Adam Schiff, Democrat chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and Grand Poobah of the Impeachment Inquisition Past and Future, earlier this week attacked President Donald Trump for daring to criticize Beijing’s handling of the China Virus. He claims Trump has “chosen to go after China” in an attempt to “deflect attention away from the administration’s terrible mishandling of this virus.”

Beyond setting up his next inquisition on the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, Schiff has another reason to be the one deflecting: His party’s Russia-collusion hoax took another couple of body blows this week.

Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell wrote a letter to Schiff informing him that 6,000 pages of transcripts from all 53 interviews the Intel Committee conducted in its Russia probe “can be released to the public without any concerns of disclosing classified material.” Grenell then told Schiff, “In the interests of transparency and accountability, I urge you to honor your previous public statements, and your Committee’s unanimous vote on this matter, to release all 53 cleared transcripts to all Members of Congress and the American public as soon as possible.”

Despite review of 43 of those transcripts having been completed nearly a year ago (well before Grenell took the helm in February), Schiff has refused to release them. Why? Because the Democrats’ collusion narrative was a BIG lie, and Schiff knows it. Unfortunately, far too many Americans don’t, and Schiff would very much prefer to keep it that way.

Schiff, of course, blames the DNI’s office for the delay. But after his many pompous declarations of having “direct evidence” of Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia, Schiff has yet to provide a scrap of it.

That fact is all the more remarkable given Robert Mueller’s total failure to come up with anything incriminating. And that failure itself is magnified by the scope of Mueller’s probe, which is the next bit of news on the collusion front this week.

We already knew his net was quite wide. But on Wednesday, the Justice Department released a Rod Rosenstein memo from August 2017 laying out an even broader scope for Mueller’s probe after Rosenstein established it in May 2017. That includes Mueller’s ability to continue investigating Michael Flynn after the FBI’s despicable efforts to entrap him, as well as to pursue Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and George Papadopolous.

As The Federalist’s Sean Davis observes, Rosenstein’s memo “was riddled with conspiracy theories lifted straight from the bogus dossier of Christopher Steele.” The dossier bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC, and that the FBI knew — or should have known — was hot garbage when agents used it as the basis for surveilling the Trump campaign. This confirmation of the belief that Rosenstein likewise relied on it for empowering Mueller nearly a year later is damning.

The 2016 election was nearly four years ago and we’re still learning fresh details about just how depraved Democrats and their allies in the deep state really were.