Rachel Maddow takes Meghan McCain to task on Adam Schiff and impeachment on 'The View'
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow appeared on The View Thursday, during which she discussed President Donald Trump and the possibility of impeachment. But it was her exchange with Meghan McCain that stole the show.
“This was blowing up all over Twitter yesterday, at least conservative Twitter,” McCain said. “It turns out that Adam Schiff knew about the whistleblower complaint in advance. The whistleblower spoke to a House aide about it, and then the aide told Schiff. Even if that’s standard practice, when Schiff was recently asked directly, he said, quote, ‘We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.’ Now that’s a lie, and I keep saying that Adam Schiff is the wrong person to do this because if we are going to go forward with impeachment, it needs to be as clean and look as nonpartisan as possible.”
Maddow was calmly able to take on McCain’s theory, which has been popular on conservative websites, letting her know that with Schiff being the House Intelligence Committee chairman, it was routine to receive tips from whistleblowers.
“He didn’t speak with the whistleblower,” Maddow responded. “Whistleblowers come forward all the time to the House Intelligence Committee, which is run by Democrats, and to the Senate Committee run by Republicans, and they say this happens all the time, we always do the same thing. We have them speak with a staffer, and then the staffer tells them to get a lawyer and file a whistleblower complaint. On the House side, they say this happens two or three times a month. This is a normal thing.”
After McCain and fellow conservative Abby Huntsman continued to express that Schiff dramatized the call to increase the chances of impeachment, Maddow pushed back.
“He actually was reticent on impeachment,” she said. “As the head of the Intelligence Committee, he has been very much in the public eye on this stuff, but he’s not been one of the people pushing for it.”
Though Huntsman agreed that Trump’s Ukraine scandal is potentially an impeachable offense, she went on to imply that Maddow contributed to a “sense of outrage fatigue over all the president’s previous scandals.”
“I think it’s a very good point,” Maddow said. “That’s what happens when you have a scandal-ridden presidency with stuff that happens all the time, that any other presidency, would have already led to impeachment.”
Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
Want daily pop culture news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here for Yahoo Entertainment & Lifestyle’s newsletter.