[…] In articles for RealClearlnvestigations, I outed Schiff’s anonymous “whistleblower” from the first impeachment of President Trump. It was Eric Ciaramella, a Democrat who had worked in the Trump White House as an Obama holdover. I also exposed Ciaramella’s prior relationship with Sean Misko, one of Schiff’s top staffers on the impeachment committee.

My reporting cast fresh doubts on Schiff’s claims that the 2019 impeachment process happened organically. The New York Times had already revealed that Schiff had not been forthcoming about prior contacts with the whistleblower. Initially, Schiff publicly stated that his office had never spoken with the whistleblower before he filed his complaint against President Trump, when, in fact, a Schiff staffer had huddled with him — something that Schiff’s spokesman Patrick Boland was forced to admit after the Times broke the story. (The staffer was never identified.) The prior contacts led to suspicions that Schiff’s office helped the whistleblower craft his complaint as part of a partisan operation.

In the censorship demands that Schiff’s office sent to Twitter, Misko and the “impeachment inquiry” are mentioned. It’s not clear whether Ciaramella is mentioned, too, since some names are blacked out. Schiff demanded that Twitter “remove any and all content” related to them.

At the time, Twitter was about the only media outlet where the names of Schiff’s impeachment operatives were circulating. The Washington press corps had conspired to protect the so-called whistleblower and cover up his identity. The Washington Post even scolded me for identifying him, claiming that I was putting his life in danger. But this was a bluff. I was told by his family, as well as impeachment investigators, that he had received no credible threats.

In his list of demands, Schiff tried to justify banning me by claiming that I was promoting “false QAnon conspiracies,” which I have never done. I challenge Schiff to produce evidence to back up his defamatory remarks.

Schiff knew better. He knew that “QAnon” was a trigger for Twitter censors, who were suppressing QAnonrelated posts. Yet even Twitter’s liberal gatekeepers appeared skeptical of Schiff’s claims: “If it is related to QAnon it should already be deamplified.” (Emphasis in original.)

Schiff knows something about promoting false conspiracies. In 2017, he took to the microphone in a televised House Intelligence Committee hearing and read into the congressional record a screed of wild conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia from the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier.

He trumpeted them as if they were fact. But they were false — every one of them — as Special Counsel John Durham has proved in court documents, expanding on what Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz found in his earlier report.

We now know that most of the preposterous rumors that Schiff dramatically read into the public record came from a source who was invented by the dossier’s authors. In his hyping of the dossier, Schiff smeared and defamed not only Trump but also Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign adviser, whom Schiff falsely painted as a Russian agent.

What’s more, Schiff falsely claimed to be in possession of “direct evidence” that President Trump colluded with Russian spies to steal the 2016 election. He used his position as the top Democrat on the intelligence panel to pretend that he had gleaned such information in closed-door hearings, when, in fact, he had heard no such evidence. He did not have “more than circumstantial evidence,” as he claimed to have in 2017, intentionally misleading the press and the public.

“The move by Schiff to ban Sperry and others on Twitter — and to remove content — is highly ironic,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley noted in a recent column. “Schiff has been criticized repeatedly for promoting ‘misinformation’ and for relying on unidentified ‘sources’ for his claims of Trump’s criminality.”

The next year, Schiff would be caught lying about the so-called Nunes Memo exposing FBI abuse of the FISA wiretap process to spy on Page. Schiff claimed that then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes misled the public when he said that the FBI heavily relied on the debunked dossier to swear out the warrants. In his own memo, Schiff, as ranking member, insisted that the FBI’s warrants were based on other evidence and were aboveboard.

In 2019, the scathing Horowitz Report proved that it was Nunes who was telling the truth. Schiff, who had access to the same classified FISA information as Nunes, knew better.

More recently, Schiff pushed the false claim that the infamous Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

[…]

Source: Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations.com (via Unum)