Schiff’s Dereliction of Duty Regarding Communist China

In this screengrab taken from a Senate Television webcast, House manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) speaks during impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump in the Senate at the Capitol in Washington on Feb. 3, 2020. (Senate Television via Getty Images)

Commentary

If ever there were a textbook case in Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), it is Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

Since the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Schiff has been at the forefront of investigating the administration and the president with an avidity that approaches, even surpasses—if that is possible—monomania.

In doing so, he has been a font of disinformation that might make the KGB blush. First was the bogus Russia probe and the lies surrounding the FISA court, then came the endless impeachment over an ambiguous phone call and, as of last week, his proposal for a “9/11”-style commission to study the U.S. response to the virus, no doubt with the president in the crosshairs.

But, as usual, Schiff is barking up the wrong TDS tree, this time to the extent of dereliction of his duty as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

The investigation by his committee that should be undertaken is the role of China—specifically the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), because this pandemic wasn’t the work or fault of the Chinese people—in deliberately deceiving the world about the provenance and extent of the novel coronavirus.

If that’s not the mission of the HPSCI, what is?

Full hearings would obviously be tabled in the present, socially distant environment, but the groundwork, with an announcement, should be laid now.

And evidence abounds, much of it hiding in plain sight, of the CCP’s culpability, such as the recent revelation that China, while the world’s greatest manufacturer of medical masks, imported more than two billion masks in January and February before alerting the world to the extent of the problem, helping to create the shortage under which we currently live.

That behavior’s implications for global preparation for the pandemic are manifest in the mortality figures in many countries, including and especially the United States, but are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. (The CCP has now been exporting much smaller numbers of the masks for obvious propaganda purposes.)

Many other often extreme examples of CCP malfeasance, including evidence of the drastic underreporting of cases and deaths and the withholding of crucial data regarding the virus are available here at The Epoch Times.

What interests me, however, is why Schiff and his colleagues in the Democratic Party and the media choose to focus their attention away from this monumental threat and, as if sublimating in the traditional Freudian sense, onto Trump.

I have written earlier that we suffer from two pandemics—the obvious Medical Pandemic and a Politics Pandemic. The two reinforce each other.

In this instance, the Politics Pandemic is pushing attention away from the primary problem, in the service of a partisan blame game. Yes, mistakes have been made in response to the virus—how could it be otherwise in such a cataclysm—but the source of the disaster must be isolated and (hopefully) forced to mend its ways, in order to prevent similar and possibly more threatening cataclysms to come.

Another recent report suggests the source of the virus wasn’t the presumed animal market but may have been caused by an accident at a Wuhan research lab that was covered up by the CCP. Even under current circumstances, shouldn’t the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence be looking into that?

But Schiff and his partner in impeachment crime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), prefer to direct attention domestically to Trump. Beyond the reflexive hyper-partisanship that has been with us for some time, this is a deflection motivated by self-defense, fear that the illegitimate, possibly even criminal, instigation of the impeachment enterprise is about to be revealed. (Added to this, of course, are potential revelations from U.S. Attorney John Durham that implicate the Democratic Party in the fabricated Russia probe.)

According to Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), testimony before the HPSCI in December by the Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson exposes lies by the “whistleblower"—you know, the guy whose identity everybody knows but isn’t supposed to say—and Schiff that would render the entire impeachment a fraud is being blocked from publication by Schiff. That Atkinson has just been fired by Trump (to the consternation of the usual suspects) enhances curiosity about the content of his testimony.

If that testimony is truly a smoking gun or even something close—and who could doubt it, the way that travesty of justice transpired—no wonder Schiff behaves the way he does. Ignoring the CCP’s lethal activities is the least of it when your own survival is at stake.

Roger L. Simon is The Epoch Times’ senior political columnist. He is also a prize-winning author and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. His most recent novel is “The GOAT,” possibly a diverting entertainment while self-isolating.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.