President Donald Trump on Thursday demanded that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff resign from Congress over his accusations that Trump conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump, in a Thursday morning tweet, accused Schiff (D-Calif.), without evidence, of spending the past two years “knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking” about the Russia investigation.
He “should be forced to resign from Congress!” Trump added.
Schiff has emerged as a target of the right this week after Attorney General William Barr’s announcement over the weekend that special counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government and that there was not enough evidence to charge the president with obstruction of justice.
High-level Republicans from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) to White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway have repeatedly called for Schiff to step down from his post leading the House Intelligence Committee for promoting the collusion theory.
Schiff and Trump have constantly butted heads since Trump came into office, as Schiff pushed for a more thorough investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia as a member of the minority party for the first two years of the president’s term.
The congressman had been a staple on cable news shows throughout the Russia investigation, maintaining that there was evidence Trump had conspired to work with Russian operatives. In the days since Barr summarized Mueller’s findings, he pledged to push forward with his own committee’s inquiry into the issue.
President Trump in an interview broadcast Friday criticized the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for giving the FBI a controversial dossier “for very evil purposes,” keeping up a weeklong series of criticisms of the former senator that has roiled the Republican Party.
Trump’s latest fight with McCain, which began over the weekend and almost seven months after McCain’s death, has centered on the president’s seemingly festering resentment that McCain gave to the FBI a dossier of unverified claims about Trump and Russia that had been compiled by a former British spy named Christopher Steele.
“If you realize, about three days ago it came out that his main person gave to the FBI the fake news dossier. It was a fake and a fraud, it was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. They gave it to John McCain, who gave it to the FBI for very evil purposes. That’s not good,” the president told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business in the interview aired Friday.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, and the Democratic National Committee tapped Washington firm Fusion GPS, which then turned to Steele, to conduct research about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin in 2016.