Adam Schiff by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

Well, that didn’t take long. It’s been what? 12 hours?

As I shared this morning, Adam Schiff and company released several pages of cherry-picked text conversations late last night which revolved around Ukraine and whether Trump had offered a quid pro quo in exchange for an investigation into Biden. My take was that some of the texts raise questions, but that the selective nature of them makes me very suspicious that we weren’t getting the whole story. My final response was that I’m simply not going to play this game.

Looks like holding off judgement was the right call.

We noticed the original tweet was deleted after we posted our fact check.

Here's a screenshot, in case you missed it.

Truth hurts. https://t.co/HHHz0Te5PT pic.twitter.com/ZJ4KDcEGHR

— Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) October 4, 2019

The only supposedly “damning” parts of the text messages involved a man named Bill Taylor insinuating there was a quid pro quo, after which the U.S. Ambassador to the EU corrected his notion. But the line from the media and blue checkmark Twitter was that Taylor was saying what he said because he had actual information of an offered quid pro quo.

Now, it appears that’s not true. Instead, Taylor had read a Politico article well after everything had transpired. Who happened to have contributed to that article? If you guessed Fusion GPS mouthpiece Natasha Bertrand, congrats (if you guessed Ken Dilanian, you were close at least).

Here's a link to the 8/28 Politico article.

"Natasha Bertrand contributed to this report" is a huge red flag.https://t.co/Jr5n2umX1M

— Robin Josephette Biden II (@RobinJosephette) October 4, 2019

This Bill Taylor guy had read something in Politico, written by a collusion truther, and took it as gospel. He then approached some of his superiors with it in these text messages but was shut down unequivocally (click here to see that text message).

Unbelievable. Adam Schiff is as slimy as they come. He put these text messages out there late last night, knowing no one would be available to rebut them right away, all the while knowing Volker had already disproven the narrative he wanted to push. And like good lackeys, the media ran with it and are still running with it.

This is exactly why Schiff and Democrats do not want to release Volker’s full testimony and it’s exactly why I was originally skeptical.

I’ve got a new twitter! Please help by following @bonchieredstate.