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When you’ve lost the Washington Post…

As Tammy writes in her latest Washington Times column, The case of the so-called Ukraine whistleblower scandal:

….These dramas are birthed by an establishment deciding it’s too dangerous to have Donald Trump be in charge of all their secrets, believing the ends of removing him justifies the means. In other words, they are going to have to burn down the village in order to save it.

We aren’t going to let that happen.

Via Daily Caller.

The Washington Post gave House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff four pinocchios over his claim that neither he nor his staff had spoken to the whistleblower before he filed his complaint regarding a phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Schiff told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to.”….

“This is flat-out false,” The Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote of Schiff’s claims on MSNBC. “Unlike the quick two-step dance he performed with Anderson Cooper, Schiff simply says the committee had not spoken to the whistleblower. Now we know that’s not true.”

Kessler wrote that Schiff was not simply attempting to dodge a question, but to mislead the American public.

“There’s nothing wrong with dodging a question, as long as you don’t try to mislead,” he wrote. “But Schiff on ‘Morning Joe’ clearly made a statement that was false.”

“He compounded his falsehood by telling reporters a few days later that if not for the IG’s office, the committee would not have known about the complaint,” Kessler continued. “That again suggested there had been no prior communication.”….

And Kimberley Strassel’s WSJ column on the duplicitous Schiff’s Shifty Timeline

If the latest impeachment push continues to backfire, Democrats can thank their duplicitous House Intelligence chairman, Adam Schiff.

The New York Times reported this week that the “whistleblower” who set off the latest inquisition provided an “early warning” to Mr. Schiff’s committee that he or she was filing a complaint over Donald Trump’s July 25 call to Ukraine’s president. The media is now at pains to stress that whistleblowers do sometimes reach out to Congress, that all “procedures” were followed, and that what really matters is the accusation that Mr. Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

Actually, it matters a great deal that Mr. Schiff knew about this early and withheld it deliberately from both the public and his House colleagues. He used his advance information to lay the groundwork steadily for later exploitation of the issue. He went so far as to charge the White House with a coverup—of a complaint he already knew about. The timeline of this orchestrated campaign is another knock to the legitimacy of the so-called impeachment inquiry. If the public can’t trust Mr. Schiff to be honest about the origins of his information, why should they trust his claim that the information itself is serious?

Mr. Schiff on Sept. 13, a Friday night, issued the explosive news that he had been alerted a few days earlier by the intelligence community’s inspector general of an “urgent” yet unspecified whistleblower complaint. But the complaint is dated Aug. 12, and news reports now say the whistleblower interacted with Mr. Schiff’s staff prior to then. So Mr. Schiff knew about the topic of the complaint for more than a month—while the public did not. It is now clear why the intelligence chairman in that month suddenly developed an interest in all things Ukrainian, and began aggressively previewing his impeachment mantra….

If all this has a somewhat familiar feel of subterfuge and ambush, it should. The episode is redolent of the sneak attack on Brett Kavanaugh. An unknown person levels nasty allegations; a Democratic lawmaker (in that case, Sen. Dianne Feinstein) conceals the claim before springing it at an opportune moment; the media jumps on board to distort and inflame the story. Lost in the carnage are little things like fairness, standards and due process….

….The Democratic claim that Mr. Trump’s Ukraine call rose to the level of impeachment was always absurd. But Americans have even more reason to doubt the legitimacy of this push in light of Mr. Schiff’s scheming exploitation of the whistleblower charge.