-Our next guest represents
California's 28th Congressional district.
His number one "New York Times" best selling book
"Midnight in Washington:" How We Almost Lost Our Democracy
and Still Could" is on sale now.
Please welcome back to the show Congressman Adam Schiff.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
How are you? -I'm good. I'm good.
-This is a lovely place to see you.
The last time I saw you was not where I expected
to see a congressman. I was at my inlaws' house.
-Yes. -I was sitting on the steps
with my son. -And I was lost.
-Yeah. -And I drove up to a house
with my cousin and knocked on the door. And it was you.
-Yeah. -And then I was even more lost.
-Yeah, and your cousin stepped out of the car.
And I was trying to help him and give him directions.
And we had met. And you stepped out.
And I will admit based on the role you often serve
in government I thought I was about to get served a subpoena.
[ Laughter ]
Because in movies they always trick you.
Always start talking about something else
and then they hand it to you.
And I'm like, son of a gun.
-Now that you mention it -- -Oh, no, no, no.
-So you're very honest about a lot of things in this book.
Including how you feel about some of your colleagues.
Including Kevin McCarthy who we talked about earlier
in the show.
How do you feel -- I should -- I should point out,
maybe not the biggest fan of Kevin McCarthy.
And how did you feel watching his eight and a half hour
speech the other night. -It was torture.
-Yeah. -It was my first moron-a-thon.
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
And I kept thinking if this is his way of punishing Paul Gosar
why make the rest of us suffer. -Right have to sit through it.
-It was rambling, it was incoherent.
And the strange thing about it is,
if you're going to filibuster something, do you really want to
filibuster early childhood education, quality child care,
hearing aids for seniors?
The most vigorous effort to combat climate change?
Is that really what you want to try to filibuster?
-Well, I wonder why it is he would do that.
Because Build Back Better, the elements of it,
are very popular, these are things people want.
And yet the Republican Party does seem like there is
some sort of electoral advantage to running against it.
Do you feel like people are going to
get excited about this bill?
And do you feel like it's something
the Democratic Party is going to be able to run on
as they approach the mid-terms and, maybe,
people are not particularly optimistic about
insofar as how your party's going to do.
-I think we're going to have the most comprehensive
positive agenda any Congress had to run on.
The combination of the rescue plan,
the infrastructure bill, Build Back Better,
will be, essentially, the new deal for this new generation,
lifting half the nation's children out of poverty,
attacking the problem of climate change,
helping all Americans with prescription drug prices,
helping young people afford college,
helping others get a good job.
And, you know, the challenge will be,
okay, what are we going to focus on when we go around the country
and tell people what we did because it's so expansive?
But I think it gives us a real fighting chance to buck
that mid-term trend, where the party in power
in the White House loses seats.
And we are going to have to defeat that trend.
Because the idea that someone with the kind of lack
of morality or ethics like Kevin McCarthy
could ever go near the Speaker's office is just terrifying.
-You know, I don't know the history of the new deal.
I obviously know how it was received once it was passed.
But how much do you think what's being passed now
is suffering from how fraught the negotiations have been
sort of within the Democratic Party?
Because it does feel like every part of it is just being
dragged across the finish line.
And, you know because of the cable news cycle
and talking about how difficult it is to get it passed
I think people may think there's something wrong to it.
-I think the lead up to the passage
of the infrastructure bill, you know,
had Democrats fighting Democrats.
And that was just singly destructive.
When we got to the Build Back Better there was none of that.
I think we realized just we can't afford to be fighting
amongst ourselves.
You know, the answer to the challenge of getting more
out of the Senate is we need more Democrats in the Senate.
We need to -- if we can't get everything we want
with an evenly divided Senate that's 50/50,
we need more Democrats in the Senate to be able to
build on what we've already done.
It's not to go after each other.
-So you were the first impeachment manager.
Now there's the January 6th investigation.
We're going to come up, you know --
obviously we're going to come up
on the year anniversary pretty soon.
What is -- what are you hopeful to accomplish from this?
Because one thing that makes me depressed
is it doesn't seem like anyone involved in that
has paid any price at all.
And it's doubtful based on how polling is going right now
for Republicans, that it is going to ever
have a cost for them.
Is that -- is there any outcome here where people
don't look at what you find and it's just a partisan result,
like some people and go, "Oh, that's what I always expected."
Or other people look at it and say, "This is a witch hunt?"
-Look, I think all we can do is expose all the malefactors,
follow the evidence wherever it leads,
tell the American people the story of
what went in to January 6th, all the planning that went into it,
who was behind it in terms of the money.
What Donald Trump was doing, what he was not doing
at the time that the Capitol was being attacked.
And make the case publicly, expose all the wrong doing,
and at the same time make sure that we
don't lose sight of our legislative agenda.
And we have to hope that there is still enough American people
with an open mind that they will follow the hearings
that we're going to have in public,
that they'll be interested in what we conclude.
We are working in a very non-partisan way,
Democrats and Republicans on the subcommittee.
It's one of the few bright spots in the Congress right now.
But I think what you're pointing to is
one of the overarching challenges we have
which is people don't get all their information
from the same places.
Of all the Facebook whistle-blower allegations
that I found the most troubling was at Facebook they created
a Republican woman.
They gave her only a few attributes.
She was "Fox" viewing, she was Christian, and Republican.
And their algorithms led her straight to QAnon.
And as long as that's the case and people are led down
these tragic conspiratorial rabbit holes
we're going to have this horrible divide.
So we're going to have to try to address that challenge.
-Steve Bannon who seems to commit a lot of crimes
but not get any better at it while he goes,
he was sort of called in front of the house,
basically wouldn't turn over documents.
Correct me if I get any of this wrong.
And now he has been arrested.
Do you think this is going to end up with him -- I don't know,
like, being cooperative with the committee to
try to stay out of prison?
Or do you think he will continue to be sort of stuck in his ways?
-I don't know. And, Seth, I look at one thing
as sort of a microcosm, just shows you what a consummate
group of grifters were running the country.
A man runs for President on a platform of building a wall
that he says Mexico is going to pay for.
-I don't think he said that, no. -Of course.
He becomes President. He doesn't build a wall.
Mexico doesn't pay for it. -Right.
-His cronies then start a fund raising money
from his own supporters to purportedly build a wall.
They steal it. Like Steve Bannon.
They are indicted for stealing money from his own people.
And then he pardons them.
And they're just a bunch of crooks and grifters.
But you can understand why Steve Bannon believed
that he was above the law, because for four years he was.
But now we have a justice department that believes
no one is above the law.
And I think the effect of this prosecution, whatever he does,
has already had a very important impact on other witnesses
who have decided to cooperate because they don't want to
be prosecuted like Steve Bannon.
-There's -- you talk about January 6th and your colleagues
from across the aisle were concerned about your wellbeing.
Like that was a very harrowing day in real time, I think,
that when something like that happens,
people do fall back to their best humanity, right?
Concern about people they maybe don't agree with all the time.
Has is it been depressing to you that that moment of,
maybe, seeing the best in people you don't agree with
has faded away?
-It is. I was there, as you know, for the 6th.
And as they were breaking the doors and windows to get in,
I had a number of Republicans come up to me and say,
"You can't let them see you."
One of them said, "I know these people.
I can talk to these people.
I can talk my way through these people,
you can't let them see you."
You're in a whole different category.
And I was -- you know, I was touched that they were concerned
about my safety.
But immediately that thought was followed by another,
that if they hadn't been lying about the election,
I wouldn't need to be worried about my safety.
And none of us would.
And when we left the chamber and came back
after the police put down that insurrection
these same people were pushing --
still pushing the big lie.
Still voting to overturn the election.
And whatever good will
I felt about their concern for me evaporated.
We had a chance after that terrible tragedy
to turn a corner as a country.
But they have just -- these -- What I call insurrectionists
in suits and ties have just doubled down on the big lie.
And they're persuading millions of Americans
that we can't trust our elections.
And if you persuade millions of people
that we can't trust our elections to decide
who should govern, then what is left but violence?
And this is -- this is why things are so precarious.
But the answer has to be not despair.
The answer has to be engagement, even greater engagement
to get us through this.
One of the reasons I titled the book "Midnight in Washington"
is midnight is the darkest hour of every day.
But it's also a hopeful time.
Because we know that what follows is light.
And there are millions and millions more Americans
who love and cherish our democracy
than those who are determined at the moment to tear it down.
And they will get us through this.
-Well, I'm just going to say this.
It sounds like a really weird place to work.
Thank you so much.
That's Congressman Adam Schiff, everybody.
"Midnight in Washington" is out now.