Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) should call the person who filed a complaint against President Donald Trump to testify.
The so-called whistleblower passed on secondhand information and details from media reports in the complaint, which largely focused on Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The call transcript was released by the White House shortly after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced an impeachment inquiry into Trump.
Trump asked Zelensky to look into former Vice President Joe Biden’s actions in the country, as well as Biden’s son Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma for five years until earlier this year. The transcript doesn’t show Trump pressuring Zelensky or offering anything in exchange.
“Given that we already have the call record, we don’t need the whistleblower, who wasn’t on the call, to tell us what took place during the call,” Schiff said. “We have the best evidence of that.”
Meadows said late Oct. 15 that Schiff must call the whistleblower to testify, accusing the House Intelligence chairman of avoiding bringing people in for depositions who might present evidence he doesn’t want to hear.
“To be unequivocally clear, no member or congressional staff had any input into or reviewed the complaint before it was submitted to the Intelligence Community Inspector General,” he said.
Meadows said on Tuesday the whistleblower needs to answer questions about the contact with Schiff’s committee.
“We call it a whistleblower but it’s really more an anonymous informant—we need to have them come in so that we can say, ‘How often did you coordinate with Adam Schiff?’,” he said.