On Friday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) suggested that 50,000 Americans died because of the Senate’s failure to remove President Trump from office in February.
As the chairman of the intelligence committee, Schiff was out in front of the House of Representatives’ sham impeachment effort, which culminated in the Senate’s acquittal of the president on all charges on February 5. Schiff chaired the secret “Star Chamber” hearings, which were then used to push impeachment into the judiciary committee. The California representative was then one of the House managers for the impeachment trial in the Senate.
Speaking with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Schiff said,
There is one thing that, really, I have to say haunts me from the trial and it was before that snippet you showed where we knew we had to answer the question to the senators, okay, essentially, house managers, you’ve proved him guilty, does he really need to be removed after all? We have an election in nine months. how much damage could he really do? And we posed that question to the Senate and we answered it by saying that he could do an awful lot of damage but frankly, Chris, I don’t think we had any idea how much damage he would go on to do in the months ahead. There are 50,000 Americans now who are dead, in significant part because of his incompetence, because of his inability to think beyond himself and put the country first. I don’t think we would have ever anticipated that his brand of narcissism and his brand of incompetence would be so fatal to the American people.
.@RepAdamSchiff suggests “50,000 Americans” are dead because Trump wasn’t impeached
Republicans said “How much damage could he really do? … I don’t think we had any idea how much damage he would go on to do … There are 50,000 Americans now who are dead” pic.twitter.com/QGH941MSlk
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) April 25, 2020
If you remember back to January — which seems like a long time ago — the entire nation was distracted by the Democrats’ phony impeachment ploy, which they themselves chose to delay for weeks. House Democrats passed two articles of impeachment on December 18, but instead of turning them over to the Senate immediately, they chose to wait in an effort to get the Senate to call the witnesses they wanted — in particular John Bolton — and to allow the public time to see further documentation, which they claimed would incriminate the president.
All of it was nonsense, of course. And while the Democrats were stalling Trump’s inevitable acquittal, the novel coronavirus was slowly but surely emigrating from China to other nations, including the United States.
Despite the impeachment circus, Trump took action. The CDC issued a Level 1 travel notice for Wuhan on January 11 and implementing public health entry screening at New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
On January 31, the president declared the coronavirus a public health emergency and announced a ban on travel from China.
Democrats responded by calling the president racist and urged people to go out and frequent local businesses regardless of the virus.
House Speaker Pelosi said on February 24, more than three weeks after Trump’s travel ban, “You should come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken by our city. We know there is concern about tourism throughout the world but we think it’s very safe to be in Chinatown and hopefully, others will come.”
So, Representative Schiff’s outrage at the president’s “incompetence” rings hollow when compared to the Democrats’ complete failure to admit that a potential crisis even existed.
Schiff, who initially found himself pushed off the front page of the news by the virus, is now pushing for a 9/11-style investigation into President Trump’s alleged mishandling of the coronavirus.
While no one would claim that the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been perfect, he has definitely been more on top of it than Democrats in Congress have been. The House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, failed to have their first hearing on COVID-19 until February 5, a full five days after the president’s travel ban on China — and ironically the same day that the president was acquitted in the Senate.
To claim that 50,000 lives have been lost due to Trump’s incompetence is so low that it beggars belief. Crisis reveals character or, in Adam Schiff’s case, the complete lack thereof.
Photo: AP Images
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects, with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected]
