House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) tipped his hand Wednesday, saying that he would use Tuesday’s testimony from intelligence chiefs to shoot down the rationale for a national emergency, should President Donald Trump try to use that card to fund a border wall.
“I will say this also that glaring absences that you talked about earlier—that none of the intel chiefs brought up a threat at the border as being one of the most pressing threats facing the country—that can be Exhibit A in a challenge of a national emergency,” Schiff said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “The fact that none of the intelligence agencies think it is an emergency, the fact that Congress on both parties don’t think this is an emergency…I think if anything it is going to undermine that legal case that the President may try to make, that hearing yesterday can be a central exhibit.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday with their annual assessment of global threats. The U.S.-Mexico border did not make the list.
Watch here:
Schiff suggests will use intel chiefs’ testimony if Trump tries national emergency card pic.twitter.com/XramYDqbk3
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) January 30, 2019
Head him off at the pass Adam!!! Spanky and his toadies are not going to be able to tolerate all these facts being thrown at him from every direction. They will get in the press and hopefully everyone with three digit IQs will finally understand what is going on with this administration.
Maddow aired a piece last night about the House Intel Committee being frozen in place due to GOPers failing to seat their members:
Speier sits on the House Intelligence Committee. While Republican leaders have appointed members to 23 other Congressional committees, they have not yet appointed their members to Intel, preventing the committee from meeting.
“If the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his Grand Jury do have an interest in looking at certified transcripts of the testimony of Donald Trump, Jr. or any other witnesses before the House Intelligence Committee, the special counsel’s office can only bring legal action on the basis of someone’s potentially false testimony if they have an official transcript of that,” she explained. “They can only get an official transcript of that testimony once the Intelligence Committee meets and votes to release that official transcript.”
Hope springs eternal, but I think this will never really happen. Our only real option is to make them irrelevant.
Heh. I guess it’s a “Do the facts of the matter matter?” matter. If the new Congress means they do matter at all often, Trump might as well trail off home and wait for his indictments. It wasn’t the airplanes, we’ll say. It was asking what the hell he was talking about that killed the beast. Or maybe it’s like “War of the Worlds,” where he can’t survive prolonged contact with reality.
Seem like the emergency Donald would claim to help build the wall would be more a huge surge of folks crossing the border. Granted that seems easily disprovable too.