Claims by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) that he had no contact with the intelligence community whistleblower at the center of the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump are disputed in a new book.
In Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, authors Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian reveal a meeting between the whistleblower’s attorney, Andrew Bakaj, and lawyers working for the House Select Committee on Intelligence. This occurred in the run-up to the fall 2019 launch of an impeachment inquiry into Trump over allegations he demanded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to initiate corruption investigations into now-President Joe Biden in exchange for U.S. military aid already promised to Kyiv.
Schiff was, and is, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Lawyers working for the committee who met with Bakaj, the attorney representing the person who filed a whistleblower complaint with the intelligence community inspector general detailing Trump's demands (made during a July 25, 2019, telephone conversation with Zelensky), reported directly to Schiff.
That Sept. 9, 2019, meeting occurred prior to revelations about the phone call surfacing in the press and got underway before the whistleblower complaint had been forwarded to Congress, lending some credence to Republican charges, made during the impeachment inquiry, that the California Democrat was secretly coordinating with the whistleblower from the very...
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