Pelosi wants "the American people to know what that phone call was about," which is, I think she's saying here, all Adam Schiff was doing with his ridiculous paraphrase.

Pelosi called out for lying and defending Schiff’s fake hearing quotes: “Those weren’t the President’s words.” pic.twitter.com/zyS7Sxkn0E

— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) October 3, 2019

Here's the Schiff paraphrase that Pelosi won't disown:

Rep. Schiff re-writes the call transcript for added drama: "I’m going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good, I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand, lots of it, on this and on that, I’m going to put you in touch with people" pic.twitter.com/1rV7BpEN6o

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 26, 2019

Schiff's insidious satirical paraphrase was concocted out of Trump's Ukraine phone call: "The other thing, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me."

You'd think Pelosi would try harder to preserve her credibility, but she's locked into the narrative that her people are the high-minded upholders of morality and nothing they do is for political purposes. She cannot distance herself from Schiff. She's sticking to the story that their side is all good, and Trump finds leverage. From his remarks yesterday:

And then, Schiff went up and he got — as the chairman of the committee, he got up and related a call that didn’t take place. He made up the language. Hard to believe. Nobody has ever seen this. I think he had some kind of a mental breakdown. But he went up to the microphone and he read a statement from the President of the United States as if I were on the call, because what happened is, when he looked at the sheet — which was an exact transcript of my call, done by very talented people that do this — exact, word for word — he said, “Wow, he didn’t do anything wrong.” So he made it up. He went up to a microphone, and, in front of the American people and in Congress, he went out and he gave a whole presentation of words that the President of the United States never said. It has to be a criminal act. It has to be. And he should resign. And some people even say it was treason. But it was a very sad thing.

Trump looks into Schiff's mind. Why did he do it? Theory #1: He lost his mind — "some kind of a mental breakdown." Theory #2: Because he had the real transcript right there and looked at it and saw nothing wrong, he made up something that would be wrong. The sheet of paper he had in his hand didn't say what he needed, so he just said something else, what he wished was on the paper.

ADDED: Schiff's invention might have arisen from reading the whistleblower's complaint, which said: "Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the president used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests." If the transcript of the phone conversation hadn't become public, Schiff's riff might not seem like such a crazy overreach.