What are the Democrats hiding about impeachment inquiry?
By Post Editorial Board
October 14, 2019 | 7:27pm | Updated
https://nypost.com/2019/10/14/what-are-the-democrats-hiding-about-impeachment-inquiry/
https://archive.is/9HgUd
America’s top two Trump-hating newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have now both called on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a vote of the full House of Representatives to make the “impeachment inquiry” truly official — and to set rules like those for the inquiries targeting Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, so that the minority party and the White House weren’t totally sidelined.
So far, though, Pelosi and her impeachment pointman, Rep. Adam Schiff, are moving the opposite way.
President Trump and other Republicans have been complaining about Schiff’s decision to hold most hearings behind closed doors, yet the Intelligence Committee chief opted for even greater secrecy in last Friday’s questioning of Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine — conducting it as a deposition, which makes it a criminal offense for either side to discuss her answers.
That keeps even the rest of the House in the dark about everything except the opening statement Yovanovitch made public.
Schiff is going to even greater lengths when it comes to the whistleblower whose complaint launched this whole … adventure. He might not even have the guy testify — which would remove any chance for anyone to probe his motives and biases.
This, when Schiff has admitted that, contrary to his earlier account, his staff was in touch with the whistleblower before he’d even begun to file his complaint.
And when the Washington Examiner has revealed that at least two Schiff staffers (one of them hired in the midst of the complaint filing) worked with the whistleblower at the White House back when he was advising the Obama point man on Ukraine, Veep Joe Biden.
As Politico reported in 2017, Ukrainian officials during the 2016 campaign “tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office … disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and … [and] helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.” What did the whistleblower, and Schiff’s staffers, know about all that — and why did no one blow any whistles then?
What are they trying to hide?
Schiff doesn’t want anyone to get the chance to ask.
Pelosi has a clear duty here: Go to the full House to pass rules so her impeachment inquiry can be more than an outright frame job.