Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee says that House Democrats, under the direction of Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, are blocking Republicans from participating in the impeachment hearings and the media is helping them.
Jordan appeared at a press conference where he blasted Pelosi and Sciff for shielding voters from what, by law, should be public knowledge. He said during twenty hours of questioning there was “not one single thing that was classified … that the American people should not be able to see not be able to hear.”
The first witness before the cloistered meeting was Kurt Volker, President Trump’s former envoy for Ukraine. Volker resigned last Friday after he played a key role in connecting Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, with Ukrainian officials.
Democrats labeled a Volker text message which suggested a meeting between the White House and Ukrainian Andrey Yermak as “highly illegal coordination between Trump and the State Department.”
John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said of the meeting, “He’ll get some hostile questions. He’s a smart guy … and I think he’ll have reasonable answers.”
According to Herbst, there was nothing illegal about the President’s attorney communicating with Volker but rather an attempt to “maintain bipartisan support in Congress for Ukraine.”
Jordan said the way the Democrat-led House Oversight and Reform Committee is acting is suspect at best if not unconstitutional. He pointed out that 12 Representatives met behind closed doors when nothing justified the testimony being hidden from the elected 432 members of Congress.
The murky way House Democrats are going about the business of what is little more than a show trial is proving Mark Davis of Townhall right. He wrote in September, “This shiny new ‘impeachment inquiry’ package placed under an early Christmas tree by Speaker Nancy Pelosi will ultimately contain one of two things: objective evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors by President Trump, or something that will blow up in their faces as others have before.”
Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York blasted the impeachment inquiry yesterday on ABC’s “This Week.” He said, “What Adam Schiff wants is to get the United States of America drunk on his favorite cocktail. There are three ingredients. One is cherry-picking leaks, second is withholding facts, and three is just outright lying.”
Zeldin said that Democrat Committee Chairman Adam Schiff is running a “kind of flying by the seat of your pants type process.” He said Schiff will not release transcripts of Kurt Volker or Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, who both testified behind closed doors to House panels this month.
Neither congressman can reveal what Volker had to say because they are “duty-bound” to follow the rules of a closed House committee meeting. Jordan said that none of the matter is classified so it makes no sense to be done behind closed doors unless Schiff is “stacking the deck” to try the President through the media which knows nothing about what is being said in secret.
“Why are we sitting inside of Adam Schiff’s bunker turning in our cell phones before we come in and being told that nothing here can be told to the American public?” Zeldin asked.
Good question Congressman Zeldin. Why indeed?
