About those phone records (3)

I scoured the House Intelligence Committee impeachment report prepared under the supervision of the lying lout Adam Schiff in an effort to deduce whose phone records he obtained and how he obtained them. The report itself is silent on the subject. I inferred that Schiff certainly obtained the telephone records of Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas. In part 2 of this series I cited reports that Schiff obtained records on a total of five phone numbers from AT&T and Verizon and added that all the published information was derived from the records of these five numbers.

As of this morning, it remains unclear if anyone else’s records were obtained and how the records were obtained. Equally mysterious is how other parties to the calls were identified in the call logs produced in the report’s endnotes. The White House has let it be known that Schiff has the wrong OMB number. The fake news media won’t be troubled to get answers from Schiff; he is an ally and most favored source whose reputation must be protected at all costs.

Ranking Intelligence Committee Member Devin Nunes turns up in the call logs recorded in the report. On FOX News last night Nunes stated that his number along with that of a current staffer as well as that of former staffer Kash Patel (now on the staff of the National Security Council) are included among “thousands of pages of [phone] metadata” that Schiff has obtained.

What is happening here? Margot Cleveland considers the Nunes angle in the Federalist column “Why Devin Nunes’s Phone Logs Aren’t A Smoking Gun.” Readers of Lee Smith’s new book will understand without need for elaboration that Nunes is an obvious target of Schiff’s shenanigans. It is sickening.

I would dearly love to get the facts straight before expressing opinions on Schiff’s conduct. That is my preferred modus operandi. So far as I can tell, only conservative journalists have lifted a finger to get the facts straight or express concerns. Kim Strassel takes up the story in her weekly Wall Street Journal column “Adam Schiff is watching.” So does David Harsanyi in the NR column “Adam Schiff’s Attack on the Free Press.”

Both of these columns struggle with the undeveloped facts. Strassel, for example, refers vaguely to the “subpoena [of] the phone records of Rudy Giuliani and others.” Harsanyi similarly notes “the revelation that Giuliani and his Ukrainian affiliate Lev Parnas, whom Schiff apparently subpoenaed, had exchanged calls with former The Hill columnist John Solomon, ranking Intelligence Republican Devin Nunes, and attorney Jay Sekulow.”

Strassel reports that Schiff subpoenaed both Giuliani and AT&T for Giuliani’s records. She raises serious legal issues about the subpoena issued to AT&T, which appears to have complied with it. For example, she quotes former Attorney General Michael Mukasey: “There does not appear to be any basis to believe that a congressional committee is authorized to subpoena telephone records directly from a provider—as opposed to an individual[.]”

This story has not come to rest. We need to an adequate account of the facts. Despite the silence of the mainstream media, it is, as Drudge used to put it, impacting.

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