A prank call by Russian deejays fished in Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., but a Republican challenging him for his House seat doesn't think the call, in which Schiff expressed eagerness to get "compromising material" on President Trump, is a laughing matter.
Jon Hollis, who is running for the Los Angeles-area seat held by Schiff since 2001, has filed an ethics complaint against his opponent based on the 2017 call, in which a phony Ukrainian politician claimed to have graphic photos of the then newly-inaugurated President Trump.
“This letter serves as an official complaint to the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) regarding Rep. Adam Schiff’s illegal collusion with foreign entities and misuse of taxpayer resources for opposition research on political enemies,” one complaint, dated Aug. 28 and filed by Jon Hollis, a Republican challenger for the seat in California’s 28th Congressional District, stated. “The evidence supporting Adam’s Schiff's violations of the law is compelling and irrefutable.”
The filing primarily points to that wincing 2017 call that continues to haunt.
At the time, Schiff assumed he was talking with Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy, who solicited potentially damaging information and compromising pictures of Trump from his visit to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant four years earlier.
Schiff stressed in the call that he would “be in touch with the FBI” to make arrangements with regard to accessing the supposedly explicit materials and cautioned the voice on the other end not to divulge anything he would not want “our Russian friends” to hear, warning that they were likely listening.
However, in reality, the then-ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee was conversing with someone far from the political powers of Kiev. Instead, he was being pranked by two Russian comedians — Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov. Schiff became chairman of the committee this year.
Read More...
GOP challenger files ethics complaint against Schiff for purporting to obtain compromising
Current News
The NeverTrumper Who Lectured America on the Rule of Law Is Taking a Plea Deal
John Bolton spent years telling you that Donald Trump was a threat to American institutions. That the rule of law mattered. That classified information was sacred and the men who mishandled it were unfit for public trust. Read more
From ‘Mother’ to ‘Gestating Parent’: A Civilization Loses Its Words and Then Itself
The Roman Republic did not collapse because its legions were defeated in the field. It eroded, gradually and almost imperceptibly, from within. Sallust, writing in the generation before the Republic’s final crisis, identified the mechanism with uncommon clarity: when a civilization abandons the virtues that built it, the language through which those virtues were expressed becomes the first casualty. Words grow contested. Then they are redefined. Then they are replaced. By the time a republic wakes to what has happened, the vocabulary of self-governance has already been emptied of its meaning. Read more
The Lie of Institutional Neutrality: What Pride Month Reveals About Who Controls the Cathedral
Alexis de Tocqueville, writing of democratic despotism in Democracy in America, described a system that would not tyrannize through violence but through the steady degradation of citizenship — a society in which an “immense and tutelary power” would keep citizens “in perpetual childhood,” covering the surface of society “with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” He envisioned an authority that would not break wills so much as soften them, not forbid but prevent, not punish but enfeeble. Read more
Marc Elias Went to Court to Kill the Fund That Would Pay Back His Victims. Senate Republicans Are Helping.
Marc Elias went to federal court to kill the fund that would pay back his victims. Senate Republicans are helping. Read more
They Called It a Peaceful Protest. A Reporter Had to Hide Her Network Logo to Stay Safe.
They called it a peaceful protest. Read more
Thucydides, Tehran, and the Temptation of a Quick Settlement
In the seventh year of the Peloponnesian War, Athens found itself holding a position of unexpected strength. Its navy was dominant, its treasury sufficient, its enemies fractured. Sparta, exhausted and humiliated by losses at Sphacteria, sent envoys seeking terms. The peace was theirs to dictate. Read more