OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Americans who believe that the Democrat-led House Select Committee on Jan. 6 is just the latest partisan effort to jam up former President Donald Trump and his supporters got new justification for their concerns on Wednesday.
Specifically, the committee has admitted to doctoring a text between Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, and then-Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, as The Federalist initially reported.
The outlet noted:
Following reporting by The Federalist that Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and his staff doctored a text message between Rep. Jim Jordan and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the House Jan. 6 committee admitted over email that it did, in fact, doctor the text message.
As The Federalist reported on Wednesday morning, on Jan. 5, 2021, Jordan forwarded to Meadows a three-paragraph legal summary from attorney Joseph Schmitz, summarizing a four-page legal memorandum Schmitz had written regarding congressional certification of the 2020 presidential electoral vote count.
In an emailed statement to the outlet, a Democrat spokesman for the Jan. 6 committee admitted that, yes, the committee doctored the text message.
“The Select Committee on Monday created and provided Representative Schiff a graphic to use during the business meeting quoting from a text message from ‘a lawmaker’ to Mr. Meadows,” the spokesman wrote. “The graphic read, ‘On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’”
“In the graphic, the period at the end of that sentence was added inadvertently,” the spokesman acknowledged. “The Select Committee is responsible for and regrets the error.”
The spokesman didn’t go into details about how it was possible to “inadvertently” cut a sentence in half then go on to eliminate the last two paragraphs of a detailed legal summary. Also, the spokesman did not “explain why Schiff attributed the content of the text to Jordan, ‘a lawmaker,’ rather than to Schmitz, the attorney who wrote it,” The Federalist continued.
The outlet provided details on its previous report:
As The Federalist reported on Wednesday morning, the original Jan. 5 text to Jordan was written by Washington attorney and former Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz and included an attachment of a four-page draft Word document drafted by Schmitz that detailed Schmitz’s legal reasoning for suggesting that Pence had the constitutional authority to object to the certification of electoral votes submitted by a handful of states. The piece that Schmitz had sent to Jordan was published at the website everylegal.vote the next morning and even included the same “DISCUSSION DRAFT” heading and timestamp as the document that Schmitz sent to Jordan.
In his statement, Schiff erased the final two paragraphs and the final clause of the first paragraph of the text message before inserting punctuation that was never there, all without disclosing what he was doing. The graphic displayed by Schiff, which was doctored to look like an exact screenshot, was similarly doctored, as it contained content that was never in the original message and eliminated content that was.
“Good luck tomorrow!” Schmitz noted in a text to Jordan on the evening of Jan. 5, adding the Word document as an attachment.
The outlet then said that Schmitz texted Jordan a three-paragraph summary of the Word document — the one that Schiff “sliced and diced then attributed to Jordan.”
Several GOP lawmakers The Federalist contacted for comment on the admission blasted Schiff for his deceit while noting that anyone who knows Jordan knows that he does not sent out lengthy text messages.
“That’s just not Jim’s style,” one lawmaker close to the Ohio Republican told The Federalist. “Long, nerdy paragraphs might be my style, but that’s not Jim’s style at all.”
“Plus, you have to remember what was going on at that time,” the lawmaker noted. “People were sending around these law review articles and debates left and right because we had an interest in learning the facts and getting them right. And if it’s somehow seditious in this country to debate or share a law review article on Alexander Hamilton’s view on things, that’s not really a country I want to be a part of anymore.”
