Following the Trump defense team’s opening arguments earlier today, House managers held a press conference. They didn’t look too happy. Gone was the hubris they’d displayed just ten days ago as they walked across the Capitol to deliver the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. They appeared subdued, beaten. One reporter asked Adam Schiff if he would comment on White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s allegation that he had coordinated with the whistleblower. The congenital liar Schiff said, “It’s nonsense. I don’t even know who the whistleblower is.”

During his explanation, Schiff referred to the whistleblower as “he or she.” Schiff replied:

Well, he didn’t want to address that specifically because it’s nonsense. I don’t even know who the whistleblower is. The whistleblower came to our committee and he was – and, and the President’s counsel was purposely ambiguous about this and said, ‘Well he got some kind of advice.’ Well the advice that he or she, the whistleblower, got was, ‘You should talk to a lawyer and you should talk to the Inspector General.’ What they also don’t want to tell you is that’s the practice for Democrats, for Republicans, in the House, in the Senate. When a whistleblower contacts the committee and they have every right to, they have every right to talk to our staff, it is encouraged that they do. If they have a serious complaint and it’s within the jurisdiction they’re telling (inaudible), because sometimes whistleblowers will come to us and they have an issue that is not one that deals with the IC, the Intelligence Community, we will refer them somewhere else. But as we would learn, this was very relevant to the Intelligence Community so he was or she was properly encouraged to go to the Inspector General and that’s evidently what they did. The real issue is – they want to punish this whistleblower. Now, they said, well why did Adam Schiff want to call the whistleblower and then not want to call the whistleblower? And they wanted to try to imply some malevolent motive behind this.

We wanted to call the whistleblower when we really didn’t know what the whistleblower had to say and could add. And we didn’t know yet about all these other witnesses, Ambassador Taylor, Ambassador Yovanovitch, Ambassador Volker and Gordon Sondland. We didn’t know about any of that.

But we also didn’t have the whistleblower’s life threatened by the President of the United States, suggesting that the whistleblower is a traitor or a spy. We used to have a way of dealing with traitors and spies. So, yes when we were able to find all these other witnesses, and protect the anonymity of the whistleblower, and make our case without relying on the whistleblower with second hand information, whose life has been put in jeopardy by the President and his allies. Yes, we didn’t want to go there. And the only motive they have is to out the whistleblower is to punish the whistleblower. If they were really interested in what the American people knowing all the facts, they wouldn’t be fighting to make sure this is the first trial in history without witnesses.

I can promise you this, Mick Mulvaney knows a lot more about this than any whistleblower. And John Bolton knows more about this than the whistleblower. And Michael Duffy and Robert Blair and the other witnesses we’d like to talk to. They have first hand information, some of them have first-hand conversations with the President. So why is it that the administration doesn’t want them outed?Why doesn’t the administration want them to talk to the American people? Because they know it would only incriminate the President.