Networks of far-right Twitter accounts backing President Donald Trump have spent the weeks after the announcement of an impeachment inquiry attacking and spreading conspiracy theories about Rep. Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chair who is helping lead the impeachment effort.

The accounts both amplify Trump’s own condemnation of Schiff and go substantially further, with some suggesting the high-ranking Democrat be executed for treason.

“Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress,” Trump tweeted in late September, after Schiff explicitly paraphrased the non-verbatim transcript of the call during a committee meeting. “Arrest for Treason?”

Schiff said later in the hearing that his summary of Trump’s call was “meant to be at least part in parody."

The Twitter networks reviewed by BuzzFeed News began to pop up in 2015 to support Trump’s campaign in the lead-up to Republican primaries and organized over private group message rooms, Politico reported in 2017. The accounts amplify each other’s tweets and some have gained over 25,000 followers and tweet and retweet hundreds of times per day. They share messages that promote the Trump campaign’s language and attack his enemies with memes and other posts — giving the president a free and large rapid response apparatus during the impeachment process.


Since the impeachment inquiry began, the accounts have adopted language from the president and other congressional Republicans to characterize key members and events that are relevant to the impeachment inquiry. Many have tweeted multiple times per day with similar language to Trump’s tweets about the impeachment, with some tweets garnering less than 100 retweets and others garnering retweets and likes in the thousands, and have spread their messages to thousands of followers.

“Adam Schiff now doesn’t seem to want the Whistleblower to testify,” Trump tweeted last week. “Must testify to explain why he got my Ukraine conversation sooo wrong, not even close. Did Schiff tell him to do that?”