Schiff’s memoir offers his take on tumult in the capital
Southern California congressman tells of Trump battles
How times change. Just ask Adam Schiff.
It was back in January 2009, when a smiling Schiff, eight years into his tenure as congressman from Southern California, was hosting a reception. It was one of a gazillion in a freezing but bubbly D.C. that month — hailing the inauguration of the nation’s first Black president.
“You and I were a lot less gray when we first met so many years ago,” he noted in a recent chat with me about his new book, “Midnight in Washington, How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.”
On this day, the book — Schiff’s first — had just topped the New York Times Best Seller List.
It was a long way from 2000, when Schiff defeated then Congressman Jim Rogan, beginning a run of successful re-elections ever since representing an area from Pasadena to Burbank to stretches of the San Fernando Valley to Silver Lake and Hollywood.
It’s no secret that in his time away from the job of congressman, Schiff, DBurbank, has long been an amateur screenwriter. But in the book, it’s Schiff in a very-real-life drama.
The memoir begins on the floor of the U.S. Senate where Schiff, perhaps former President Donald Trump’s leading nemesis in Congress — faces a room full of GOP senators, who throughout Trump’s presidency staunchly defended the former president’s words and deeds. It was they who would decide Trump’s fate, if Schiff — the lead House prosecutor among a team of seven — could persuade them that Trump abused his power and obstructed justice in the run-up to the 2020 election.
But it covers much more ground, from his roots to his education to the highs and lows of the last five years in American politics.
It was a toss-up whether the memoir, Schiff’s first such endeavor, would ever get written, at least during such a tumultuous time in D.C. Flashbacks:
2017: Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, leads the House inquiry into alleged Russian influence in the 2016 election.
2019: Schiff leads an inquiry into whether Trump used the power of his office to “condition official acts” in exchange for political favors — namely support for his re-election.
2020: Schiff leads a team of seven House members prosecuting the case against the president.
Amid all that news, there were epic social-media battles with the former president.
Colleagues nudged Schiff to get it down on paper — the good, the bad, the ugly.
The longtime congressman may be known to many as the man whose legislation as a state senator earned him the name “father of the Gold Line” in the San Gabriel Valley, or as the lawmaker who consistently sought recognition of the Armenian genocide. But to people unfamiliar with his local track record, who hadn’t heard his name before the 2016 presidential election, he may always be known for his role — positive or negative — at the center of the Trump-era whirlwind.
“As I was living the events of the last four or five years, I had any number of my colleagues tell me you’d better be writing this down,” said Schiff, fresh off a select-committee vote. “And I would always ask, “When do I possibly have the time to write it down?”
Schiff added: “I did realize as I was living through these tumultuous years that I was at the center of a lot what was taking place in the nation. I felt that historians down the road would want to know what was going on in the Congress. There are very few impeachments in our history, and I felt I was in a position to help record history.”
And therein lies the rub for GOP stalwarts who might have a hard time separating Schiff the author from Schiff the Trump combatant.
Richard Sherman, chairman of the Los Angeles County Republican Party, acknowledged that Schiff’s work on Armenian genocide recognition actually deserves credit.
But he said it might be hard for many, including himself, to embrace his account of history, because Schiff himself has become so polarizing to Americans.
“You know in advance, he going to blast, blast, blast,” Sherman said, referring to the ubiquity of the congressman on cable news programs, going after GOP actions and policies. “There is a tendency to turn the channel. That’s why I don’t think I’ll be reading the book anytime soon.”
Sherman added: “If I were looking for a book to try to understand what happened — what triggered it, what actually happened — I would hope it would be a more scholarly approach that tried to be as unbiased as possible. And he has been from Day One out to slam the former president and out to slam Republicans. So it makes it someone suspect.”
The book taps in to Schiff’s thinking throughout the highs and lows — and the monumental challenge — of trying to convince his GOP colleagues that the president should be removed from office. There are streaks of indignation in his arguments in the Senate chamber, as well as dismay aimed at longtime and respected colleagues as the effort to remove failed.
All the while, the nation grew more divided. Friendships lost. And there’s even Schiff’s own internal questioning of what he could have done better to convince a jury of senators of his argument.
Schiff vividly recalled the day when then Attorney Gen. William Barr summarized the freshly released and long-awaited Mueller Report on Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election that echoed Trump’s relentless insistence that the investigation was a “hoax.”
The substance of the debate itself has now long been baked into history, but for Schiff, it was a moment that exemplified Trump’s base of support, which quickly and forcefully established a narrative that the report vindicated Trump. And it was a narrative pointed squarely at Schiff.
“They also used it to bury me,” Schiff, 61, writes, chronicling the onslaught of media commentary that went after him, from Sean Hannity to Tucker Carlson.
It was Schiff himself, in the eyes and on the lips of many, who was cast as, he said, the “sinister conspiracist whose fertile imagination defamed and imperiled the president of the United States.”
Schiff writes: “I remember watching Kellyanne Conway hold forth on “Fox and Friends” in the morning, saying, ‘Adam Schiff should resign. He has no right, as somebody who has been peddling a lie day after day after day! Unchallenged! Unchallenged, and not under oath! Somebody should have put him under oath and said, ‘You have evidence? Where is it?’ ”
It’s interesting that Schiff was even watching “Fox and Friends.” But then again, Schiff himself is both a consumer of news and a newsmaker, and the changes in the media over the years he’s been in office is not lost on him, and the role it has in the polarization of the nation.
“There’s been a trend for a long time of increasing partisan political polarization,” Schiff said, reflecting on his time in office. “There were some signposts along the way. But I would say the biggest contributor in the pre-Trump years to the polarization of American politicians, and the degree to which we’ve been balkanized into our political tribes owes to the changes in media and how we get our information.”
Schiff points to accelerators like social media algorithms that “accentuate anger, fear and lies.”
“That’s what keeps people engaged on the platform,” he said.
Ironically, Schiff himself comes from a background not averse to conservative principles. In “Midnight,” Schiff goes out of his way to show that.
It’s a side of the — beloved or hated — congressman that tries to get at beyond the noise of the past five years. It’s a story that returns to Schiff’s immigrant roots, which belies the partisan touchstone he has become. His family had been politically split. His mother grew up in a fiercely
Republican household — his grandfather on her side having been an Eisenhower elector in 1952 and 1956. Schiff’s father was the son of “yellow dog” Democrats and an ardent New Dealer.
“When the topic did turn to politics, “Schiff writes, “my parents took pains to emphasize the value of hearing each other’s opinions. Neither political party, they told us, has a monopoly on good judgment, and it was essential to exchange ideas with curiosity and respect.”
Of course, that was far from D.C., where Schiff is immersed in a House Select Committee investigating into the roots of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection to interrupt certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory.
The week we spoke for an interview about his book, the committee voted to hold Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress for defying a congressional subpoena to testify about what he knew about the lead-up. On Nov. 12, a federal grand jury indicted Bannon on allegations of contempt of Congress.
The panel also is deliberating whether to hold former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark in contempt for declining to answer the panel’s questions.
Schiff is in the middle of it once again — this time with a panel that controversially includes only two Republicans serving.
It’s a disparity that Schiff acknowledged, though he was dismayed when the committee began that only two House Republicans voted for the select committee in the first place.
“All we can do is our best,” he said. “Ultimately, the proof will be in the quality of the report we issue. In the quality of the hearings we conduct, and the degree to which we can inform and educate the public.”
The current scenario conjures up a key theme from Schiff’s book.
“We have changed,” Schiff writes early on. “The members of Congress have changed.”
Schiff said he emerges from the these historic years concerned about the nation.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that our democracy is on the ballot,” Schiff said in our interview. “One of the reasons I titled the book “Midnight in Washington” is, midnight is the darkest hour of every day everywhere in the world. But it’s also a hopeful time because you know what follows is filled with light.”