats are trying to impeach a duly elected President based on the accusations and assumptions of unelected bureaucrats who disagreed with President Trump’s policy initiatives and processes. They are trying to impeach President Trump because some unelected bureaucrats were discomforted by an elected President’s telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. They are trying to impeach President Trump because some unelected bureaucrats chafed at an elected President’s “outside the beltway” approach to diplomacy.

The sum and substance of the Democrats’ case for impeachment is that President Trump abused his authority to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, President Trump’s potential political rival, for President Trump’s benefit in the 2020 election. Democrats say this pressure campaign encompassed leveraging a White House meeting and the release of U.S. security assistance to force the Ukrainian President to succumb to President Trump’s political wishes. Democrats say that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal attorney, and a “shadow” group of U.S. officials conspired to benefit the President politically.

The evidence presented does not prove any of these Democrat allegations, and none of the Democrats’ witnesses testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor.

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – Someone died.

His name was Phillip Lee Terry. He was killed in a forklift accident at Amazon’s Plainfield warehouse in September 2017.

Terry was 59 when he died. He left behind a grieving wife, son, two grandchildren, father and sister. He was an avid swimmer and a devoted Auburn football fan.

His death ought to be at the center of the dispute dividing Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, The Indianapolis Star and Reveal for the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel like that’s the case.

Holcomb is upset with Reveal and the Star for publishing a lengthy story that says, among other things, says the governor and the state tried to cover up details surrounding Terry’s death in order to minimize or eliminate any responsibility for the accident on Amazon’s part. The company initially was fined in the tragedy, but a later decision overturned the fine.

Holcomb and other state officials did so, the story goes, as part of a campaign to secure a second Amazon headquarters, which would have brought many jobs and much money to Indiana.

Holcomb objected to the story.

On the day after Thanksgiving, he had his general counsel, Joe Heerens, send cease-and-desist letters to Reveal and the Star demanding a retraction and an apology to Holcomb.

Heerens’ letter to Reveal focused its attention on undermining the credibility of one of the piece’s main sources, a former Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspector named John Stallone.

Heerens asserts that Stallone fabricated a meeting with Holcomb and Indiana Labor Commissioner Rick Ruble in which the governor and the commissioner told Stallone to resign if he wasn’t willing to go easy on Amazon.

Heerens also says Stallone didn’t resign from his IOSHA job but instead was fired for poor performance. And the governor’s counsel maintains that Stallone was wrong about the number of safety violation citations – the state says four, Stallone says eight – the inspector wanted to report.

Heeren’s argues that Reveal and the Star easily could have ascertained these facts.

That’s a matter of some contention, given that the governor and state officials refused to be interviewed for the stories. Instead, they issued blanket denials.

And that undercuts their credibility because Stallone apparently recorded a conversation in which the head of IOSHA counseled Amazon officials on how to evade any responsibility for Terry’s death.

The story and the dispute have prompted demands from Democratic state legislators and candidates for governor that an independent investigation is conducted into Terry’s death.

Indiana’s chattering class has dismissed these calls as a political stunt – just more Democrat-and-Republican fun ‘n’ games as the state heads into another election cycle.

Doubtless, Democrats do have partisan motives.

But that doesn’t mean the idea of doing an independent investigation isn’t a good one.

It’s clear that there are real and important issues in dispute here.

If Reveal and – by publishing the story – the Star made errors of fact, those should be corrected immediately. Any journalist’s first and foremost duty is to the truth.

But, if anyone in the state government attempted to cover up anything related to Terry’s death, the people of this state should know about it.

And Holcomb’s should be the loudest voice demanding that they do know about it.

Because, just as journalists have a duty, so does he.

That duty isn’t, as his general counsel’s letter to the Star implies, to protect his reputation or the reputations of state employees. Nor is it simply to preserve the state’s “positive business climate.”

Eric Holcomb isn’t just the governor for the business community. Nor is he just the governor for Republicans or hardworking state employees.

He is – or at least he should be – every Hoosier’s governor.

He was Phillip Lee Terry’s governor, too.

That ought to mean something.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is the director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.