California Sen. Adam Schiff is probably really wishing he’d smoked crack and filed knowingly false firearm background checks with Hunter Biden right now, I can imagine.
Hunter, you may recall, got a pardon for basically anything he’d done at the federal level going back to 2014 as his dad was on his way out of the Oval Office. That just so happened to be the year during which Hunter joined the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, which ended up planting the poison seed that grew into the noxious bush that ended with him getting convicted on one set of federal charges and pleading guilty to another. But, thanks to daddy’s pen, any sort of federal ruffianism he got into between then and the end of Biden’s presidency was on the house.
Schiff, it so happened, also got a pardon — but one of those weird, newfangled “preemptive pardons.” Effectively, figuring that the biggest levier of lawfare against former President Donald Trump would probably come under scrutiny now that he was again current President Donald Trump, Schiff was given immunity for his activities — but only as it related to the Democrats’ Jan. 6 kangaroo committee.
That’s important for two reasons. First, it appears Schiff either doesn’t understand real estate finance law or understands it all too well, because he listed two primary residences between 2003 and 2020, ostensibly to get better mortgage terms from banks. (Such arrangements are almost always verboten.)
And, you’ll never believe this, but John Solomon — one of the first guys to blow the whistle on Hunter’s strange Burisma adventures — has information that Schiff might also be in trouble for House Intelligence Committee shenanigans not related to the Jan. 6 committee, that happened about four years before that Jan. 6.
Whoops! If only he’d been combing through Hunter’s rugs trying to find a crumb of crack amidst all the Parmesan cheese before dropping a bricked MacBook off at a repair shop and forgetting about it entirely.
According to a report from Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy over at Just the News, FBI Director Kash Patel has declassified an FBI 302 interview — a memo that summarizes an interview with a source — with “[a] career intelligence officer who worked for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee for more than a decade repeatedly warned the FBI beginning in 2017 that then-Rep. Adam Schiff had approved leaking classified information to smear then-President Donald Trump over the now-debunked Russiagate scandal.”
The individual is said in the Monday report to be “a Democrat by party affiliation who described himself as a friend to both Schiff, now a California senator, and former Republican House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes,” who frequently clashed with Schiff over Russiagate.
Nunes ended up releasing his own memo, which Patel had a part in authoring and which was ridiculed when it was published in 2018 but turned out to be mostly correct — and far more correct than any of Schiff’s fictions.
Should Schiff be imprisoned for his crimes against the people of the United States?
The source, Just the News reported, said they “considered the classified leaking to be ‘unethical,’ ‘illegal,’ and ‘treasonous,’ but was told not to worry about it because Schiff believed he would be spared prosecution under the Constitution’s speech and debate clause.”
Just the News also noted the “staffer told the FBI that retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn — Trump’s first national security adviser — was to be a specific focus of the committee as part of a broader effort to target Trump. The whistleblower also specifically pointed to Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., as a likely source of classified leaks, the memos state.”
The whistleblower said that “a particular leak” in the summer of 2017 had caused him “to confront [the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] on the issue,” and that “a particularly sensitive document” was “viewed by a small contingent of staff, as well as SCHIFF and Representative ERIC SWALWELL … within 24 hours, the information appeared in the news almost verbatim.”
They “suspected that SWALWELL played a role in the leak and noted that SWALWELL previously had been warned to be careful because he had a reputation for leaking classified information.”
The source’s most recent interview with the FBI was in 2023, in which he said he recalled attending a meeting at which the plan was discussed.
“When working in this capacity, [redacted staffer’s name] was called to an all-staff meeting by SCHIFF,” the interview report read.
“In this meeting, SCHIFF stated the group would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States DONALD J. TRUMP. SCHIFF stated the information would be used to indict President TRUMP.”
The staffer, the report said, “was eventually informed that the issue would not be investigated further by the DOJ, as Congressmen have immunity to all speech and actions made on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. [Redacted staffer] did not believe that the activity he witnessed would be protected by this legal provision.”
Now, if everything in the 302 memos is true, as Bill Clinton might have put it, this kind of depends on what you mean by “leaking” leaked information — or rather, the manner in which it was done.
The key case in the whether the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution (“They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest … for any Speech or Debate in either House”) is Gravel v. United States, in which then-Democratic Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska effectively declassified the Pentagon Papers by having them read into the record of a Senate subcommittee meeting.
By a 5-4 ruling, the court said that a subpoena of one of Gravel’s aides was unconstitutional because Gravel’s action was protected under the Speech and Debate Clause and staffers served as “alter egos” of their superiors.
However, one assumes this staffer is familiar with Gravel v. United States, knows the protections afforded under it, and was willing to say that no, they did not believe this leaking fell under the aegis of it.
“For years, certain officials used their positions to selectively leak classified information to shape political narratives,” Patel told Just the News. “It was all done with one purpose: to weaponize intelligence and law enforcement for political gain.”
That being said, Just the News’ report acknowledged that the actions covered by the revelations “fall outside the statute of limitations for prosecution on most legal theories.” So did Donald Trump’s “campaign finance violations” in New York, and look how that went. I’ve said it before, and I’ll said it again: The Golden Rule of politics is “do unto others as they do unto you.” Once a Rubicon has been crossed, there is no uncrossing it — and if any legal theory exists to extend that statute of limitations, we’re now in an area where it’ll be done. This isn’t even mentioning his real estate woes, either.
And Schiff doesn’t have a preemptive pardon for it, either. Alas, if he’d only spent more time with Hunter.
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