House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) said in an interview published Friday by the New Yorker that President Trump “doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for our country.” Schiff made the comment in a sit down softball interview Thursday with Swamp stenographer Susan Glasser for her Letter from Trump’s Washington column.
Glasser did not challenge Schiff for lying about the whistleblower, making up Trump’s words at a committee hearing or his spying on fellow committee members and reporters. The interview reads like one Party member speaking with a fellow Party member.
Schiff is described by Glasser as a “mild mannered vegan”. Schiff says that like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) he does not hate Trump. Glasser does not challenge Schiff in the interview at any point–except once where she is concerned Schiff hasn’t pushed for subpoenas to compel testimony from Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Schiff also told Glasser that he is not a “fact witness” in the impeachment and will refuse Republican demands to testify.
…A few hours later on Thursday, I met Schiff for an interview in the Capitol, and he was not so reticent to embrace the H-word. He had heard about Pelosi’s press-conference moment but had not yet seen it. Do you hate Donald Trump, I asked? “No,” he said, “but I do hate what he is doing to the country.” Schiff is not a name-caller, unlike the President whose wrongdoing he has been pursuing. His committee’s three-hundred-page report is his response to Trump. In it, the committee concludes, “The evidence of the President’s misconduct is overwhelming.”
…if Pelosi is owning the charged politics of impeachment, it’s her partner, Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who has been the public face of the impeachment investigation. He has driven and shaped the narrative, interviewing witnesses and then pointedly summing up their testimony in long, ad-libbed speeches. Republicans compare the former federal prosecutor, an otherwise mild-mannered vegan from Southern California, to Inspector Javert, from “Les Misérables,” hunting Trump obsessively.
…I pressed him on why, then, his panel had not subpoenaed some key witnesses, such as Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to whom the President essentially deputized Ukraine policy; the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who listened in on the famous July 25th call; or the Vice-President, Mike Pence, who met with Zelensky in Trump’s place in late summer, when Trump was withholding nearly four hundred million dollars in congressionally appropriated military assistance for Ukraine. Schiff said that there was no point in doing so, given that his panel had subpoenaed a dozen Administration officials, including Mulvaney, who had refused to comply.
…There is also, Schiff suggested, an element of “projection” in the attacks on him. “There are members of Congress who may be fact witnesses. I’m not one of them,” he told me. Schiff was referring specifically to the ranking Republican member of his committee, Devin Nunes, of California, who showed himself to be an ardent promoter of conspiracy theories in Trump’s defense during last month’s public hearings. Yet Nunes never revealed that he had been speaking with central figures in the case, including Giuliani, on the same day that Trump was firing his Ambassador to Ukraine at Giuliani’s behest. This information was made public on Tuesday, in Schiff’s report, which cited phone records obtained by the committee.
…As Schiff was being called away from the interview, I asked him what had been the most memorable testimony of the hearings. Had there been a John Dean “cancer on the Presidency” moment that would last in history?…
…Instead, Schiff said, “sometimes it’s not the big things” but smaller, revealing comments that resonated…
…The other conversation that Schiff cited was Sondland’s memorable encounter with David Holmes, a diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. Holmes overheard Sondland talking on the phone with Trump, who asked if Zelensky would pursue the investigations he wanted. After the call, Holmes asked Sondland, “Does the President give a shit about Ukraine?” As Holmes testified, the answer was no, he only cares about “the big stuff.” Well, Holmes pointed out, there is big stuff happening in Ukraine, like a war with Russia, but Sondland said no, that was not what he meant. Trump only cared about matters that concerned him, like the investigations. “That says it all,” Schiff told me. “The President doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for our country, what’s good for Ukraine. It’s all about what’s in it for him personally and for his reëlection campaign.” In that small moment in an obscure diplomat’s testimony, Schiff reflected, was the impeachment case in all its brazen simplicity. “That is a perfect summary,” he said, “of this whole scheme.”
And that’s how Glasser ends the article. President Trump is being impeached because Adam Schiff (and Nancy Pelosi) really do hate him, despite their prevaricating on the matter. There is no Russia collusion, no bribery, no quid pro quo proven. Under Trump the U.S. is stronger economically, militarily and safer than when he he was inaugurated.
The presidential election is less than a year away. Rather than let the American people decide whether Trump should remain in office, Schiff, Pelosi and the Democrats are using the impeachment process to at the least cut the legs out from Trump’s reelection prospects and at worst to overthrow the government.
Who is that really “doesn’t give a shit about our country”?
