Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who began the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, said “the president doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for the country.”
Schiff was responding to a question in a lengthy New Yorker interview published Friday that provided the congressman with the opportunity to describe this role in the impeachment hearings and his belief that “the evidence of the president’s misconduct is overwhelming,” as his impeachment report concludes.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Schiff referenced a conversation between U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and diplomat David Holmes. Holmes asked Sondland, “Does the president give a shit about Ukraine?” Sondland replied in the negative, adding that Trump was more concerned about “the big stuff.” (RELATED: Brit Hume: Schiff Spreading ‘Nonsense’ That Whistleblower Has A ‘Right To Anonymity’)
“That says it all,” Schiff told The New Yorker. “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 reelection campaign.”
“That is a perfect summary,” he said, “of this whole scheme.”
The committee chairman stuck to his line that he is not a fact witness in the impeachment process, claiming that some who are saying so are merely “projecting” their own involvement.
“There are members of Congress who may be fact witnesses. I’m not one of them,” Schiff told the New Yorker, apparently in reference to the intelligence committee’s ranking Republican member, California Rep. Devin Nunes. (RELATED: Ocasio-Cortez Says Impeaching Trump Is About Saving The Democratic Party From Disaster)
Chairman Adam Schiff (L), Democrat of California, and Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R), Republican of California, during the first public hearings held by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as part of the impeachment inquiry. (SAUL LOEB/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Republicans have called Schiff a fact witness and more, describing him as the “judge, jury and prosecutor” in the impeachment process. They have also alleged that he has met with the whistleblower who ignited the impeachment inquiry and that the congressman knew of his complaint before it became public.
Schiff insisted that he was pursuing the truth in his march towards impeachment and that he doesn’t hate Trump personally but he does “hate what he is doing to the country.”
“This attack on truth has always seemed to me the most corrosive to our democracy, the idea that there’s no such thing as fact anymore,” he told the New Yorker. “Given you have witnesses say there was a quid pro quo and then members [who] hear that would say, ‘no one is saying there is a quid pro quo.’ It’s, like, Did you just hear what the witness said?”