Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) paid a visit to Bill Maher on Friday night’s Real Time, amid news breaking that President Trump had refused to release the Democratic memo that he had drafted for the House Intelligence Committee. The Democratic memo was intended as a rebuttal to the misleading and biased GOP Nunes memo, and Schiff explained to Maher why the refusal to release the memo was so troublesome.
“The problem is this, and this is why we urge Republicans not to go down this road,” he told Maher. “They wrote this deliberately misleading memo that omitted all of the important information the reader needed to know, and when we supplied the material facts it’s like, ‘Oh, no, we can’t share the facts’ because that would be disclosing too much information.”
Maher then pointed out that facts seem to no longer matter to Republicans who will blindly follow the commander-in-chief, which is a scary thing unto itself. “How do you fight that?” he asked Schiff candidly.
Sadly, his answer was no less terrifying.
Well, it is enormously challenging. Of all of the difficulties that we face, in terms of how we’ve gotten to where we are politically, you have serious issues with campaign finance reform, you’ve got redistricting, but among the most difficult to deal with is the fact that people now simply get their information from different sources. Had Fox News existed and been essentially the state-run TV during the Nixon era, there might not have been an impeachment of Richard Nixon.
But there is this whole echo chamber that supports whatever the president says. What I find so astounding about the last year is how much this deeply flawed president could remake an entire political party in his own image, so quickly. And probably the most distressing thing about that for me is not what a poor president Trump turned out to be, which we could easily foresee, but rather — okay, we underestimated even that — but the real shock is how many people in congress and in the party would be complicit in that.
Schiff went on to say that while Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and a few others have spoken out, he would have expected more of his colleagues on the other side of the aisle. “The problem when you have someone who lacks character in the Oval Office,” he summarized, “It infects the whole of government.”
The entire conversation is worth a watch, even if it probably won’t make you sleep any better at night.
(Via Real Time)