FBI Director Kash Patel called Sen. Adam Schif (D-CA) “the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate” during a contentious exchange in Patel’s testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The argument erupted after Schiff continued a line of questioning in which Democrats suggested Patel had fired FBI agents, or removed them from cases, at the direction of the White House for political reasons.
Schiff then went after Patel over the Jeffrey Epstein case, implying that Patel had not released Epstein’s “black book” (which, in fact, has been released), and attacking him over the questioning of convicted Epstein aide Ghislaine Maxwell.
The two of them erupted at each other:
Schiff has a long-standing vendetta against Patel, as Breitbart News has reported:
Schiff has been trying to destroy Patel ever since 2017, when Patel helped expose the fact that members of the outgoing Obama administration abused their power to “unmask” the names of Americans caught on foreign wiretaps, a practice that was thought to have led to the unjust firing and prosecution of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn over false allegations of collusion with Russia.
Schiff, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote a memorandum in which he attempted, unsuccessfully, to counter the claims of the Republican majority that the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page, an aide to then-candidate Donald Trump, was justified.
Schiff’s claims were later debunked by a report by the Department of Justice Inspector General, which validated Republican concerns about the abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court by the FBI in its efforts to target Trump.
During the first impeachment investigation of President Trump, which Schiff led as chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Democrats tried, in vain, to find evidence that Patel had been a “back channel” for Russia to Trump. The impeachment report cited a phone call between then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Patel — which proved nothing but the fact that the committee had violated the president’s Sixth Amendment rights by spying on his legal counsel.
Schiff then served on the one-sided January 6 Committee, which pursued Patel again. Once again, it found no wrongdoing, and only belatedly released the transcript of his closed-door interview with the committee.
Schiff has used his time in the Senate to focus on national politics, picking up where he left off during the first Trump impeachment and the January 6 Committee.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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