12.13.18

TURNING THE TABLES
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On Nov. 18, Trump tweeted, “So funny to see little
Adam Schitt [sic] talking about the fact that Acting
Attorney General Matt Whitaker was not approved by
the Senate, but not mentioning the fact that Bob Mueller
(who is highly conflicted) was not approved by the Senate!”
Special counsels do not need to be approved by the
Senate, but attorneys general do, per the Constitution.
Last week, Trump nominated former Attorney General
William Barr to return to the position. Meanwhile,
Mueller’s investigation is picking up speed with recent
sentencing memos filed on Trump’s former National
Security Advisor Michael Flynn, former campaign chairman
Paul Manafort and former personal lawyer Michael
Cohen.
“There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald
Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict
him,” Schiff said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS.
“He may be the first president in quite some time to face
the real prospect of jail time.”
Schiff recently spoke with the Pasadena Weekly to
discuss the new power dynamic in Washington, how
Democrats plan to hold the Trump administration accountable
and what’s next for the Russia investigation.
Pasadena Weekly: What message do you think voters
sent on Election Day?
Rep. Adam Schiff: They sent a message that they
want to place a check and balance on this administration.
They want Congress to be focused on bread and
butter issues, like how families make ends meet and
keeping the cost of health care within reason. But also
that they don’t want this president to have unrestricted
power, that he’s just too unstable and too inclined to tear
up the foundations of our democratic institutions.
What are your main priorities when Democrats
take control of the House, and what can they get done
with control of just one branch?
Our first priority is going to be to offer a positive
agenda for the country that addresses the economic
changes that are going on, that makes sure more Americans
have an opportunity to live the American Dream,
that brings down the cost of prescription drugs. But I
also think that we’re going to need to do oversight that
has been lacking for the last two years. There’s not a
great expectation that our legislative agenda will get
through the Senate, but we do want to be able to show
the country the priorities that we have if they entrust us
with the full government in 2020. On the oversight side
of things, there are numerable allegations of corruption
and malfeasance within the administration. We’re
going to have to prioritize; we aren’t going to be able
to look into everything that has come to our attention.
We’ll have to look at the most serious matters first. It’s
everything from the ties between the Trump campaign
and Russia to the president’s potential efforts to use
the instruments of state power to censor the press by
raising postal rates on Amazon to go after the Washington
Post, to holding up the merger of CNN’s parent to
punish CNN, to violations of the emolument clause. We
just saw reports yesterday of how much the Saudis were
spending at Trump hotels to curry favor with the Trump
administration. There are a whole range of important
oversight priorities.
What can Democrats, Republicans and the Trump
administration work together on in the New Year?
The country could badly use an investment in infrastructure.
That would be good for the economy, it would
help put Americans back to work, it would certainly help
repair a lot of our decaying roads and bridges and highways
and renewable energy infrastructure and airports,
and that ought to be completely nonpartisan. So that’s a
fruitful area to work together. The president at times has
indicated interest in working to bring the cost of prescription
drugs down. If he’s willing to buck some of the
people in his own administration to work with Democrats
on it, we can find common ground there. There are
any number of opportunities for us to get things done for
“There are any number of
investigative threads that
we were pursuing when the
Republicans abruptly ended
their participation in the
investigation, so we want to
make sure the job is done
with thoroughness.”
— US Rep. Adam Schiff
the American people. I hope
the president will be open to
doing that.
What are some of the leads
or witnesses in the Russia
investigation that the Republicans
refused to follow up
on that you will follow up on
come January?
One that I’m particularly
concerned about is the allegations
that the Russians were
laundering money through
the Trump Organization. We know the Trump Organization
was lying about its efforts to build a Trump Tower
in Moscow, efforts that continued through the middle
of 2016, and efforts in which the Trump Organization
sought to enlist the help of the Kremlin and offer
Putin a penthouse suite, reportedly, but we don’t know
whether the financial ties are much broader than that.
If the Russians were laundering money through the
Trump Organization that would be powerful leverage
they would have over the president of the United States.
So that certainly is a priority. There are any number of
investigative threads that we were pursuing when the
Republicans abruptly ended their participation in the
investigation, so we want to make sure the job is done
with thoroughness.
Have you seen any indication that the acting attorney
general has interfered with the Mueller investigation,
and are you worried that Bill Barr will interfere
if he is confirmed?
We have no visibility into what role Whitaker is playing,
and that’s of grave concern. He auditioned for the
part by bashing the Mueller investigation and talking
about how he can secretly suffocate the investigation.
We will work hard to expose any involvement that he
has as long as he’s with the Justice Department. In terms
of Barr, he’s made some concerning remarks about not
only the Mueller team but also he’s given credence to the
president’s efforts to prosecute his political rivals and
reopen the Uranium One investigation. Those things are
deeply concerning, but I don’t put Barr in the same category
as Whitaker. Barr is plainly qualified and has already
been attorney general; he was a fairly mainstream
and conservative attorney general. Were it not for the
concerning comments he’s made about the Mueller
investigation and the Clinton investigation, I would have
far fewer reservations. But these are things that need to
be explored during his confirmation hearings.
What can Democrats do to protect the Mueller investigation?
Once we get the gavel, we’ll be able to bring Whitaker
before Congress and demand to find out what role he
has played in the Mueller investigation, whether he was
given and is abiding by an ethics opinion from the Justice
Department, whether he’s shared any information he
has gleaned about the investigation with the president
or the president’s lawyers. He’s going to have to answer
all of those questions and more. We ought to take up and
pass legislation to protect Mueller, but that’s something
that the Senate majority leader has refused to do. We’re
going to try to get that done as part of our final budget
talks, but I don’t know how optimistic to be about that.
We can certainly end the attacks on the integrity of the
Justice Department and the FBI that have come out of
the House Intelligence Committee during the Nunes
period. That will stop in January.
Do you think Mueller is delaying submitting his
final report to the Justice Department until the Democrats
have taken control of the House in January, or is
the investigation just ongoing? Will House Democrats
use their subpoena power to try to force the Trump
administration to make the report public, if it is suppressed?
I don’t think his timing is determined by the change
in the majority. I think there are other factors at work
that are influencing the timing, including potentially
the appointment of Whitaker may have accelerated the
timetable. There are certain things that we should be
doing to assist the Mueller investigation, and the Republicans
have refused. We will certainly have to take that
up in January, that is, we will be making the interview
transcripts of our witnesses [before the House Intelligence
Committee] available to Mueller for consideration
as to whether witnesses should be charged with perjury.
That may or may not influence the timing of charging
decisions with respect to some of the subjects of the
investigation. In terms of whether the report will be
made public, I think we ought to make as much public as
possible. We should be as transparent as possible. This
is simply too important to be swept under the rug. It’s
going to be the responsibility of Congress to make sure
there is a full accounting.
It seems like if any other president had done what
we already know this president has done they would
be impeached. What is it going to take to hold this
president accountable? And have you seen or do you
know of evidence that the president, his family members,
or his inner circle have committed wrongdoing?
What we are seeing every day as the president continues
to attack the Mueller investigation and dangle
pardons in front of potentially cooperating witnesses
or a harsh sentence for those who testify against him, is
that he is willfully trying to interfere in the investigation
and he’s doing it in broad daylight. The effect of that is to
numb the public to just what a breach of the democratic
norms of office we are seeing. Ultimately, for an impeachment
to be successful it will need to be bipartisan,
otherwise you might be able to impeach the president in
the House but you’ll never be able to convict him in the
Senate. What it will take is we will have to wait and see
what Mueller reports. His conclusion and the evidence
of that report would have to be sufficient to convince the
country that the president’s conduct was so incompatible
with the office that he needed to be removed. That’s
a very high bar, and it’s properly a high bar under any
circumstance because it’s an extraordinary remedy.
It would require a great many Americans around the
country to view the president’s conduct not through a
partisan lens, but through the lens of whether what he’s
doing is consistent with our Constitution. We simply
have to wait and see what Mueller produces and then
determine what the consequences should be.
What’s next for you? Are you going to run for president?
What’s next for me is really getting to work on the
parts of this investigation the Republicans were unwilling
to undertake and providing a check on this president.
Whatever comes after that, I don’t know at this
point. I’ve got more than enough on my plate as it is.
12 PASADENA WEEKLY | 12.13.18