Adam shifty schiff12/4/2023 ![]() ![]() I used to do lots of Sunday-morning shows and whatnot, but as an expert on national security and foreign policy. ![]() “There is a popular mythology of the last couple of years that I was a complete unknown before Donald Trump, which wasn’t true. “I did not imagine that I would become a household name,” Schiff told me before the Armenian event. Schiff at a community parade in Echo Park. Now seemingly everybody knows the House Intelligence Committee chairman by his face. For most of his nearly 19 years in Congress, Schiff toiled in comparative obscurity, an earnest, respected legislator but not a bold-faced figure. 1, and California’s fairest-haired political prospect for (some) higher office. This is the slightly surreal reality of Schiff, blue America’s man of the hour, red America’s public enemy No. Read: Adam Schiff is back from the wilderness A third simply called out, “We love you, Adam Schiff!” “Go get ’em, Adam! Put him away!” cried another. There, Schiff rolled down Sunset Boulevard on the back of a bright-red Mustang convertible, a string of plastic Christmas lights around his neck, as spectators hollered friendly greetings to the hometown hero he has become.“Thank you for standing up for America!” one yelled. The scene had been different just hours before at a community parade in the diverse, hip, and gentrifying neighborhood of Echo Park, near Dodger Stadium. For 15 or 20 minutes as Schiff stood calmly by onstage, a full-scale brawl seemed about to break out. Had Turkish protesters crashed the party? No, just a rowdy, angry contingent of Donald Trump supporters, chanting and holding up red-white-and-blue signs proclaiming Don’t Impeach! A tug of war erupted over a Trump T-shirt, and as the demonstrators scuffled with the crowd, a couple of people stumbled and fell to the floor. “You should be in jail!” someone exclaimed. And when Schiff, the measure’s chief sponsor, arrived in suburban Glendale for the event, he was welcomed with cheers and whoops and thunderous applause from some 200 representatives of the largest Armenian enclave outside of Armenia itself.īut just moments after he began speaking, angry shouts of “Liar!” rang out in the second-floor auditorium of the Glendale Central Library. One was a celebration-of the long-sought final passage of a joint congressional resolution condemning the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians as the 20th century’s first genocide. That reality was on stark display last weekend in a pair of contrasting scenes on Schiff’s home turf of Los Angeles. Not just the impeachment inquiry, but the Russia inquiry before that, has really elevated him into a national figure.” “He’s got the right demeanor, he’s got the right persona, he’s extremely well-spoken, he’s very judicious in terms of his public utterances. “He’s done an incredible job,” says Garry South, a veteran California Democratic strategist. Only three years ago, when he considered a run for the open Senate seat that Kamala Harris went on to win, a Los Angeles Times poll found that just 19 percent of Californians knew enough about him to have an opinion now nearly three-quarters of voters statewide do. That role has made him a formidable political figure, and he is sitting atop a campaign war chest of nearly $7 million, more than half of it raised in the past nine months alone. As Trump’s chief congressional antagonist, Schiff has played the parts of Law & Order’s Jerry Orbach and Sam Waterston rolled into one, both investigator and prosecutor in the Ukraine impeachment inquiry now racing to its high-speed climax. “We used to joke in L.A.-not just myself, but other members,” he told me in an interview the other day-“that if you wanted to get on the local news, it wasn’t enough to kill someone you had to also be in a high-speed chase.” Not so long ago, Schiff was just one among California’s 53-member House delegation, contending for recognition in the nation’s most populous state and one of its biggest media markets. “That idea holds that we are a nation of laws, not of men.” ET, his jaw set and his voice thick with emotion. “What is at risk here is the very idea of America,” Schiff said just after 8 p.m. On Wednesday night, he had pride of place as the Democrats’ closing speaker before the impeachment vote. Perhaps that’s because, at this signal moment in history, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff himself realizes that he has emerged as one of the most familiar names and faces in all of American politics. Only when one of his Republican colleagues, Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, described President Donald Trump’s impeachment as “a total Schiff show” did the target allow himself the barest chuckle. He wore his regulation uniform of a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and bright-blue tie. H e stood for hours on the House floor, solemn and ramrod-straight. ![]()
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