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As Reports of Michael Flynn Pardon Emerge, Adam Schiff Embarrasses Himself Again

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UPDATE, Nov. 25, 2020: After publication of this article, President Trump announced on Twitter that he was pardoning Michael Flynn.

This article, and its headlines, remain as published:

Even by Adam Schiff standards, it’s shameless.

The California congressman, who made his name among many Americans as possibly the foremost serial liar of the Democrats’ “Russia collusion” hoax,  managed to distinguish himself even further on Wednesday with his duplicitous reaction to word that President Donald Trump was reportedly considering a pardon for one-time National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

The president, Schiff said, was “acting like an organized crime figure.”

It’s probably not the best choice of words for a lawmaker who made headlines in the run-up to the sham impeachment effort against Trump by deliberately inserting mafioso-style phrases into the president’s conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in July 2019.

(Schiff being Schiff, he claimed to have no regrets for the maneuver.)

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A Flynn pardon “would send a message that at least as far as President Trump is concerned, if you lie on his behalf, if you cover up for him, he will reward you,” Schiff told CNN’s “New Day.”

“He will protect you, but only if he thinks it’s in his interest. There are others that lied for him that he’s not going to extend that kind of service to, but it just, frankly, reflects so ill on our democracy, on the United States.”

Do you think President Donald Trump should issue a pardon to Michael Flynn?

As usual, Schiff is peddling a story that has the truth exactly backward.

What has reflected “ill on our democracy” hasn’t been the actions of Trump but the childishly malicious “resistance” of Democratic lawmakers and their mainstream media enablers who spent the four years since Nov 8, 2016, denying the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and employing underhanded legal maneuvers against it.

Nowhere was that more evident than in the FBI’s treatment of Michael Flynn, a retired three-star Army general who devoted his career to the country’s service.

In a complicated legal saga that started with an FBI interview of Flynn in the White House in January 2017 and continues to this day before U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan. (Liberals baying for Flynn’s blood ignore the facts that former FBI Director James Comey has all but admitted that 2017 interview was an ambush, and that one of the agents who conducted it was the now-disgraced Peter Strzok, a man with an apparently obsessive hatred for the Trump presidency.)

The disturbing reality that much of the anti-Flynn operation was almost certainly conducted with the knowledge and at the direction of then-President Barack Obama (and then Vice President Joe Biden) is overlooked entirely by Democratic partisans and their media sympathizers.

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As a matter of law the questions might be complicated — Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI but has since withdrawn his plea; the Justice Department is no longer interested in prosecution while the judge in the case feels otherwise.

But as a matter of justice, his case appears to be open and shut:

A Washington swamp resistance operation targeting the then-incoming Trump administration took out Flynn in an atrocious abuse of power and a federal court judge has decided to take a personal interest in acting the part of the prosecutor.

Every American, regardless of political sympathies, should be appalled by the treatment Flynn has received.

Now, according to the website Axios, which cited unidentified sources, Trump is considering putting an end to the ordeal via pardon. The New York Times reported the potential development separately.

If a presidential pardon is the best option for Flynn to go on with his life without a politically motivated persecutors pursuing him, that’s an option everyone but his persecutors should accept.

Naturally, for Schiff, it’s unacceptable.

“Imagine what people around the world think when we have a president who’s acting like an organized crime figure,” Schiff told CNN.

The better point is to imagine what the rest of the world thinks when they see the premier law enforcement agency of the United States, an arm of the executive branch of government, orchestrate a criminal case against a political opponent (and one who’s an appointee of a duly elected president, no less).

In countries where the rule of secret police agencies reigns supreme, seeing the United States follow that same dismal path can only bring aid and comfort to tyrannies — men like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping know they’re in the company of the world’s most powerful nation.

As a matter of disgrace, Democrats couldn’t ask for much more.

What makes Schiff’s choice of words even worse is that his party’s presidential nominee Joe Biden, a man who could well be sworn into the country’s highest office come Jan. 20, is himself accused of “acting like an organized crime figure” — thanks to notes discovered on his own son’s computer.

As is known already to Americans who don’t rely on the mainstream media for their news, a laptop computer apparently belonging to Biden’s son, Hunter, contained a proposal to form a company with the then-powerful Chinese energy giant CEF with an ownership structure that would reserve 10 percent on behalf of “the big guy.”

“The big guy” — a phrase that practically reeks with the stench of organized crime — was widely understood to be a reference to Joe Biden himself.

It’s not the Trump administration that’s behaved like organized crime for the past four years — that’s been the Democratic opposition, like Schiff, and the swamp figures at the heart of the federal law enforcement and intelligence bureaucracies, like Comey.

It’s not Trump who’s treated the country’s justice system as a tool of political intimidation, that’s been his Democratic enemies.

Every American who’s followed the Trump administration with intellectual honesty unblinded by partisan passions understands that.

Politicians like Schiff, a man who actually chairs the House Intelligence Committee, no doubt understand it too, but in the pursuit of power, truth is as irrelevant in the political sphere as it is in an organized crime turf war.

Anyone interested in the news has seen Adam Schiff degrade himself with abandon over the past four years — claiming evidence of “Russia collusion” where none existed, orchestrating an impeachment trial that was not only nakedly political, but baseless to boot.

But even by Schiff’s standards, likening Trump’s potential pardon to the act of an organized crime boss was shameless.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
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