Claims by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) that he had no contact with the intelligence community whistleblower at the center of the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump are disputed in a new book.
In Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, authors Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian reveal a meeting between the whistleblower’s attorney, Andrew Bakaj, and lawyers working for the House Select Committee on Intelligence. This occurred in the run-up to the fall 2019 launch of an impeachment inquiry into Trump over allegations he demanded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to initiate corruption investigations into now-President Joe Biden in exchange for U.S. military aid already promised to Kyiv.
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Schiff was, and is, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Lawyers working for the committee who met with Bakaj, the attorney representing the person who filed a whistleblower complaint with the intelligence community inspector general detailing Trump’s demands (made during a July 25, 2019, telephone conversation with Zelensky), reported directly to Schiff.
That Sept. 9, 2019, meeting occurred prior to revelations about the phone call surfacing in the press and got underway before the whistleblower complaint had been forwarded to Congress, lending some credence to Republican charges, made during the impeachment inquiry, that the California Democrat was secretly coordinating with the whistleblower from the very beginning.
From an excerpt of Unchecked (publishing Oct. 18 by William Morrow) shared with the Washington Examiner, here is how Bade, a reporter for Politico, and Demirjian, a reporter for the Washington Post, set the scene for the key meeting between Bakaj and Schiff’s committee lawyers, plus his chief investigator Dan Goldman, now the Democratic nominee in New York’s 10th Congressional District:
“Andrew Bakaj was known around Washington for representing government employees calling foul on sensitive national security matters. So when he reached out to Schiff’s Intelligence panel on Sunday, September 8, asking to discuss something sensitive in person, Schiff’s counsels promptly agreed. The following afternoon, panel counsel Maher Bitar escorted Bakaj down three flights of stairs to a conference room in the committee’s secure chambers, where Dan Goldman, Schiff’s investigations director, and another panel lawyer were waiting.”
Under federal law, Bakaj was not yet, at the time of this meeting, permitted to reveal specifics of his client’s whistleblower complaint to Schiff’s staff. But according to Bade and Demirjian, Bakaj, an experienced attorney, provided enough “breadcrumbs” to make clear the incident and players involved. That might have been because this was not the first time Schiff’s underlings on the committee, and therefore, presumably, the panel chairman himself, got wind of the Trump-Zelensky call.
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Before Bakaj trekked to Capitol Hill to meet with Schiff’s staff on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, there had been another meeting, reported by the New York Times in October 2019 and recounted by Bade and Demirjian in Unchecked:
“In late July, a CIA official who had previously been detailed to the White House approached an old colleague of his, who was working as a lawyer for Adam Schiff on the House Intelligence Committee. Because they were off-campus, their meeting had the air of a social visit, but the CIA official had very serious matters of state on his mind. He was worried that Trump — along with [former New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani — had tried to solicit election interference from the president of Ukraine during a phone call that had taken place just days before.
“The official had not listened to the call himself but had heard enough alarming details from others to feel compelled to do something. Without sharing those details, he asked Schiff’s lawyer for advice on what he should do.”
A Democratic aide on the House Select Committee on Intelligence would later acknowledge to USA Today that Schiff “could have been more clear” in saying his committee had not “spoken directly” with the whistleblower. But the aide defended the chairman, emphasizing he had been “referring to the panel officially interviewing the whistleblower, and himself personally.”
Trump never disputed the allegations leading to his first impeachment and even released a recording of his telephone conversation with Zelensky, insisting he did nothing wrong. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) initiated the inquiry on Sept. 24, 2019, and the House voted to impeach Trump along party lines on Jan. 13, 2020. On Feb. 5, 2020, Trump was acquitted after a trial in the Senate held to adjudicate the impeachment charges.
Meanwhile, the reporting from Bade and Demirjian in Unchecked would seem to back up concerns regarding Schiff voiced by congressional Republicans at the time of the first impeachment inquiry into Trump. The chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence presented himself as something of an honest broker reacting in real time to facts about the Trump-Zelensky telephone call as they came to light.
But Schiff was apparently hiding the full scope of his involvement in pushing the House toward impeachment. Critics say that from the beginning, the congressman quietly and subtly guided important players in the controversy, first to make sure his committee had the grounds to launch an investigation and second to put that inquiry on a fast track toward impeachment.
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As Bade and Demirjian write:
“Republicans would later accuse Schiff of coaching the CIA official with step-by-step instructions for how to file one of the most explosive whistleblower complaints in modern history — presumed coordination they would decry as collusion between Trump’s impeachers and ‘the deep state.’
“Schiff’s staff would fervently deny those charges. … What is known, however, is that the CIA official told Schiff’s attorney that the president had done something highly unethical regarding Ukraine — and Schiff’s counsel suggested he get a lawyer and speak to the intelligence community’s inspector general, whose job it was to field and investigate whistleblower complaints. Schiff’s attorney also took what he’d learned back to the Intelligence Committee chairman.”
Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump examines both the impeachment of the former president related to his telephone call with Zelensky and the Republican’s second impeachment in the waning days of his administration, on charges of his alleged culpability in the ransacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
