NOT SO SWIFT SCHIFF

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), fell for a spoof by Russian pranksters who promised in a call with the top House Democrat to furnish him with “kompromat”–compromising dirt–on President Donald Trump.

Schiff found the early 2017 call with the Russian pranksters, who posed as Ukrainian leaders, “productive,” one of his staffers wrote in an email to the Russians-posing-as-Ukrainians with whom he was communicating. Now, after getting caught in the media by reports in the Atlantic magazine and the U.K. Daily Mail newspaper—as well as audio of the call appearing on YouTube—a Schiff spokesperson claims the powerful Democrat congressman thought the call was “bogus” from the beginning. But that’s not what the record shows.