Appearing Thursday on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) unloaded on House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) handling of the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, stating “75 percent of the entire Congress” are in the dark about the closed-door probe.
A transcript is as follows:
ALEX MARLOW: [House Republicans] went full Breitbart yesterday storming [House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff’s (D-CA)] secret chamber. We’ve been calling it “Schiff’s dungeon.” This is still a very serious thing. I really admire the new tactic. What compelled you guys in the Congress to decide that enough’s enough, we’re actually going to physically take matters into our own hands? HOUSE MINORITY WHIP REP. STEVE SCALISE: Well, that was it. We’ve had enough of Adam Schiff running this Soviet-style star chamber, because only in the Soviet Union would you have a process where they are trying to impeach a duly elected president in secret, behind closed doors. You can’t go in, the press can’t go in, and voting members of Congress can’t go in. About 75 percent of the entire Congress, who was duly elected, is not allowed in that room. Yet, [Schiff’s] trying to use whatever he’s producing in there to bee the basis to impeach a President of the United States. It’s never been done before and we shouldn’t stand for it. We wanted to go in and see what was happening. We didn’t try to go in to disrupt things, we wanted to actually just go look. MARLOW: I love the comparison to the Soviets, because that is what this is like, and [Demcrats] are the ones constantly accusing us of being Russians pawns, even though we’ve been so tough on Russia. Overall, this president has been tough on Russia. We’re tough on Russia at Breitbart and they want to act like we’re Russian stooges. They are taking the Soviet tactics, so it’s a great way to describe it. Why are they hiding from the people?
HOUSE MINORITY WHIP REP. SCALISE: That’s a great question, and they haven’t answered it, by the way. It was amazing how, when we walked into the room, I found a chair and sat down in the back of the room. I had never seen how they set up a meeting before, but they are all just sitting around a table and at the end of the table is Adam Schiff and a witness. Adam starts talking to his lawyers, I’m sure he’s trying to figure out how to get us out of the room, and we’re just sitting there watching. Again, we were just watching him. He literally gets the witness and runs out of the room, which is very telling. What do they have to hide? He himself at the beginning of the meeting said it was not a classified briefing. The whole purpose of that room, called it the SCIF, is you have classified briefs in a classified setting. This wasn’t a classified briefing, this was with a DOD official. We had members of the Armed Services committee in that room, who had come into the room, and they wanted to hear what was going on with this DOD official, and they weren’t even allowed into the room. When Adam took the witness and rushed out of the room, it said a lot. It said clearly they’re hiding something. They are trying to create a document that’ll ultimately be a tainted document. This is going to be important because what they are doing is producing a document to be the basis of impeaching the president and it’s done in secret. It’s done where only they call the witnesses. Only Adam Schiff calls the witnesses. We have witnesses on our side that we would like to call. Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Mike McCaul have a list of witnesses. They are not allowed to bring witnesses forward. When Adam Schiff produces this document, it will be based on people he wanted to bring in and, in many cases, like the whistleblower, people who had a political bias against President Trump. Can you imagine that? If you don’t like the results of the 2016 election, you can go in secret and whisper something to Adam Schiff, he’ll whisper it to the media, they’ll write bad stories, and be completely debunked by the White House days later. But at that point, it’s too late, the damage is done.