About those phone records (4)

I would like to continue this series until we have an authoritative account of the facts. Whose telephone records did Adam Schiff subpoena and how did he identify the phone numbers included in the endnotes of the Schiff impeachment report? It is impossible to imagine the outcry we would be hearing about all this if the action had been taken by Ranking Intelligence Committee Member Devin Nunes when he served as Chairman in terms past. As it is, the sound of crickets pervades the scene with a few rare exceptions among conservative outlets.

At the American Spectator, former Nixon Watergate defense counsel Geoff Shepard asserts that “Adam Schiff has jumped the shark.” His column lends some historical perspective to the what Schiff has done, though it is slightly handicapped by the deficient factual record.

NR’s David Harsanyi has been on this story from the beginning last week. Based on what we know from the Schiff report itself, Harsanyi observes in the New York Post “Democrats have embraced the exact surveillance tactics they used to warn about.” And, as Harsanyi argues, committed the abuses they have previously decried. It reminds me of the title of Nicholas von Hoffman’s 1968 book about the hippies: We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against.

Nunes himself has a good handle on what is happening here. He explained yesterday in a brief interview on FOX News (video below). He noted that his records don’t match up with the logs that appear in Schiff’s endnotes. As for what Schiff has done, Nunes reported: “We’re sitting on 3500 pages of metadata…” Referring to the information extracted by Schiff from the metadata, Nunes elaborated: “They have the phone records of many journalists. They have the phone records of many members of Congress…So there’s a lot at stake here.” He intends to pursue legal recourse of some kind.

The unexcitable foreign affairs columnist Eli Lake comments in the tweets below.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses