Success Quote by Adam Schiff

Schiff’s line is a masterclass in Washington damage control: it sounds like accountability while quietly rationing blame. The key phrase is “thus far,” a small time-bomb of ambiguity that keeps the central premise of the war on life support. It concedes an embarrassing absence without fully abandoning the possibility that the weapons will still materialize somewhere, sometime, if we just keep looking. That rhetorical hedge matters because it preserves political room to maneuver in a moment when certainty is collapsing in public.

“Deeply troubling” does double duty. It signals moral seriousness to an anxious audience, but it also redirects the emotion away from the invasion itself and toward the bureaucratic failure of not finding what was promised. The trouble, in this framing, is less the decision to go to war than the mismatch between the sales pitch and the evidence. That’s not a neutral choice; it’s a way of keeping the debate on technocratic terrain where reform is imaginable and culpability is diffuse.

The pivot to “our intelligence-gathering process” is the tell. By foregrounding “process,” Schiff shifts the locus of responsibility from leaders and motives to systems and safeguards. “Thorough and unbiased investigation” is both a democratic demand and a defensive posture: it implies the speaker isn’t ideologically invested, while also anticipating accusations that any inquiry will be partisan. In the early Iraq-WMD unraveling, this was the only politically survivable posture for many lawmakers: admit enough to appear credible, insist on oversight, and avoid saying the quiet part aloud - that the casus belli may have been built to fail.