Impeachment Trial: Adam Schiff Plays Deceptively Edited Video — Again — Misquoting Trump

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), the lead House manager for the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, played the same deceptively edited clip Tuesday in the Senate that Democrats used in the House Judiciary Committee last month, misquoting Trump as having claimed, that the Constitution gave him absolute power.

Update: Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) used the exact same deceptively-edited clip later in her own presentation.

As Breitbart News’ Charlie Spiering pointed out when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) first misquoted the president as saying, “Article II says I can do whatever I want,” Trump had been specifically referring to the power to hire and fire executive officials, specifically Special Counsel Robert Mueller — whom he did not, in the end, fire.

Later, during House Judiciary Committee hearings, Democrat counsel Norm Eisen — ironically, once the “ethics” czar for President Barack Obama — used a deceptively edited clip of a speech Trump gave in July 2019 to the youth group Turning Point USA. The context, again, was the Mueller investigation — but Democrats edited that out of the video he presented to constitutional “expert” witness Noah Feldman, who participated with Eisen in the misleading charade:

The full original quote Democrats are misusing to impeach Trump @CSPAN https://t.co/IwKOiVFjkV

— Joel B. Pollak (@joelpollak) December 6, 2019

Democrat @NormEisen and "Expert" @NoahRFeldman Misquoted Trump @CSPAN https://t.co/YyrurUsILG

— Joel B. Pollak (@joelpollak) December 6, 2019

Despite being called out, by Breitbart News, for misquoting the president with a deceptively edited video, Schiff used the same Turning Point USA clip — plus another, similarly misleading clip — to claim, falsely, once again, that Trump believed he had absolute power under Article II of the Constitution and therefore had to be impeached for that reason.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.