House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) lied openly Tuesday about the earlier testimony of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, falsely claiming that Vindman thought the president might have broken the law.

Schiff, delivering an opening statement at the fourth public hearing in the impeachment inquiry, claimed that Lt. Col. Vindman had reported his concerns about President Donald Trump’s telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a National Security Council lawyer because he thought Trump might have done something illegal.

“Lt. Col. Vindman’s fear was that the president had broken the law, potentially,” Schiff told the committee.

That statement flatly contradicts what Vindman told the committee earlier that day, as well as in his closed-door testimony before the committee last month.

When he was asked in October whether he thought anything illegal had occurred, Vindman told the committee: “I wasn’t prepaned to necessarily make that kind of judgment. I thought it was troubling and disturbing, but, you know, I guess, I guess I couldn’t say whether it was illegal. I’m not an attorney.”

On Tuesday, in his prepared remarks, Vindman said he found the call “inappropriate” and “improper” — but not “illegal.”

In both the closed-door and public hearings, Vindman testified that he was not a lawyer.

Rep. Chris Stewart summed up Vindman’s testimony — which Vindman did not contradict: “Your concerns regarding this phone call were not legal. They are based on moral, ethical and policy differences.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.