The FRONTLINE Interviews

Adam Schiff

U.S. Representative (D-Calif.)

Adam Schiff has served in the U.S. House of Representatives (D-Calif.) since 2000. He currently chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and previously served on both the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on Nov. 16, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Pelosi’s Power

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Pelosi and the Trump Presidency

Congressman, let's start in 2016.Trump is elected.What did Nancy Pelosi tell the caucus her approach was going to be to the Trump presidency, the Trump era?

… I think in early 2016, the speaker recognized that there were two challenges to our democracy.There was a challenge from foreign powers like Russia that had intervened in our election and tried to—trying to help elect Donald Trump, and that needed to be investigated.But I think the speaker also recognized that there was a profound threat growing to our democracy from within, from the presidency itself, from the president's constant attacks on the press to ultimately attacks on the power of the Congress to do its oversight, the stonewalling of all subpoenas, the attacks on inspector generals and whistleblowers.In very close proximity, guardrail after guardrail seemed to be coming down.

And she was determined to protect the integrity of our democracy, and she would underscore in our caucus meetings just how fragile our democracy really was and how we were going to do everything in our power to protect it.

Almost from the very beginning, I think on Jan. 23, he calls everybody, all the leaders of both parties into the White House for a conversation, and a moment happens….He says he would have won the popular vote, but millions of illegals had voted against him, and it's not her turn to talk, but she can't help herself.She says, I think, "That's not true; there's no evidence to support that."What does that tell you about her and about him and about how she's going to react to him over time?

Yeah, we recall in the caucus the speaker coming back from that meeting and describing it to us, and she prefaced it by saying—you know, there's sort of a breach of protocol where you don't normally call out the president and say basically, "That's a lot of hooey," but she did call him out on it.She did not allow this early lie to gain any traction.

And I think it demonstrated her willingness to stand up to him, that she wasn't going to allow him to propagate these falsehoods about the election, let alone people of our state.

And so I think she made it very clear very early on that she had the toughness, the tenacity to stand up to him, and to do so in some very blunt terms.

For two years, she seems almost conflict-averse, and he leaves her alone most of the time.But then the midterms are looming.… What was the Democratic strategy?I know she said, “We're not going to talk about Trump,” but what was the plan to win back the House?

I think you're right, that in those early months of the Trump presidency, the speaker certainly didn't go out of her way to pick a fight with the president.She stood her ground where it was necessary to stand her ground.She did it with a lot of grace and won, I think, a lot of plaudits for how she handled the president.I think the president was scared of her and scared to confront her or contradict her.And so she really seemed to have his number.

As we went into the 2018 elections, you know, I think that what we saw, really even before we get to 2018, because the speaker's strategy is always one in which you win the election a year before it begins by recruiting the best people, by making sure you have the resources in place, and so she played an active role in recruiting what I think is the most talented group of new members Congress has ever had.The class of 2018 was every bit as good, and better, I think, than even the Watergate babies.

Now, a lot of those were highly motivated, self-motivated people who had served the country in the State Department, the armed forces, the intelligence community.But she was also, I think, very actively involved in raising the resources and marshaling the candidates and the message and keeping it focused on what mattered to people in terms of their everyday lives.

Now, Trump was obviously the cloud overhanging all of that, but her strategy was a sound one, and it brought a lot of success.

Pelosi and the Impeachment Issue

And the Democrats win big.But she has a caucus that's split.Moderates feel strongly one way.These are new people that have been elected from Trump districts in lots of ways.And progressives have a different agenda and a kind of power.I know that I talked to Congressman [Jim] Clyburn (D-S.C.) this morning, and he said he thought it was maybe the most challenging time he's seen her face, how to hold the caucus together in those early days.Help us understand what were the challenges facing Speaker Pelosi during that time.

Well, I think there were extraordinary challenges, because on the subject of President Trump and his misconduct, there were many who were very eager to go down the road towards impeachment, others who were wary of it.In the, you know, first couple years, up until Bob Mueller's testimony, I think the speaker was urging our caucus to wait until the investigation was concluded to make sure that we understood all the facts before we talked about the remedy.

She also made it clear that she viewed this issue as one of conscience.But as we saw the president respond to Bob Mueller's testimony and the failure to hold him accountable for his Russia misconduct, engage in new and even worse misconduct vis-à-vis Ukraine, I think that the speaker's view, my own as well, certainly changed in the sense that we understood that the dangers of not holding him accountable were now far greater, that his escape of the jailer with his Russian misconduct led to new and even worse misconduct.

But the speaker's genius lay in her ability to get us all to the same point at one time, like a master conductor who takes disparate talented members of the orchestra and gets them all to start the music on time, and brought us to a place where we voted to impeach the president with almost unanimity, which was a remarkable achievement for a caucus that had hitherto been divided in approach.

And so I would only, I guess, differ with what Mr. Clyburn said in one respect.I think the current session is even more challenging because the margins are so much less.Near unanimity in the House was enough to impeach the president, but now in the House and in the Senate combined, we need unanimity in order to get things done.When you have a 50/50 Senate, that has a ripple effect on the House in terms of what we can achieve, and that could really heighten and aggravate tensions among our members.

And the fact that the speaker got the infrastructure bill across the finish line, and I think is poised to do the same with Build Back Better, is a monumental achievement.And I don't know anyone else who could have done it, or who can do it.She really understands her members well, knows what they want, knows what they need, knows their future ambitions.She works tirelessly.

And I used to say that—I bemoaned the fact that I had arrived in Congress too late to serve with Tip O'Neill.I now consider myself so fortunate that I came later and got to serve with Nancy Pelosi as speaker, because I think that she's the most incredible speaker within anyone's living memory.

Let's go back for a minute and pull apart the impeachment issue and your role in it and her role in it, and in some cases the most important participant, the president himself, and the ways that he helped bring about unanimity in the caucus.Let's start with that meeting where he invites Speaker Pelosi and Chuck Schumer over to the White House.She famously wears that red coat that will become important at the end of the meeting.But in that meeting, there's a real to-and-fro, a kind of back-and-forth.What were the stakes for Speaker Pelosi going into that meeting in the so-called lion's den of the Oval Office?

I think that she's had an extraordinary challenge in her interactions with the former president, both in person and remotely, and that is to show toughness, to show respect for the office of the presidency but also to demonstrate that she's not going to back down, that she's not going to give ground when it comes to protecting our democracy, and she's also not going to sit quietly while even the president of the United States tells patent falsehoods.She's going to call him out on it.And that's exactly what she did.And she did it in such a phenomenal way so as to, I think, underscore once again for the whole country why she is such an effective speaker.

I think in those meetings, you watch the dynamic between Donald Trump and Speaker Pelosi, and you have to say to yourself, Speaker Pelosi is the one with the power in that room.And she wielded it with extraordinary finesse.She marshaled all the power of the House majority, even though that majority was razor-thin, and did it to protect our country in a moment in which it was at its highest peril.

And so there's always, I think, been a tougher standard for women in politics, and she has managed to demonstrate, practically regardless of what challenge is put her in way, she's more than capable of overcoming it.

Holding Together the Caucus

When she comes out in that red coat and the sunglasses, she had gone in with maybe her speakership in some peril.There were votes from the moderates, some insurrection they might have called it, with what they call the five white men.There were some rumblings from the Squad who wanted to impeach from the night of their election.And she was kind of holding that all together.She went in uncertain, and many people we've talked to say she came out, and the caucus, if it ever wasn't hers, was certainly hers by then.Does that jibe with what you think?

Yes.And I don't know that I would say that it was any particular meeting or iconic moment, like the meeting you're talking about, but when we captured the majority, there were a small number of members who lobbied against her reattaining the speakership.They were mostly moderate members.

And in a very short period of time, whatever skepticism that they had, or whatever skepticism that the people out in the base had, evaporated when they saw what an effective job she did in standing up to Donald Trump and defending our democracy, and not just that, but defending those very moderate members who were most at risk.I think they came to be among her strongest allies and fans when they saw how deftly she handled the challenges that we faced and how she protected them, because without them, we would be in the minority.

And it really was a dramatic and swift transformation of those who had opposed her speakership to those who suddenly became true believers.And that, you know, is part of the magic that she has been able to work in the caucus, which is she has the respect of the moderates, which she has earned, but she has the confidence, also, of the progressives, because they know that she's a progressive herself.

And there aren't that many people that enjoy both, and I think the fact that she does has made her singularly effective.Whoever has that job down the road in the future is going to find out just how difficult it is, and they may not fully appreciate that because she's done it so, at times, seemingly effortlessly.

In that crucial spring where the Mueller report comes out, there's a real push by progressives and others to say, "We need to impeach him."She seems to take—you'll know better than I—she seems to take the side of the worried moderates who aren't yet supporting impeachment.Is that right?Is that what she was—it felt like she was protecting their argument for a while, waiting for some other sign.Help me understand the politics and the practicalities of that.

I think that what she has done so successfully is, first of all, she's—she has her own very strong view of what's best for the country, and she has her own conviction about when the remedy of impeachment should be used, when it shouldn't be used.She has an important sense of the timing of things, as well as the constitutional dimension of things.

And so I think up until the revelation of the Ukraine allegations, she did not feel that impeachment was in the best interest of the country.And I think all of us wrestled with this enigma, that failing to hold the president accountable could encourage both him and other presidents to believe they could engage in the most serious form of misconduct.And yet proceeding with impeachment, knowing that in the Senate the president would be acquitted, also held great dangers in terms of the country, because then you would have a judgment against something big, an impeachable offense.

Up until the Ukraine misconduct, that balance weighed in favor, in my view and the speaker's view, against impeachment.But the more serious Ukraine misconduct, coupled with the fact that the president engaged in it the day after Bob Mueller testified, the day after Donald Trump believed that he had escaped the jailer, I think dictated a very different response.

And so I think she, in a very important and deft and sophisticated way, refrained from using that tool until it was absolutely necessary.And when she decided it was absolutely necessary, she was able to lead our caucus to embrace it almost uniformly.And I think that someone without her talent and ability and knowledge of her caucus would not have been able to do that.

And part of her success is her own very innate sense of what we should do as a country and a Congress.Part of it, though, is also she keeps her hand assiduously on the pulse of our caucus, constantly, like radar, plumbing where people are and what they're thinking and how they're moving, in what direction, and knowing from that radar when the time is right to move on something.

So all of those skills were necessary, and all of those skills were deployed to our benefit over the last several years.

She's also at the same time having some back-and-forth—I don't know how you would describe it—with the women who call themselves the Squad.And we don't need to go into the details of that, but there's the moderate group that she's trying to protect; there's the push to impeach; there's the Squad themselves with other issues as well.And the speaker is kind of pulled in lots of directions.And then almost in a deus-ex-machina moment, the president himself announces that the Squad should go back to the countries where they came from, and that seems to get everybody in the caucus up and facing the common enemy of the president's vituperation and other things.And then the Ukraine call also comes rolling in, and that seems to unite everybody.Do I have that history more or less right in the order of it?

Well, I think what she has been able to do, which would be mission impossible for anyone else, is, we not only have among the smallest majorities we've ever had, we not only have the most diverse caucus that we've ever had as a country, but we also have a situation now, both in terms of how campaigns are funded and financed, how social media gives people a very independent base of power, we have a situation where a lot of the power has left the building, has left the Capitol and particularly the leadership of the party.

And so this is an issue that has vexed speakers going back to [Paul] Ryan and [John] Boehner and really forced them out of their office.And to be able to manage a caucus that diverse, with that many power centers, is an extraordinary challenge.

And I used to say that, you know, the difference between Tip O'Neill and Nancy Pelosi is the difference between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.Ginger Rogers had to do everything backwards and in heels.Tip O'Neill had a huge Democratic Caucus.It's quite easy to get things done when you can still lose dozens of votes and you're fine.Tip O'Neill controlled a lot more of the future of his members of Congress.The party did.Those institutions have become far weaker over the last several decades.

And so, with less inherent power in the office, with a more diverse caucus than ever, with independent power bases outside of the Congress, to be able to still keep us together is a miraculous achievement.And she's done that by, on the one hand, recognizing that with a margin as small as we have, we need everyone in the tent.We need the ability of our newer, younger members with vast social media followings to get their followers to come to the polls, to appeal to a new generation of voters.We cannot leave them out of the tent; they're an important part of the coalition.And at the same time, without our more conservative members from more conservative districts, we're in the minority and can't do anything.

And so what that has meant, I think, is to recognize the strengths that everyone brings to the table, pushing back where pushback on any of them is necessary, but not doing it in a gratuitous way, and continually drilling it into all of us in the caucus that we're all in this together.We either hang together or we hang separately.

And so it's a phenomenally difficult task, and I don't think anyone else would be capable of doing it.

The Ukraine Call

Can you take me to a moment, if there was such a thing, where you're talking with Speaker Pelosi about the president's call to Ukraine?You tell her facts that matter.Was there such a meeting, Congressman, and did you have that conversation with her?

We had a number of conversations like that.And I recall, for example, when we learned that a whistleblower complaint was being withheld from Congress and we discussed how we could get the complaint, and I proposed that we have a public hearing, require the director to come in and explain to the country why he was the first director of national intelligence ever to withhold a whistleblower complaint, the necessity to subpoena the complaint.

These are decisions that were above my pay grade, where we would sit down together or we would stand up together in the back of the House floor and strategize about how to handle such an important issue, process, tactic, strategy.

I recall very specifically when I was reaching the conclusion that impeachment was now going to be necessary and getting a call from the speaker, being in a car parked not far from the airport in Los Angeles and going over where we were and how things had changed and the necessity of moving forward.

And so I think that for many of us, being able to have those conversations with the speaker, get the sense that our opinions mattered but also have the benefit of her longer experience was essential to making these decisions in an intelligent way.

Was there something when you're talking in that car or in the back of the chamber, was there something that you could feel did it, tipped her, brought her across?Was your strongest argument something that you could just see it had worked and she was now ready to go?Was it as simple as that?

Well, I think that I would start with the proposition that the speaker understood better than anyone what a danger Donald Trump presented to the country, and you could feel viscerally how much she recognized he was tearing down the country.And as someone who loved the country and loved the institution of the Congress, to see a president behave like this president, to see the kind of lack of any ethics, any decency, I think just called on her to be the person standing in the breach, defending our democracy.

And so I think there was that toughness that she drew upon, and also a sense of history and a sense of timing.And so as I think a, you know, any great leader would do, it's difficult to put your finger on whether she reached that point of saying "OK, we need to go forward" on her own and kept it to herself until the moment was right, or was influenced by members of the caucus who were reaching the same conclusion, and—but she managed to bring us all together at the same time in the same place to defend our country through the impeachment and to make us all feel like we were all part of that decision.

And the relationship between her and the president once the impeachment is underway becomes really terrible.Trump attacks her on a personal level.Then you have the president of the United States and the speaker of the House not talking to each other.Do you know how she felt during that time?

Well, I think that, you know, her natural inclination is to get things done for the country, to have respect for the office of the presidency.And so it certainly didn't come easily to her, I think, to have such an adversarial relationship with a president.But this was an abnormal president.This was a dangerous president.This was a president who was tearing down our country, and you can't have a normal relationship with someone like that.

So I think the speaker worked with the president as long as she could work with the president, and then it got to a certain point where he just had to be fought to defend our democracy.And she was able to fight him and did fight him.And even in the midst of those fights, if there were still things that could be done that needed to be done—getting a budget passed, making sure that we didn't default on our debt—she would do it.But she also made no bones about the fact that she was going to be a vigorous, tenacious, unyielding champion of our democracy, and anybody that got in the way of that, including the president of the United States, was going to run into a buzz saw.

It's interesting.Somebody asks her once during that time if she hates the president, if she hates Trump, and she kind of really bristles and turns and strongly denies hating Trump.It's obviously the notion that the speaker would hate the president, even though she may, was very important for her to defend that this is not the way that she feels about him.What does that tell you about her?

Well, I remember that quite vividly, that press conference.And I think, you know, the key to understanding the speaker is to understand what a person of faith she is and how important her Catholicism is to her and how much it informs her view of her job, of the world.It's what, I think, springs from her conviction that her work ought to be aimed at improving the quality of life for our children and the next generation.

She takes those lessons very much to heart.And to suggest, as a reporter did in that question, that her approach to the president was motivated by hatred of his person was really, you know, in a way a kind of a questioning of her faith, because she is not motivated by hate.She's motivated by love of country.She's motivated by love of her children and grandchildren, and everybody else's children and grandchildren as well.

And I think she found it demeaning to suggest that this was motivated by some base idea of a personal animus. In a lot of the conversations that we would have, and I remember in particular one in the run-up to Jan. 6,I had suggested to the speaker about six months before the election that we form a rump group of members who could try to anticipate everything that might go wrong in the election: What if the Electoral College were tied?Or what if a state sent two slates of electors?Or what if the vice president didn't do his job?And so we did that.We set up a small group to work with different state delegations of the different states we knew ultimately the Republicans intended to challenge.

And I remember during one of those prep sessions, I talked about on Jan. 6 framing our arguments that these Republican efforts and the president's "Big Lie" were part of a systemic effort by Donald Trump to undermine our democracy.And her response was—and I think she was right—"Let's not make this about him.Let's make this about our democracy.Let's make this about the solemn function of a joint session of Congress where we conduct the peaceful transfer of power.Let's not personalize this."

And it was a perfect illustration of where she comes from just generally, which is, let's keep this high level; let's not make this about him.Now this was of course before we realized or knew that there would be a violent attack on that day.But we did end up retooling our approach, to make it very, you know, very 30,000-foot level, impersonal and very constitutionally-focused.

Now, after the bloody attack on the Capitol and Republicans came back on the House floor even after that still determined to overturn the result, it was quite a different story.But it was an illustration of how, you know, first and foremost it's about the country; it's about our Constitution; it's about the future.And Trump is only relevant in as much as he is a threat to all of those things.

Tell the story, will you, Congressman?Speaker Pelosi knows he's not going to be convicted by the Senate, and she calls you all into a meeting and talks about why it was important to impeach him anyway.What did she say, Congressman?

Well, what she told us was that we should be very proud of the way that we had represented the country and our caucus, the case that we had made to the American people; that we knew we were going to go into a biased jury to begin with, but the most important jury are the American people, and that we had played a really important historic role.

And it was just like the speaker sort of on the eve of the end of the trial to be underscoring to all of us how important was our work, how proud she was of it, how much she felt we had represented the caucus well and made the caucus proud of the case we were making.

So it was both personal in the sense that we had been living in the trench, and so it was really meaningful to us just personally to know that we had her confidence and the confidence of our colleagues.But also she was speaking about our role in history not just as managers, but the role of the speaker, the role of the House—that we fulfilled our constitutional duty, and the fact that the Senate wouldn't didn't diminish what we had done.In a way, it just made it that much more important, because someone had held the president to account.And we couldn't do the senators' job for them, but someone had held the president to account, and it was the speaker, the House and those of us as managers as the instrument of the speaker of the House.

It isn't very long after that, of course, when the State of the Union happens, and the president basically takes the show over, giving Rush Limbaugh, who's been on Pelosi from the very beginning in some of the most amazing ways, gives him the Medal of Freedom.The result of that event: She tears up his State of the Union speech in a very public display of something.What's your account of what happened there, Congressman? …

I don't think that that was premeditated in any way.I don't think she went to the State of the Union that day determined to tear up the president's speech.But I think it was really a last straw.She had watched this man so demean his office by all the petty insults on Twitter, all the attacks on our institutions, all the elevation of that which is crass, and then the speech itself right there on the House floor filled with lies.I think it just became too much to be endured.And the president having that little respect for his office and for the truth and for the American people, I think, drove her to tear it up like the pile of lies that it was.

And so I think it was quite spontaneous.And given the respect and veneration she has for the office of the presidency, I think nothing less than the rampant falsehoods and the elevation of, you know, the kind of base, divisive, vile personalities of the Rush Limbaughs and others, nothing less than that kind of coarse conduct in, of all places, the State of the Union address, I think drove her to that profound demonstration of defiance—that the speech he had given wasn't worth the paper it was written on.

January 6

I just want to get your thoughts about Jan. 6 and her performance, whether it's calling [Vice President Mike] Pence to enact the 25th Amendment or whether it was [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley, whatever strikes you as something crucial and important and revealing about her reaction to those terrible events, or on the specific of what happened in her office with that guy with his feet on her desk and the defiling of the artifacts.Congressman, what on Jan. 6 is your thought, memory for posterity about Nancy Pelosi's actions?

Well, I think that Speaker Pelosi viewed Jan. 6 as the culmination of four years of tearing down our democracy by Donald Trump to the point where there were people literally defecating in the Congress, and her office itself violated, her staff forced to barricade themselves in an office and listen to insurrectionists pounding on the doors to get in.I think the defilement of the Congress was symbolic of Donald Trump's defilement of the country.

And no one was going to feel that more acutely than Nancy Pelosi.The other one who might have felt that was Mitch McConnell.But as Robert Caro once said in an interview, power doesn't corrupt as much as it reveals.It revealed Mitch McConnell as willing to sacrifice anything and everything, including his own institution, to cling to power or maybe obtain power again.

Power revealed Nancy Pelosi to be a dedicated, passionate, tough-as-hell defender of our democracy who wasn't going to take crap from anybody.And thank God she was there when she was, and is there now, because she played a vital role in keeping our democracy together during one of its darkest hours.

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