The presidential counselor claimed the Democratic congressman has been “peddling a lie day after day” about evidence of collusion with Russia.
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, says that in the wake of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) should vacate his seat for spreading lies about the president.
“He ought to resign today,” Conway said of the congressman during an interview Monday on Fox News, falsely claiming the House Intelligence Committee chairman “has been on every TV show 50 times a day for practically the last two years, promising Americans that the president would either be impeached or indicted.”
At issue was Schiff’s assertion in a CBS “Face the Nation” interview last August that there is “plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy in plain sight.”
“He has no right ― as somebody who’s been peddling a lie day after day after day unchallenged,” Conway said of Schiff. “Somebody should have put him under oath and said, ‘You have evidence? Where is it?’”
Like others in the Trump administration and the GOP, Conway has treated Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report as a political win because, according to Barr, the probe did not find that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to meddle in the 2016 election.
The report itself is not public, however, and Barr does not lay out specific evidence Mueller’s team may have considered — so there is no way for Conway to know that the probe found no evidence of collusion. As for obstruction of justice, Barr says that Mueller’s investigation “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Schiff said as much in his August interview, noting that finding evidence of collusion is “a different statement than saying that there’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt of a criminal conspiracy. Bob Mueller will have to determine that.”
A handful of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are now pushing for the special counsel’s report to be made public so the full scope of the probe and the reasoning behind its findings are transparent.
Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), has launched a separate investigation into potential power abuses by the president, submitting document requests to a list of Trump associates and family members along with federal agencies and other entities.
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