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McCarthy Floats Removing Schiff From Congress Altogether After Durham Report

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) responded to special counsel John Durham’s report, in part, by suggesting one of the chamber’s most controversial Democratic members, former Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, be removed from the chamber.

In a 300-plus page report that became public on Monday following a four-year investigation, Durham cited the FBI and the Justice Department for launching a bogus investigation into the 2016 campaign of then-GOP nominee Donald Trump without justification. His report also noted that the campaign of Hillary Clinton was heavily involved in creating the false narrative that Trump’s campaign was “colluding” with Russia to interfere in the election.

“Durham revealed that, just weeks before the presidential election, former President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and the heads of the CIA, Justice Department, and FBI were all briefed on Clinton’s plan to smear Trump with the Russia Hoax in August 2016,” Slay News noted. “Despite knowing it was a hoax, those same top officials pursued and spread the false claims.”

Throughout Trump’s presidency, Schiff frequently touted the collusion claim — during congressional proceedings and on various cable news outlets — but Durham’s findings completely refuted it.

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“It raises the question about Adam Schiff,” McCarthy said on Tuesday. “Remember when Adam told the American public he had proof? Remember when he said he didn’t know the whistleblower?

“What he put America through when he openly lied to us,” McCarthy said. “It raises questions about his character and whether he should be in Congress.”

The report generated a great deal of criticism, mostly from Republicans and many of whom long suspected that Durham would find a hoax.

Still, the fact that the FBI and DOJ so willingly participated in it has brought new scrutiny.

“The Russia-collusion hoax was concocted and brought to life only because the most powerful people in the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community wanted an excuse to weaponize the federal government against Donald Trump,” explained The Federalist’s senior editor John Daniel Davidson. “They didn’t want him to be president, simple as that. It didn’t matter to them what voters wanted; they thought they knew better. So they felt any abuse of power was justified in preventing Trump from winning the White House.”

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Davidson continued, “It means, too, that it would be better if we had no FBI at all than the corrupt agency we have now, which sees fit to traffic in actual disinformation, spread conspiracy theories, and throttle the democratic process whenever a candidate comes along who threatens the status quo. That’s the real lesson of the Durham report, and we ignore it at our peril.”

“The big takeaway from the report is that the Obama-era FBI launched a full investigation of the Trump campaign, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, in the summer of 2016 despite having zero evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia.”

He noted further: “Not only that, but officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government, including President Obama, knew that the entire false narrative that Trump was colluding with Moscow was completely made up by the Clinton campaign in an effort to weaponize the federal government against Trump and distract from Hillary Clinton’s own email server scandal.”

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Davidson said Durham’s investigation confirmed that “in August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan briefed Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and other senior administration officials on what the report calls the ‘Clinton Plan intelligence,’ a scheme Clinton approved in July 2016 ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.’”

All of them knew the claims to be lies, and “all of them ignored this important fact,” he said.

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