WASHINGTON: — Democrat Adam Schiff spent two tumultuous years front and center in President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry. Five years ago, the nation watched as Schiff stood before his House colleagues and implored them to vote to impeach a president for coercing an ally to find dirt on a political opponent: He said then-Republican candidate Trump must not be allowed “to engage a foreign power against his next rival.” “If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost,” he said to the senators, his voice cracking at one point.
The Republican-led Senate wasn’t persuaded, and senators voted to acquit President Trump of the Democratic-led impeachment charges over his interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. A year later his backers stormed the Capitol, attempting to overturn his defeat and he would survive a second impeachment.
Now Trump is headed back to a White House power base with more political capital than before, and he will also be stronger than ever in Congress — the Republican one that is already mostly unified. And Adam Schiff, one of Trump’s most ardent foils, was sworn into the Senate on Monday as part of a Democratic caucus that is going into the minority and has been restrained so far in challenging the returning president and taking more of a wait-and-see approach about how he will use his remaining weeks in office.
As California’s new senator, Adam Schiff insists he won’t shy away from familiar ground — opposing Trump when he so sees fit. But he’s also aiming to be known for bipartisanship, too, after campaigning in Republican portions of his state and making a point to learn more about rural issues that had not been in his portfolio representing an urban Los Angeles House district.
“I think being there and people getting to know me and kick the tires a bit, I think that helps sort of offset some of the kind of Fox News stereotypes,” Adam Schiff said of Fox’s attention to him as he challenged Trump in his first term. He says he also views that outreach as a chance to get an understanding of the Democrats’ path forward after losses in the November elections.
Adam Schiff was sworn in weeks ahead of the new Congress, which begins Jan. 3, since he is filling the remainder of longtime Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat, after she died last year. He is joined in the Senate by Democratic colleague Andy Kim of New Jersey, who previously served in the House and is completing the remainder of former Sen. Bob Menendez’s term after he resigned following a conviction on federal bribery charges.
Bipartisanship was a priority for Feinstein, who frequently reached out across party lines and cultivated personal relationships with fellow senators. But her dealings with Republicans were continually assailed by liberal voters in California.
Feinstein “was able to do a couple things at once and I’m going to need to attempt that, as well.… It’s working with others so we can deliver for the state; it’s reaching across party lines so we can get things done, but also stand up and defend people’s rights and their freedom and their values when they are threatened,” Adam Schiff told The Associated Press in an interview before his swearing-in.
Karl adds that those priorities will often conflict with the age of Trump, “and so I’ll have to strive to do both.”
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who has met with Adam Schiff as he gears up to what would be a historic trial in the Senate, told me that he believes Adam Schiff is asking the “right questions” when it comes to other senators and not “opining at every opportunity.”
“Everyone knows what he’s capable of, but at the same time, he understands that he is a freshman,” Schatz says, “and it certainly does not go unnoticed when someone of his caliber understands that they’re coming in here as part of a team.
But Adam Schiff, who was censured last year by House Republicans for his role in investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia, will not be able to shed his long-standing portrayal as a chief Trump antagonist right away. The former House Intelligence Committee chairman is better known than most of his incoming freshman classmates, and he has been calling out Trump on social media in recent weeks, trashing some of the president’s Cabinet nominees while many of his fellow Democrats stay silent.
“Should automatically DEBUG APPLY, but chousenate must still do it”, Adam Schiff last week posted on X about FBI director nominee Kash Patel, a former GOP House intelligence staff member, who “acts more like an internet troll than FBI Director,” and that the “Senate must reject him.”
He could also become part of the story — Trump has promised retribution against those he sees as political enemies. President Joe Biden has been weighing preventive pardons for aides and allies such as Schiff, who sought to hold Trump accountable for his campaign to subvert the 2020 election. Trump has at one point suggested that Schiff should be arrested for treason and has referred to him as the president’s “enemy from within.”
Adam Schiff, however, says he doesn’t believe it’s necessary. He said Biden should not use his waning days in office to protect himself or anyone else Trump is targeting.
And the former prosecutor has a deep well of experience at fending off Republican attacks. After the Censure of the House (while fellow California Rep. Kevin McCarthy was speaker and Schiff was already campaigning for Feinstein’s Senate seat), Adam Schiff made his way to McCarthy’s district and met with local leaders. He recalled that when an interviewer at a conservative news outlet there brought up McCarthy saying he is a liar, “I think I responded something along the lines of well, when it comes to Kevin, I’m sure he means that as some form of compliment,” Schiff said.
Adam Schiff is unlikely to pursue his fellow senators in that manner, and said he will refrain on those types of attacks because “the Senate is a very different place culturally than the House right now.” He has already sought to cultivate ties with Republicans, like the incoming senator from Montana, Tim Sheehy, with whom he recently spoke about collaborating on wildfire legislation important to both their states.
And he might earn at least some grudging respect from more seasoned Senate Republicans, some of whom offered moments of praise for him during the 2020 impeachment trial, even as they strongly disagreed with his premise and ultimately voted to acquit Mr. Trump.
After the first day of arguments, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina shook his hand and said he was proud of him. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who will become the next Senate majority leader, said at one point that Schiff “was impassioned and they’ve made a pretty good case.”
Adam Schiff told me that he had “a little bit” the sense that some Republican senators “were a bit surprised that I wasn’t this caricature,” as well as that the Senate is more of “a collegial place” than is the House. “I don’t believe it was a wounding introduction,” he said.
