Adam Schiff's screw up--He 'opened the door' to discussion of Biden corruption

Andrew McCarthy:

You opened the door.

Trial lawyers live in fear of that phrase.

When a trial starts, both sides know what the allegations are. Both have had enough discovery to know what the adversary will try to prove. Just as significantly, both know what their own vulnerabilities are. A litigator spends his pretrial time not just laying the groundwork for getting his own evidence admitted by the court; each side works just as hard on motions to exclude embarrassing or incriminating testimony — evidence that would be damaging to that side’s position but that a court may be persuaded to exclude because it is not clearly relevant.

For an advocate, it is a coup when the judge rules that harmful testimony is excluded. But such rulings always come with a warning label: Don’t open the door. That is, don’t do anything that makes the otherwise irrelevant evidence relevant.

President Trump’s impeachment trial has a Biden door. Adam Schiff has thrown it wide open.
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Yet, though he now tells anyone who’ll listen that the Bidens have nothing to do with his case against President Trump, it is Schiff who has made them highly relevant.

The House Democrats tell you that their case is straightforward: The president exploited his foreign-affairs power by pressuring Ukraine to conduct an investigation for no reason other than that it would harm a political rival and thus help Trump’s reelection. On this account, it makes no difference whether there was a legitimate basis for such an investigation. Schiff’s point is that any presidential collusion with a foreign power that could influence the outcome of an American election is an abuse of power, period.

But Schiff is smart enough to know that all abuses of power are not created equal. Common sense says it matters whether there was a legitimate reason for the investigation the president was seeking.

It is fair enough to tut-tut that a president should not conflate foreign policy and domestic politics (something all of them do to some degree). And it would certainly be prudent (even if not constitutionally required) for presidents to leave questions about who should be investigated to the Justice Department, especially when a president’s political fortunes may be implicated. All that said, though, it makes a difference whether this president is asking the foreign power to manufacture a case against a political opponent, or whether the president is instead asking for an investigation into something that truly appears suspicious.

Schiff has ignored that salient distinction from the start. And by ignoring the difference, he has — however heedlessly — painted a bull’s-eye on the Bidens. The father and son were front and center within the first ten minutes of Schiff’s opening statement at the impeachment trial Wednesday afternoon. But that was old news. Schiff kicked the door open at the start of the very first House hearing. Not content to quote from President Trump’s actual call with President Zelensky of Ukraine, Schiff insisted on presenting a “parody” that, he maintained, conveyed the unspoken essence of Trump’s message: “I want you make up dirt on my political opponent, understand? Lots of it.”

In sum, the House’s chief prosecutor represented to the American people that President Trump had asked his Ukrainian counterpart to fabricate a false case against Biden. In any court in America, that would open the door to the Trump defense team to show that this was not the president’s intention at all; he was simply asking Zelensky to look into a situation that cried out for an inquiry.

In light of Schiff’s explicit allegation, the president is entitled to an opportunity to show that there was reason for him to believe that a notoriously corrupt Ukrainian energy company had retained Hunter Biden and paid him a fortune despite his lack of qualifications; and that later, despite the blatant conflict of interest, then–vice president Biden extorted Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, threatening to withhold $1 billion in desperately needed funds.
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I am not sure that Schiff is all that smart.  He is deceitful and willing to push his theories without evidence such as his clinging to the Russian collusion hoax long after it was debunked by Muller.  He, in fact, took a phone call and manufactured an impeachment on a bugs response to it.  It is typical of the bad faith in which the Democrats have responded to Trump since his election.