Schiff earns a spot in the liars hall of fame?

Frank Miele:

You can take your pick for the most famous liars in history — people who are willing to say anything for the sake of gaining and keeping power — but surely Rep. Adam Schiff has earned a place on that list.

I won’t call Schiff a “congenital liar” — as Fox News personality Sean Hannity does nightly — but only because the term excuses Schiff of personal responsibility for his behavior. I don’t think it was his genes that made Schiff into a consummate liar but rather his narcissistic personality.

Watching Schiff spin his yarns as chief House manager for the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump reminds me of the great dissemblers of Shakespeare, such as “Honest Iago,” who is only comfortable in his own skin when he is making the skin of others crawl. The “motiveless malignity” that poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge ascribed to Iago is writ large in the perfunctory perfidy that Schiff practices with unassuming ease. He would destroy a king, but he assures us he takes no pleasure in it, wink-wink, nod-nod.

Perhaps I am giving Schiff too much credit. He might be more akin to Monsieur Parolles of “All’s Well That Ends Well,” the arrogant know-it-all whose own words come back to haunt him: “He will lie, sir, with such volubility, that you would think truth were a fool.”

That, of course, is the problem, because the senators hearing the impeachment trial might also be giving Schiff too much credit. If they are not familiar with the facts of the case, then they might lend credibility to the pompous utterances emanating from the well of the Senate by Schiff and the other House managers. Since the rules of the Senate allowed Schiff to make his argument for 24 uninterrupted hours, it gave him the opportunity to frame the case against President Trump in fully partisan and factually deficient terms. The only word that accurately describes what Schiff did to Trump in his presentation of the case is to say that he “framed” him. To use a legal term of art, Schiff argued “facts not in evidence,” and without anyone to object, the senators were left to assume that these facts were true when time and again they were false and misleading.

Start with Schiff opening his argument by quoting Alexander Hamilton on the dangers to the republic of unprincipled men, and you will begin to appreciate the Shakespearean scope of the irony at play last week. Schiff meant to castigate Trump, but the words are better directed at Schiff himself — for it is he who is “seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity.” It is he who has joined in the “cry of danger to liberty.” It is he who has taken “every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion.” It is he who has fallen in with “all the non sense of the zealots of the day.”

It is appropriate therefore to apply Hamilton’s warning against unprincipled men of bold temper to the chief House manager himself: “It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

We got plenty of sturm und drang as Schiff began to lay out the case against the president to an audience of virginal senators who were hearing only one side of the story for three straight days. The danger was laid out accurately by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, although as usual he missed the point:

“It may have been the first time that many of my Republican colleagues heard the full story, the complete narrative from start to finish, uninterrupted and not filtered through the kaleidoscope lens of Fox News where at best things are left out and at worst things are terribly distorted. It may have planted the first seed in their minds that, yes, perhaps the president did something very wrong here.”

Do you spot the logical fallacy in this statement? It is the key to the entire impeachment hoax. Schumer believes that Schiff delivered “the full story, the complete narrative” when, in fact, he just delivered the same argument we have heard since September. It cannot be the “full story” because at that time last week we had still not heard “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey used to say. Namely, we had not heard the president’s defense team make any rebuttal of the unchallenged assumptions of Schiff and the Democratic coup crew. It was in the House managers’ presentation, not Fox News, that we saw how “at best things [were] left out and at worst things [were] terribly distorted.”
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The Trump defense team has exposed Schiff's half-truths and lies and has devastated his case for impeachment.  It is too bad the networks tried to suppress the showing of the defense team.  They were brilliant and the Democrats know.  That is one of the reasons why they brought up the Bolten book leak to try to change the subject.  Whether the votes got to see the defense, the Senators did and it made a strong impression on them.  The media will be unable to hide the facts revealed from those making the decision.