Adam Schiff Lays Out His Colleagues' Plan to Oust Robert Mueller
By Jeremy Stahl at Slate
http://amp.slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/adam-schiff-lays-out-his-colleagues-plan-to-oust-robert-mueller.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_ru&__twitter_impression=true
"SNIP.......
Jeremy Stahl: Did you read the Politico report “Trump’s Russia Strategy: Bash Mueller to Beat Impeachment?”
Adam Schiff: No, I haven’t read that. Just judging from the headline, I’m not at all surprised if that’s the White House strategy. And they have plenty of allies in Congress that are helping them in that strategy. From the very beginning of our investigation, they decided that the best way to protect the president was by putting the government on trial. It’s a tactic I saw when I was a prosecutor. If the evidence is increasingly incriminating to the defendant, you put the government on trial.
So they began with a conspiracy theory about unmasking, that was part of the Chairman [Devin Nunes]’ midnight run. When that didn’t pan out, then they turned to [an alleged] conspiracy within the FBI involving Carter Page, and when that didn’t pan out they turned to the next phase, which is attacking the initiation of the investigation. Right now, they’re in the process of picking an endless series of fights with Rod Rosenstein, in the hope that if they can keep asking for things until they get to something Rod Rosenstein can’t turn over to the Congress, because it would interfere with the investigation, then it would give the president a pretext to fire him and replace him with someone pliable who will do the president’s will. The president is tweeting his attacks on Mueller, and I think it’s a two-pronged strategy: One that tries to lay the predicate to fire Mueller’s boss as a way of putting someone in who can kneecap the investigation privately outside of the public view by telling Mueller, “You can’t look into certain things.” But if all else fails, then so discrediting the investigators that no matter what they produce, they can cast doubt on it.
You’re basically saying that your colleagues are hoping to force Rosenstein’s hand to either give away evidence that will interfere with the investigation and make public that evidence, or refuse them in a way that would lead them to claim that Rosenstein should be impeached.
Without a question. Most recently they asked for the Comey memos, and they were quite indignant in not getting the Comey memos. What they didn’t reveal, of course, is that we had already had access to the Comey memos. I had already read the Comey memos, and the chairman already had the opportunity to read the memos. Now, whether he took the opportunity or not—the chairman seems to ask for a lot of things and demand them and then not read them—but we already had access, so we knew that the Comey memos were completely consistent with the director and what he was saying in his testimony.
........SNIP"
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