Adam Schiff: GOP Strategy ‘Will Be to Make a Circus’ Out of Mueller Hearings

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said that he harbored no illusions about how House Republicans will treat Special Counsel Robert Mueller during his scheduled testimony next month on the counter-intelligence probe into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign: “I think it will be a GOP strategy to make a circus out of these hearings.”

Schiff was responding to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who had questioned if such a public forum, with such a polarizing figure like Mueller, wasn’t destined to be “politically contentious and could backfire.” Last July, for instance, public interviews in the then-Republican-led House Judiciary and Oversight Committees of FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was removed from the Special Counsel investigation over politically biased text messages, quickly devolved into partisan sniping. Afterward, Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy acknowledged that “public hearings are a circus.” 

This didn’t deter Schiff, however. “We’re going to do our best to keep them civil, to keep them focused on the facts… but we want to make sure that Bob Mueller is not subject to improper or unprofessional treatment,” Schiff said. “The strategy on the GOP side was we are an extension of the president’s legal defense team. We’re going to see that, I suspect, played out in these hearings.”

He also pushed back when Blitzer noted how often public hearings turn into five-minute-long moments of Congressional grandstanding, with little in the way of actual questions and answers. “Well, we have to make sure that’s not what happens,” Schiff responded. “In addition to making sure whoever does the questioning, in however, whatever manner we do it, we get to the most important points. But also we want to make sure what we do in the Intel committee is not duplicative of what the Judiciary Committee is doing. We want to make sure we maximize the use of time.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.