Earlier this morning, President Trump fired off a couple of tweets aimed at the memo kerfuffle and the Sunday shows.

Representative Devin Nunes, a man of tremendous courage and grit, may someday be recognized as a Great American Hero for what he has exposed and what he has had to endure!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2018

Completely agree. Without Nunes’s leadership, we wouldn’t know, for a fact, that Democrat oppo research was laundered by the FBI and used to authorize surveillance of an American citizen…a citizen who has never been accused of anything more serious than mopery and self-promotion.

Then came the second one

Little Adam Schiff, who is desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington, right up there with Comey, Warner, Brennan and Clapper! Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2018

Generally, I don’t think this kind of calling out of people works all that well. Washington is a small town and eventually the administration is going to find some issue in which Schiff is a key player…perhaps a law that makes public masturbation a constitutional right…and then this tweet will have to be walked back. But that point is in the future.

While the tweet is harsh, it has the virtue of being true enough that even if Schiff were not a public person that Trump would not be guilty of either libel or slander.

It is all but formally established, for instance, that Schiff burned CNN’s Manu Raju to the freakin ground by leaking Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee as it was in progress but mischaracterizing the testimony to deliberately crate an anti-Trump story. Eventually, CNN had to retract the story because that apple turned out to be a horse dropping.

Schiff’s method of lying was on display over the weekend where he slips something that could be classified into an interview. Then his minions point reporters at the classified part and the reporters turn that into a scoop. Of course the “classified material” can’t be validated and Schiff falls back on the “I’d have to kill you if I told you” song-and-dance. An example happened just recently:

Mark Zaid, an attorney who has worked many national defense cases dealing with the handling of classified information, also said it’s possible the Schiff release reveals classified information.

“At first blush I would have some concerns about the details in this statement as to whether it crosses a classification line, but it is possible Rep. Schiff, having had access to the underlying classified information, knows these points are in unclassified paragraphs,” Zaid said. “So much of these back and forths about the memo are in a gray area on classification.”

This is what Schiff is doing with his alternative memo

Friends don't let friends on @HouseIntelComm compromise good sources & methods. Schiff deliberately & unnecessarily loaded up his memo w/many sources & methods that shouldn't be released & he knows it. There's a 0% chance this isn't deliberate to play games, meddle & obstruct.

— Lee Zeldin (@RepLeeZeldin) February 5, 2018

He’s lying about what it claims. He’s loading his memo up with legitimately classified information so the committee won’t vote to release it. Then he will use the refusal to release the memo as evidence that his lies are actually a suppressed truth.

In an institution awash in odious characters, Adam Schiff is in a singular category. Trump calling him out was way overdue.