Adam Schiff: Trump’s Power Isn’t Absolute “But His Incompetence Is”

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Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) took President Donald Trump to task for his assertion that the economy would reopen soon amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“There is no ‘reopening’ without a plan to get the virus under control and keep it that way,” Schiff wrote on Twitter. “Trump’s false claims of absolute power are alarming, of course. But his failure to scale up testing is unforgiveable and deadly. His power isn’t absolute—but his incompetence is.”

Schiff’s criticisms came after Trump ignored the Constitution and claimed that he has “absolute authority” as president.

“I have the ultimate authority,” the president told reporters yesterday in response to a question about what authority he has to reopen the economy. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be. … It’s total. The governors know that.”

Schiff is presently conducting an investigation into the Trump administration’s coronavirus response.

“We are right now going through our intelligence holdings. What did the intelligence community make us aware of at the end of last year or earlier this year? Other committees are doing like analyses,” Schiff told MSNBC’s “AM Joy” on Sunday.

“It is very important, I think, in reviewing the intelligence component to this to realize the intelligence piece is just one piece of the warnings coming to the administration. A lot of those warnings were in the public domain. They came from public health organizations, like WHO or CDC or his own National Security Council, and ignored those warnings.”

He added: “We are diving deeply into what does the intelligence community know, what resources we would bring there, and what do we need to do prospectively to better protect the country in the future. That last piece, how do we protect the country in the future, is really the mission of that independent commission we based on, we used the model the 9/11 commission.”