Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) released a video reacting to Donald Trump’slatest threat to criminally prosecute him.
Watch the video here. Download the video here.
Read the full transcript below:Schiff: So today Trump posted this on social media, accusing me of crimes and saying that I needed to be brought to justice. This in and of itself is not new. Trump has been threatening prosecution or jailing of me, accused me of various things over the years. But I want to put this in the context of not only his attacks on me, but also his attacks on other perceived political enemies and what it means for the rule of law. So for years, really beginning with my work on the investigation of Donald Trump connected to Russia and then connected to Ukraine, continuing through my leading his first impeachment over his Ukraine misconduct—and for years now—Donald Trump has threatened to investigate me, prosecute me in various different ways, accused me falsely of engaging in a variety of crimes, the most serious of which, which he has repeated frequently, ad nauseam, is accusing me of treason.
Donald Trump: He should resign from office in disgrace. And frankly, they should look at him for treason.
Schiff: Of saying there is a way that we deal with people who are committing treason, or at least there has been in the past, and saying I should be jailed and prosecuted. So he’s accused me of treason. He’s also accused me of leaking classified information. He’s accused me of fraud. It’s been basically one thing after another. All baseless, all without merit. A lot of his attacks are on social media—like this attack here, or this one here, or this one here. Some of them are during interviews, where he calls for my prosecution or my arrest, or accuses me of various crimes—like here.
Trump: And I’ll tell you what. He should be forced to resign from Congress. Adam Schiff—he’s a lowlife. He should be forced to resign.
Schiff: That’s right. He’s attacking me during a joint press conference with another head of state. But it’s not just me. Over the years, Donald Trump has been attacking others. And now that he has a pliant Justice Department—with Pam Bondi and other of his criminal defense lawyers running the Justice Department—they are accusing all kinds of political adversaries of various crimes. So they have suggested or referred to the Justice Department James Comey, the former FBI Director, and accused him of—I’m not sure exactly what. They’ve referred John Brennan to the Justice Department, the former Director of the CIA. They have gone after Christopher Krebs—you’ll remember, Chris Krebs was the one who worked for the Cyber Information Security Agency and said that the 2020 election was the most secure in history. That was his offense. So they’ve said that he’s under investigation. They’ve said that Miles Taylor is under investigation. He was a Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security. And the list goes on. And the danger of this, of course, is not that these people will be successfully prosecuted without any evidence, but that they can be put to the difficulty of having to defend themselves, in the hope it will distract the public’s attention from their malfeasance, or make them pay a political cost or a personal cost for standing up to the president. And in the case of the present attack on me, the president has an additional motive. And that is Jeffrey Epstein. Basically, the controversy of the Epstein files has dominated MAGA world, and the president needs a distraction. And I am a convenient distraction. So the president today is accusing me of fraud. And the basis of his accusation is that I own a home in Maryland, and I own my home in California. Big surprise—members of Congress, almost all of them, own more than one home or rent more than one home because we’re required to be on both coasts. So he is using my ownership of two homes to make a false claim of mortgage fraud. But what really is going on here is this is Donald Trump trying to bring about political retribution, retaliation— Trying to distract from his Epstein files problem. And the bigger problem, of course, is that this is a terrible abuse of power. A president threatening prosecution or saying that his opponent should be jailed. This is the kind of stuff you see tinpot dictators do. It is designed to intimidate his political opponents and somehow try to silence them. Well, I have news for Donald Trump. This bogus latest attack—this bogus latest call for me to be prosecuted or to be jailed—is not going to deter me. I’m going to continue to hold Donald Trump accountable for his corruption, for his malfeasance, for the terrible harms he’s doing to this country. You can count on it.
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