President Trump on Monday wondered whether Rep. Adam Schiff should be arrested for treason, a crime punishable by death, for misrepresenting his words at a congressional hearing last week.
“Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?” Trump wrote in one of a tsunami of morning Twitter posts.
During a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee last week, the Democratic California lawmaker summarized Trump’s side of the conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, offering a version that he claimed was the “essence” of what Trump had said.
But the summary enraged the president, who on Friday called for Schiff to resign.
The president’s latest rip was likely to intensify criticism of Trump’s handling of the scandal engulfing his presidency, stemming from the July 25 phone call in which Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
The call prompted a whistleblower to file a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, who turned it over to the White House.
The inspector general deemed the whistleblower complaint credible and urgent, while the top US intelligence officer said the whistleblower and the IG had acted in good faith.
The complaint drove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to launch impeachment proceedings, putting Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, in charge of the House probe.
Trump has described his call with the Ukrainian leader as “perfect” and denied any wronging.
With Reuters