Adam Schiff Must Resign

And AGAIN you demonstrate your fealty to the axiom, "If you can't beat the message, beat the messenger." No facts. No actual reason to doubt the whistleblower. Just dismissal based on one of the details to which he was professionally assigned, the National Security Council.

How do I know that? By reading what I'm guessing is your source for breaking news flash, an article in Townhall.com. In addition to some false and misleading characterizations about the whistleblower and his or her complaint, the Townhall piece quotes at length from a Washington Examiner story which reports, among other things, the following:

Thank you, reformed. You've alerted us to a MASSIVE scandal! During the Obama administration, an experienced intelligence community professional with "deep knowledge" of Ukraine might have accompanied the vice president on one or more of the VP's trips to Ukraine, of all places! How dare ANY White House leverage professionals with "deep knowledge" of particular countries in their foreign policy! How dare ANY White House leverage intelligence!! The Trump White House sure hasn't leveraged any, and the Kurds in Syria currently under attack by Turkish forces can tell you how THAT'S working out.

You're shooting blanks at a whistleblower you know only by a complaint whose ONLY "error" you have cited is not about an assertion of fact, but rather a one word assertion of personal opinion ("pressured").

You've shown neither bias nor any double standards. ALL Americans, including people who work in the intelligence community, are have a constitutional right to their personal political views. The issue is NEVER whether people have political views; it's whether those views improperly influence their work product. In the case of the whistleblower, the ICIG commented directly as to the influence of the whistleblower's political views reflected in his or her complaint:

"...although the preliminary review identified some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate, such evidence did not change my determination that the complaint relating to the urgent concern 'appears credible,' particularly given the other information the ICIG obtained during its preliminary review."

Translation? The ICIG identified the existence of political bias, but because of the information he gathered from his OWN investigation of the complaint's contents, concluded the whistleblower's bias did NOT affect the credibility of his or her assertions.

Alternative translation? Even when a Democrat is president, a Republican can tell the truth. Even when a Republican is president, a Democrat can tell the truth.

Your claim is utterly and completely baseless, reformed. EVERYONE - including you - has some form of political bias. By your standard, ONLY a supporter of the president's could be trusted to file a credible whistleblower complaint... even though THAT person would of course suffer from his or her own form of "political bias." And since according to you, "political bias" means we can't trust the "biased" person's work product, we wouldn't be able to trust the Trump supporter's complaint either. Come to think of it, since everyone has political bias, by your logic, we wouldn't be able to trust ANYONE's whistleblower complaint, which would be an absurd and unacceptable outcome.

Almost immediately after the president ended his call to the Ukrainian president, White House officials acted to secrete record of that conversation on a special code word server out of concern about the content of the call, and that the president might have committed a crime. You claim to be a person well informed about these matters. If you don't know that what I just asserted is true, then you're not well informed. The reporting on this matter has been widespread, consistent, and credible.

The White House did NOT treat the record of the president's call to Ukraine the way they usually treat calls to other heads of state. It hurriedly hid evidence of the call precisely because those who listened to the call live believed there HAD BEEN pressure and there HAD BEEN a quid pro quo. You have a constitutional right to believe otherwise. But just realize that your "political bias," NOT the facts of the matter, is the only support for your view.

And yet AGAIN you respond to the final result, but not to the actions that preceded the final result.

Please answer this question DIRECTLY AND WITHOUT EVASION: If there was nothing wrong with the president's call to the Ukrainian leader - if the call's "transcript" could have been released the same day without concern about its content - why did White House lawyers direct that record of the call be secreted to a code word classified server? That's NOT the way the White House normally treats records of presidential calls with foreign leaders. And we both know there is NOTHING in that transcript that needed code word protection. So why did they secrete the record?

YES! Eventually they released it. But before they released it, they hid it! Why?

PLEASE ANSWER MY QUESTION DIRECTLY AND WITHOUT EVASION.

Here you repeat a claim for which I have on multiple occasions asked that you provide support; not once have you done so.

I think you believe the whistleblower's "spin" on the conversation was that the president "pressured" the Ukrainian leader to investigation Crowdstrike and the Bidens. That happens to be a "spin" with which MANY experts and laypeople agree, as is perhaps best evidenced by the dramatic increase, since release of the whistleblower's complaint, in the percentage of Americans who believe the president should be impeached AND removed from office. Public opinion notwithstanding, the fact remains that you have yet to identify ONE SINGLE ASSERTION OF FACT in the whistleblower's complaint that is false.

You disagree with his or her characterization of the call. Fine. He or she disagrees with you. What does that prove? If what happened during and after the call happened as the whistleblower says it happened - and you have offered NO EVIDENCE that it didn't - then there is STILL cause for alarm.

Have you seen the latest reporting on this matter? That there was great concern about the president's intentions among national security officials BEFORE the call to Ukraine, as well as after it?

You're simply wrong about this, reformed.

[FIRST, NOTE, THAT I ADDED A SECOND PART TO MY PREVIOUS POST AFTER YOU RESPONDED HERE.]

The fact that you're not willing to answer my question directly proves the emptiness of your case. If you had an answer, you'd give it. But you don't have an answer, so you hide.

The language of your reply prompts a slightly different question... that you won't address because its truthful answer disables your argument: If "[obviously] they had nothing to hide," why did they hide it?

Coming from you, a champion of the "apples and oranges" defense, your disregard for the glaring difference between secreting code word classified material on a code word classified server and secreting material that's clearly NOT code word classified on a code word classified server is jarring. By your logic extended, there's no difference between a person who kills another person out of revenge or spite or for money, and one who kills in self-defense. After all, so your argument says, the fact that one did it in self-defense doesn't change that he or she still killed someone. So they're both killers!

As I said, jarring.

And YET AGAIN you evade the core content of one of my posts, choosing to address the messenger (The WAPO) rather than the message.

The journalism from the Post, the NY Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among others, during the Trump administration and prior has been brilliant. Of the hundreds of their stories that cited unnamed sources, only a scant few necessitated a subsequent correction. Their reporting on the whistleblower's complaint was spot-on accurate, we learned once we saw the document.

So your problem is not with the source of the information, reformed. Your problem is with the information itself. How do we know your problem is with the information itself? You won't address it. That's your MO: If the question I ask disrupts your argument, you don't even acknowledge it, let alone answer it, until I ask it five, six, eight, or ten times. And if information I provide disrupts your argument, you attack the messenger - whether it's me or the newspaper or the reporter - rather than the message.

We both know that if you HAD good, on-point answers to the questions I ask and the information I post, you'd give them. But since you don't have such answers, the best you can do is deflect, distract, evade, change the subject, remain silent, or attack the messenger. You've done it again and again and again and again in our exchanges. I see no evidence that your practice is going to change.