Elise Stefanik just busted Adam Schiff for playing games with impeachment and he should be really ashamed of himself. Adam Schiff appears to have mischaracterized a text message exchange between two players in the Ukraine scandal.
Stefanik quickly hammered Adam: “Schiff’s sham impeachment is littered with mischaracterizations, falsehoods, & political desperation.”
“The more Schiff speaks to the American people, the more the support for impeachment is obliterated in the court of public opinion,” she added.
Politico reported that the issue arose when Schiff sent a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler last week summarizing a trove of evidence from Lev Parnas, an indicted former associate of President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. In one section of the letter, Adam Schiff claims that Parnas “continued to try to arrange a meeting with President Zelensky,” citing a specific text message exchange where Parnas tells Giuliani: “trying to get us mr Z.” The remainder of the exchange — which was attached to Schiff’s letter — was redacted.
But an un-redacted version of the exchange shows that few days later, Parnas sent Giuliani a word document that appears to show notes from an interview with Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma, followed by a text message to Giuliani that states: “mr Z answers my brother.” That suggests Parnas was referring to Zlochevsky not Zelensky.
The document contains a series of questions and answers, but does not identify who is doing the asking or answering. Yet the questions center on the hiring practices at Burisma, while the responses include statements such as “we wanted to build Burisma as [an] international company” and “we also thought it would help in Ukraine to have strong international board figures,” which seems to point to Zlochevsky — not the Ukrainian president — as the respondent…
…“The most charitable view of the situation is that Schiff’s staff committed the equivalent of Congressional malpractice by not looking more than an inch deep to determine the facts before foisting this erroneous information on his colleagues and the American public,” one senior GOP aide told Politico.
“But given the selective redactions and contextual clues, it seems as though Chairman Schiff sought to portray an innocuous meeting with Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky as an insidious one with the President of Ukraine simply because both of their surnames start with the letter Z.”
