- 3 months ago
The California congressman talks with David Remnick about federal authorities’ inquiry into his mortgage, the Supreme Court’s primary role in enabling this Administration, and why he thinks the rule of law in America is “hanging by a thread.”
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00:00The president of the United States seems to really dislike you.
00:03Yeah.
00:04Why?
00:05I live rent-free in that guy's head, and let me tell you, it's pretty scary in there.
00:09I have a suspicion, which I hesitate to articulate because it's kind of a vain suspicion.
00:14Please.
00:14But I will share it anyway.
00:16During the Russia investigation, I'm deposing Jared Kushner, and it is just shortly after
00:22Trump has first attacked me on his Twitter account.
00:26Sleazy Adam Schiff, corrupt this, blah, blah, blah, spends too much time on TV, pushing
00:31the hoax, something like that.
00:33And I remember at the time being desperate to respond, being attacked by the president.
00:37At the time, a few months into Trump, one, that was very unusual for a president of the
00:42United States.
00:42Unpleasant or flattering?
00:44Well, my colleagues were all deeply jealous of me, but I was frantic to figure out how
00:50I was going to respond.
00:52This was going to tens of millions of people.
00:53I would soon learn, because it became quite routine, there was no way I could respond,
00:59at least not in a way that the people he was talking to would ever hear me respond.
01:03But nevertheless, I remember being on the House floor, and Mike Thompson, my colleague from
01:07Northern California, grabs my arm, and he says, Adam, you should tweet back, Mr. President,
01:12when they go low, we go high, go fuck yourself.
01:16And I so wanted to do it.
01:19If I write a book one day of the tweets I wish I'd sent, that'll be on the cover.
01:22So I'm, like a week later or two weeks later, I'm deposing Jared Kushner in the Russian
01:28investigation.
01:29And during one of the breaks, he comes up to me in an ingratiating way, in a calculated
01:35and ingratiating way.
01:37And he says, you know, you do a really good job on TV.
01:39And I said, well, thanks.
01:43Apparently, your father-in-law doesn't think so.
01:46And he said, oh, yes, he does.
01:48And that's why.
01:49I think in the same way that Donald Trump picks his cabinet by watching Fox, he picks
01:56his enemies by seeing who's effective against him on TV.
01:59Now, he loves you so much that he wrote on Truth Social to the Attorney General, Pam, I've
02:06reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that essentially, same old story as last time,
02:10all talk, no action, nothing is being done.
02:12What about Comey, Adam Shifty Schiff, Letitia, question mark, question mark, question mark.
02:17They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.
02:20Now, Comey has been encountered, Letitia James as well.
02:26Well, what's the status of this accusation against you?
02:30And I know there are limits to what you can and cannot say.
02:33Well, you know.
02:34But please do.
02:35I can tell you what I know, which is frankly all I read in the paper.
02:39We've had no word from the Justice Department, no communication from them.
02:44But it's coming like Christmas, no?
02:46You know, they're, I think, having a problem, at least as I read in the paper.
02:52What's the supposed case?
02:53The problem is they don't have a supposed case.
02:56But spell out the accusation, if you would.
02:58The accusation is a loose accusation of mortgage fraud.
03:03And they're making it against all their political opponents.
03:06I know that we've been completely open with my mortgage brokers, bankers.
03:11So there's no there there.
03:14And they know it too.
03:15The question is, I think, are they going to fire everyone in Maryland
03:19so they can bring in another Lindsey Halligan like they did in Virginia?
03:25But we've seen how well that has gone in Virginia with both of the cases they brought against.
03:30The other two Trump mentioned in that angry tweet having their cases thrown out.
03:35You seem rather serene about this.
03:38To me, what I'm facing is, frankly, the same fight I've been in since he became president the first time.
03:45In the beginning, it was a forward-leaning democracy-preserving effort to impeach a president who was abusing his power
03:54and then hold him accountable through the January 6th committee.
03:58This is the same fight, but now it is very much a defensive battle.
04:02And now he has new tools to abuse, including the Justice Department.
04:05But it is the same fight.
04:06He talks a lot about Russia, Russia, Russia, hoax, hoax, hoax.
04:09Did you get anything wrong about that?
04:11No, I don't think we got anything wrong.
04:15I do think that at the end of the investigation, Mueller concluded, and I said throughout the investigation—
04:22Robert Mueller, yeah.
04:23Robert Mueller, I said throughout the investigation this was very possible,
04:27that he could not prove the crime of conspiracy bound a reasonable doubt.
04:31A lot of Democrats think there was, in the rearview mirror, some overreach, legal overreach,
04:37in the attempt to bring down Donald Trump.
04:40Do any of those cases seem like overreach or ill-advised in any way?
04:46Well, certainly the federal cases, I would say no.
04:50The January 6th case, it's hard to imagine a bigger crime against a democracy than incitement of insurrection.
04:58It wasn't a day of love, in your view.
04:59It was—I was there.
05:01It was no day of love.
05:03Likewise, the president's not only bringing hundreds of classified documents to his residents,
05:09but lying about it by obstructing the investigation into it, also very serious.
05:14In terms of the civil case, you know, I will let Leticia James speak for herself on that case.
05:24You seem a little dubious of it.
05:26No, no, I wouldn't say that at all.
05:27But whether the same standard in that case was applied against Donald Trump as would have been applied against others,
05:39I would leave her to speak to.
05:41I just haven't—I wouldn't be able to compare what kind of cases I brought as a prosecutor in New York
05:47without knowing what kind of process cases I brought in New York.
05:50But I do think that the argument of some kind of equivalence is a false narrative.
06:00And I hear it all the time on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
06:03I hear all the time how the Justice Department under Merrick Garland,
06:07under that horrible partisan Merrick Garland, was so weaponized against Donald Trump.
06:12And that's a complete fiction and fabrication.
06:13Do you feel that Merrick Garland moved too slowly, too cautiously?
06:17I absolutely do, yeah.
06:19And this is the irony of it, of attacking Merrick Garland,
06:22which is they moved with alacrity against the foot soldiers who broke into the Capitol that day.
06:30They moved not at all for an entire year against the higher-ups.
06:34Why did Merrick Garland move so slowly?
06:36What about his character or tactics or strategy led him to behave that way?
06:43The Justice Department in the first Trump was abused and made partisan.
06:53And he wished to restore the department's reputation for independence.
06:57Now, what they did in the first Trump Justice Department is peanuts compared to today.
07:02But nevertheless, Merrick Garland wanted to restore the reputation of the department
07:06for strict nonpartisanship.
07:08And that made him very reluctant to pursue an investigation of the president.
07:15Too reluctant.
07:16Ultimately, that gave the Supreme Court the time it needed to drag things out further
07:21and make the case against Trump go away completely when it could have been brought to fruition.
07:26And we might be in a very different place today.
07:28But I think it was that laudable aim that, taken too far,
07:32amounted to a kind of immunity for the president.
07:35I have to think that Donald Trump feels two things about the prosecutions against him
07:40and the impeachments.
07:41He feels that he prevailed.
07:43And that fills him with a sense of invulnerability at this point and rage at the same time.
07:49Do you agree with that?
07:50And how does that shape his behavior as president?
07:53In his own head, it's often difficult to figure out, okay, what does the president really believe?
08:00Because I think what the president really believes is you make your own truth through repetition.
08:07So whether he's talked himself into his victimization, he's always viewed himself as a victim of everything.
08:11Whether he truly believes it, who really knows, is probably less important than what does he do on the basis of whatever belief he has.
08:23But I've also thought there's this interesting comparison of blind spots.
08:30Trump, being a pathological liar, can't envision anyone else committed to the truth.
08:36It's just an alien idea to him.
08:37It's a blind spot.
08:38Likewise, but from a completely opposite perspective, Bob Mueller, such a person of integrity and truth,
08:49that I think he found it impossible to believe that Bill Barr would so betray him,
08:54as Barr went on to do by misrepresenting Mueller's report.
08:59In a way, they have kind of an interesting but opposite blind spot.
09:02One, unable to see people acting so unscrupulously because they're so – they comport themselves with such integrity like Mueller.
09:13And the other, like Trump, who has no moral compass and doesn't believe anyone else does either.
09:18Do you think there's anything ruinous about the Epstein situation for Trump?
09:22Or is this something that will fade like so many other things?
09:24If there are ruinous things in the files, the public will never see them.
09:29Bondi and company will make sure they never reach the public eye.
09:34But for another, I think he's almost impervious to dirt.
09:39One thing I get tired of hearing, and this has been going on for years, is Democrats saying,
09:45you know, my Republican colleagues in the halls of Congress allow to me,
09:49they admit to me, that they can't stand Donald Trump, and then they don't act on it.
09:54Why not?
09:55In other words, if you're – I ask a lot of people this.
09:58Are these jobs so swell?
10:00Is it so great being a congressman or a senator that you don't want to risk going back to your home state or district
10:06and being a lawyer or a teacher or whatever it was before that you sell your principles and soul?
10:14No, no.
10:14The job isn't worth it, and no job would be worth it.
10:17And at that level, I don't understand it at all.
10:20At a different level, I understand it completely.
10:22They're afraid.
10:24And I talked to one senator, for example, along with Tim Kaine,
10:27have been offering resolutions, war powers resolutions.
10:30So I was working the Republican senators.
10:32I know that a lot of them are deeply uncomfortable with this blowing up of ships
10:35and more uncomfortable with the idea of going to war in Venezuela.
10:38But I had one very senior Republican tell me,
10:41you have to understand, it's not just that they – that he will punish us.
10:47He'll punish our whole state.
10:50So they're worried about their constituents.
10:52They're worried about themselves.
10:53They're worried about their personal safety.
10:55And then there is also this endless process of rationalization, which goes like this.
11:00Somebody worse will come.
11:02If I don't vote for RFK Jr., you should see the guy they've teed up to run against me in the primary.
11:09If I don't vote for Pete Hegzeff, I would be primered.
11:13I'd be gone.
11:13You should see who would come after me.
11:15My feeling is let me see him.
11:18I mean if you're going to just vote the same way anyway, how much worse could it be?
11:22I don't really derive any satisfaction from hearing private misgivings.
11:26I long since gained any solace from that.
11:29If you're going to vote with him on these things that are destroying the country, then why be here?
11:36And some of them are deciding, as you say, it's just not worth it to them anymore, and they are leaving the Congress.
11:42In drips and draps.
11:43Yeah.
11:44You raised Venezuela, and rightly so.
11:46The Senate and House have ordered investigations into whether Pete Hegzeff ordered the killing of unarmed survivors in one of those boat strikes that's been going on in the Caribbean.
11:56I don't know how many have already taken place.
11:58The numbers are growing.
12:00Is there really actual bipartisan concern about these actions, and how much longer can they go on?
12:08What's coming down the road here?
12:10There is bipartisan concern.
12:13We've had now two votes on war powers resolutions.
12:15We've had two Republicans who have voted to end the strikes or to withdraw any implied congressional approval of these things.
12:27We need four to be able to win in the Senate.
12:30We need, obviously, to carry the House, and we would need to do it by a veto-proof majority.
12:35Nevertheless, even in the absence of veto-proof majority, it makes a statement, and it has an impact.
12:42The president does pay attention when he's voted against by his own party.
12:46But up until now, the Republicans seem to take turns as to who can vote against the president
12:51and rarely allow that more than four people do so at one time.
12:56By and large, all we're seeing is verbal expressions of concern, occasional votes of concern.
13:04The Republicans who are now saying they're concerned about these reports that Hegseth ordered the murder of these survivors on one of these ships,
13:14I think does deeply concern them.
13:16The question is, will they go beyond concern?
13:18They both said they'll do an investigation in the House and Senate.
13:23So let's say this investigation reveals that, yes, there were survivors and, yes, they were killed.
13:28Is that a war crime?
13:30It would be a war crime.
13:31If those reports are accurate, it's a war crime.
13:33It's also murder.
13:35Will Republicans take the next step to hold anyone accountable?
13:39I'm very doubtful about that.
13:41One of the great spectacles, and there's so many every day in political life, is the testimony in the committee hearings involving Kash Patel and your committee and Pam Bondi as well.
13:56The technique being employed by Kash Patel and Pam Bondi seems like something new.
14:03The way they don't answer your questions and then attack personally, whether it's you or anybody else on the committee.
14:09If you watch Bondi in particular, it was so obvious because she kept turning to her notes for the pre-planned attack on Senator Blumenthal or Senator Whitehouse or Senator Schiff or whoever.
14:20Does it work?
14:21Part of – well, it only works if the Republicans allow it to work.
14:25If the Republicans in that committee said, actually, we need to know, did Tom Holman, the White House boarder czar, allegedly take $50,000 from undercover FBI agents?
14:41And if he did, why was the case dismissed?
14:44And if it was, was he allowed to keep the money?
14:48I mean pretty basic oversight question of a top-ranking Trump official.
14:53And how did the Republicans respond?
14:56With silence.
14:58And allowed Bondi to simply attack anybody asking that question.
15:02But it's also an illustration of who they're really speaking to in those hearings, which is an audience of one person.
15:09Pam Bondi knows the only person that she owes her job to is Donald Trump.
15:12The only one she needs to please is Donald Trump.
15:14So that's what Bondi does.
15:17And as long as she does that, she'll never have a problem in a hearing with her boss.
15:21But does it matter that the institution involved is up in arms against its leader now?
15:26The FBI, for example, seems to be in its rank and file apoplectic about Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, that this leadership has made them furious in any number of ways.
15:39So does Kash Patel last?
15:42I don't know if he lasts.
15:43If he doesn't last, it's because he keeps embarrassing the president.
15:48The president doesn't care whether Kash Patel is competent.
15:50He does not like to be embarrassed, though.
15:53For Patel, for example, to say that the suspect was in custody after Charlie Kirk's horrible murder when it wasn't true because Patel wanted to leap out there on social media ahead of people and say things he knew nothing about.
16:08That is a humiliation for the president.
16:11And you can count on Patel to keep on embarrassing and humiliating the president because he's incompetent and in way over his head.
16:24Who else would you put in that category of incompetence in the key cabinet positions?
16:28Well, I don't know that I would put her in the category of competent, but willfully destructive, I would say Tulsi Gabbard.
16:35She does not get as much attention as the rest of these –
16:39Well, it's hard to hear every voice in the choir.
16:41Yes, it is.
16:43It's only an asterisk in articles now about Venezuela that the whole predicate of these attacks is a lie.
16:56That the intelligence community assessed that Trende Aragua, this Venezuelan game, was not being controlled by Maduro, by the government.
17:05They weren't sent to infiltrate America and carry out terrorist attacks or whatever.
17:11And so the National Intelligence Council writes this report.
17:14They speak truth to power.
17:16And they're told by Gabbard's chief of staff basically to rewrite their conclusion.
17:23And ultimately they're fired until analysts know that if they write things that contradict the president's preferred narrative, they're gone.
17:31Since it's the holiday season and we want to bring nothing but good cheer to our listeners, I must ask this.
17:38I know you'll say the fever will break step by step with things like the midterm elections and the coming to an end of this term.
17:46But we've had historians on and other political analysts say, look, remember, this is not the first bad period of American history.
17:55We've had the Civil War, for God's sake.
17:58We've had all kinds of periods of enormous crisis and even existential feeling crises.
18:06Tell me what your greatest immediate fears are and maybe go back to a little bit about how they can be avoided and tamped down and for us to get from month to month, year to year.
18:20In the category of deepest fear, most profound concern, is that somehow they're successful in thwarting the one remaining mechanism for accountability, and that is the election.
18:37Barring that, their time will come to an end.
18:43What we do right now will determine how quickly it passes, how much damage is done in the meantime, and making sure that we have a free and fair election has got to be at the top of our priority list because the Supreme Court will not save us.
18:59Republicans in Congress will not save us, certainly not based on current conduct.
19:03Will the coherence of the Democratic Party save us?
19:07I think what will save us are the American people themselves.
19:13The most important players in our democracy are what is going to save this democracy, and that is the people with the title of citizen.
19:21And if you look at what the citizens are doing, gathering by the millions to protest the president, what the citizens just did in this last election in California, there were lines around the block to vote on a ballot measure about reapportionment?
19:39Seriously?
19:40Reapportionment?
19:41I mean, who would have thought five people would turn out to vote on reapportionment?
19:44But if anything, that election in California was the purest referendum on the president.
19:51In New Jersey, in Virginia, in New York City, it was a competition of candidates.
19:56In California, there was no competition of candidates.
19:59It was simply a referendum on the president and his policies, and it drove people to the polls.
20:05So it's going to be the citizens that save us.
20:10We need to make sure that their votes still matter.
20:12The most successful tool that we've had has been litigation.
20:16We do very well in the lower courts.
20:18The Supreme Court, obviously, still a big problem.
20:22But even delaying harms is valuable when a country is marching towards a kind of dictatorship.
20:30The way I view my job, every day, and I think this should be the same way that we all view our jobs,
20:37every day we need to think about what can I do today to mitigate the harms?
20:42I love how in Chicago, where they learn from the experience in Los Angeles,
20:46you have parents driving other parents' kids to school so that their parents don't risk being arrested and deported.
20:55I love how people are dropping off food to families so they don't have to risk going to the store.
20:59People are taking steps to support their neighbors, to support each other.
21:05These public servants who are getting fired or quitting are doing something really important to serve the country.
21:13And the federal employees who are staying on the job are doing something really important to save the country.
21:19There are just lots of people showing millions of acts of kindness, of devotion to our democracy,
21:27that give me the confidence to know we're going to get through this.
21:30Adam Schiff, thank you.
21:32Thanks, David. Great to be with you.
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