Radio Recap: Schiff’s Reckless Abuse of the Constitution

By 

Jay Sekulow

|
October 4, 2019

3 min read

Constitution

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We’ve been spending this week talking about what’s going on in Washington, DC, especially Rep. Adam Schiff’s Intelligence Committee and what they’re doing to the Constitution.

Today on the show we discussed Adam Schiff’s reckless abuse of the Constitution, what the President was doing with Ukraine, and the chaos that is the impeachment inquiry.

Adam Schiff had a bad week. First, he completely made up falsehoods about the President’s phone call with the Ukrainian President. Then, as we discussed on yesterday’s show, it comes out that he lied about contact with the whistleblower. What’s at stake here is the Constitution.

Senior Military Analyst Wes Smith earlier in the week wrote an article about US relationship with Ukraine and explained the context of the halting of aid on the show:

“The context is so very important. The President was exercising due diligence, not only according to the Constitution, but also according to his responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief. Ukraine had been rife with corruption.

This is the background. President Obama would not give them lethal military aid. Earlier this year Congress voted for a package in that gave them almost 400 million dollars in aid. President Trump simply halted the aid, not giving it to them immediately for two reasons: President Zelensky was inaugurated in May. The President said he wanted to do two things. He wanted to establish a personal relationship with the new president. The President also wanted to make sure that Zelensky would carry out his campaign promise of rooting out corruption before giving them 400 million dollars in aid.”

The President exercising due diligence was a very prudent thing to do.

We also discussed the text messages that have been in the news today. The most important text is largely being ignored by the media. US Ambassador to the EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland says in one:

"The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo's of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign."

That the issue of foreign aid and now these texts are being linked with impeachment talk is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is the lack of rules and equity regarding how they are handling the so-called inquiry.

ACLJ Director of Government Affairs Thann Bennett explained:

“They’re free-wheeling and all over the board. There are no rules they are being governed by, this is impeachment by irregularity.

If you put rules and procedures around it and allow the minority to ask questions. Things like the text message evidence would be entered into the record . . . that evidence doesn’t fit their narrative.

In order to keep that evidence out, you have to keep operating without rules or procedures.

The thing that would fix that is a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives . . . First of all it would make people who are actually accountable to voters have to go down and put their name on the line with what they’re doing. Right now they don’t have to do it. The second thing it would do is set up a formal procedure with those types of rules that Adam Schiff and Speaker Pelosi would not be able to deviate from. The minority would have subpoena power and all the evidence would come forth.

House leaders are running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution. We’re not going to let that happen.

You can listen to the entire episode here.