Adam Schiff says it 'took a bloody insurrection to get even a few Republicans' to support impeaching Trump
- Adam Schiff blasted Republicans for refusing to back Trump's impeachment until after the Capitol riot.
- "It took a bloody insurrection to get even a few Republicans to support impeachment," he told NPR.
California Rep. Adam Schiff criticized Republicans for refusing to back impeaching President Donald Trump until after the deadly Capitol riot.
Schiff serves as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. His new book, "Midnight In Washington," is releasing Tuesday.
"It's hard for me to be objective about this," Schiff said on NPR's "All Things Considered," when asked about his performance leading up to Trump's first impeachment, in 2019, over his dealings with Ukraine.
"It took a bloody insurrection to get even a few Republicans to support impeachment," Schiff said, referring to the January 6 siege. "That's a pretty horribly high bar to have to wait for even a small group of Republicans to honor their constitutional oath."
Trump's second impeachment was the most bipartisan impeachment vote in US history, with ten House Republicans and all but one of the Democrats voting to impeach Trump on a charge of incitement of insurrection. The Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump, but seven Republicans in the upper chamber joined all 50 Democrats to vote to convict him.
The siege took place while Congress was convening to certify Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. Earlier that day, Trump held a "Save America" rally in Washington, DC, in which he urged his supporters to march to the Capitol and "fight" the certification. His lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, also suggested a "trial by combat" while other GOP lawmakers who helped organize the event similarly called for the president's supporters to overturn the 2020 election results.
Schiff writes in his book that when the pro-Trump rioters breached the Capitol that day, some of his Republican colleagues told him to hide.
"You can't let them see you," Schiff recalled one of his GOP colleagues telling him. Another said, "He's right. I know these people, I can talk to them, I can talk my way through them. You're in a whole different category."
The California lawmaker went on to write that while he was initially "oddly touched" by their concern, he realized that "if these Republican members hadn't joined the president in falsely attacking me for four years, I wouldn't need to be worried about my security, none of us would."
Schiff told NPR he was also "shocked" at Republican opposition to Trump's first impeachment, when he was charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress connected to his efforts to strongarm Ukraine's president into launching bogus political investigations while withholding US military aid.
"What shocked me during the trial was the realization, as I listened to some of these senators, that they understood the president was guilty," Schiff said, referring to Republicans. "They recognized that he was guilty. They were surprised by the abundance of evidence."
He went on to say, "They only knew what they knew from watching Fox. But even when confronted with this evidence, it wasn't enough to move them to give meaning to their oath, because it might cost them in their job or it might cost them a position in the Cabinet. And there was nothing they treasured quite so much as those things."
Schiff spearheaded Trump's first impeachment as the chairman of the House intelligence panel and as the lead impeachment manager. In the end, just one Republican, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, voted to convict Trump on either of the charges.