Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff told the Senate Wednesday that it is wrong for a president to investigate a political rival after swiftly defending former president Barack Obama for doing just that to Donald Trump.
The bizarre remark came during the first of two days of questions and answers in President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.
Breitbart.com reports: Schiff was responding to a query posed by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), asking a hypothetical question about whether Obama would have had the authority to investigate suspected corruption by a son of Mitt Romney, Obama’s rival in his 2012 re-election campaign.
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The lead House manager dismissed the hypothetical, then went on to argue that a president should not ask the DOJ to investigate a rival.
But as Breitbart News noted last week, Schiff wrote in the Washington Post in April 2019 (emphasis added):
Counterintelligence investigations differ from criminal investigations in their means, scope and ultimate disposition. Their goal is not successful prosecutions, but to identify and mitigate threats to national security. If a foreign power possessed compromising information on a U.S. government official in a position of influence, that is a counterintelligence risk. If a foreign power possessed leverage, or the perception of it, over the president, that is a counterintelligence nightmare.
Later on, White House attorney Jay Sekulow noted that Trump had been a victim of exactly the kind of investigation that the Obama administration had initiated under Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
Schiff is on record backing that investigation, as above.
