Thread by @JewhadiTM

Little Pencil Neck Adam Schiff Angrily Insists Trump Is Guilty Despite Utter Lack Of Evidence thefederalist.com/2019/03/30/ada…

Imagine you’re building a circumstantial case in court, promising the judge and jury all along the way that your final witness will pull it all together with direct evidence to eliminate any reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty.

Your final witness takes his seat, clears his throat, and tells the court that he has thoroughly investigated the circumstantial evidence you’d presented, and found none of it sufficient to establish a criminal act.

He goes on to say that his investigation found no additional evidence to support a criminal charge against the defendant.

What do you say in your final argument?

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we know we promised the final witness was key to the case.“

“We know we told you he would present evidence in support of, and in addition to, the circumstantial evidence we submitted throughout the trial, and that his testimony would leave no doubt as to the guilt of the defendant.”

“We’d now like you to disregard his testimony, ladies and gentlemen, despite our previous representation to this court that his testimony was necessary to prove our case. We’ve changed our minds.”

“We’re now confident that the circumstantial evidence we presented was sufficient to establish enough suspicion to assume the defendant was guilty, and we’d like you to go with that.”

“It really comes down to a matter of trust, ladies and gentlemen. You can either believe our expert witness—or you can believe us, take another look at that circumstantial evidence we presented, and find the defendant very close to guilty enough. We trust you’ll choose wisely.”

This seems to be the final argument of Rep. Schiff, Rep. Nadler, and their friends and colleagues in the Democrat and media sphere: Forget what we’ve been promising you about Mueller’s report;

disregard his finding of no conspiracy or coordination; and take another look at the circumstantial elements of Trump and his associates’ behavior we’ve been talking about for the last 2 years.

Never mind that all of these elements were thoroughly examined during the investigation and found to be either completely immaterial or insufficient to support a charge.

Never mind that, when challenged on the materiality of any of these circumstantial allegations, we’ve consistently defaulted to the expectation that Mueller would prove us right in the end.

Just forget all of that and trust us when we tell you that we never needed Mueller to establish collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

Schiff rehearsed this theme Thursday in his widely covered lecture to Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee in response to their joint letter calling for his resignation.

Many in the media noted that Schiff was uncharacteristically emotional, his strident tone animating his recitation of a number of Trump-Russia interactions he believes to be sufficient evidence of collusion or, at the very least, “not okay.”

Schiff’s anger and self-righteousness was reviewed favorably by the media, with a number of commentators noting his “passion” and that he “pushed back” and wasn’t going to let the assault on his integrity by the Republicans go without a fight.

Left unspoken was the irony of a favorable media representation of the universal instinct of one believed to be falsely or unfairly accused to fight back with passion and occasional anger. With other notable examples of such behavior close at hand, none was mentioned.