Investigative reporter John Solomon, who has extensively covered stories about the intelligence community in recent years, particularly involving Donald Trump, details in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal published Monday how House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) allegedly abused the impeachment process to “punish” his critics, including Solomon himself.
The FBI and Justice Department, Solomon explains, have “created specific rules governing agents’ actions involving special-circumstances professionals, which include high-level approval and review,” as well as “special rules for subpoenaing journalists.”
“If the executive branch, and by extension the courts that enforce these privacy protections, observe the need for such sensitivity, it seems reasonable that Congress should have similar guardrails ensuring that the powers of the state are equally and fairly applied,” Solomon contends.
However, Schiff’s use of subpoenas to obtain phone records from private citizens, including himself and Trump’s personal lawyers, and to then publicize them demonstrate an “alarming” abuse of his power as a committee chair and the man heading up the impeachment inquiry:
[Schiff’s] committee secretly authorized subpoenas to AT&T earlier this year for the phone records of President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and an associate. He then arbitrarily extracted information about certain private calls and made them public.
Many of the calls Mr. Schiff chose to publicize fell into the special-circumstances categories: a fellow member of Congress ( Rep. Devin Nunes, the Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican), two lawyers (Mr. Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow ) and a journalist (me).
Even more troubling, writes Solomon, is that some of the people’s phone records he released were at times critical of Schiff.
Along with having “trampled the attorney-client privilege of Mr. Trump and his lawyers,” and “intruded on my First Amendment rights to interview and contact figures like Mr. Giuliani and the Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas without fear of having the dates, times and length of private conversation disclosed to the public,” Solomon argued, Schiff has also spread misinformation in an apparent attempt to “punish people whose work Mr. Schiff found antagonistic”:
Contrary to Mr. Schiff’s defense that he was simply serving the investigative interest of Congress, the release of the phone records served much more to punish people whose work Mr. Schiff found antagonistic than to fulfill an oversight purpose. And it served Congress poorly because it spread false insinuations. Mr. Schiff’s report suggested, for instance, that Mr. Giuliani called the White House to talk to the Office of Management and Budget, implying he might have been trying to help Mr. Trump withhold aid to Ukraine as Democrats allege. The White House says that claim is wrong; the number was a generic phone entry point and no one in OMB talked to Mr. Giuliani.
Likewise, Mr. Schiff published call records between Mr. Giuliani and me and suggested they involved my Ukraine stories. Many contacts I had with Mr. Giuliani involved interviews on the Mueller report and its aftermath or efforts to invite the president’s lawyer on the Hill’s TV show, which I supervised.
Schiff’s actions, Solomon warns, “threaten” freedom of the press. Read Solomon’s full op-ed here.
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