Adam Schiff Is Ready to Rumble [View all]

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https://www.lamag.com/mag-features/adam-schiff-impeachment/?fbclid=IwAR1t7kX_sW4l5Y4dpijDF-Quyf-kbnD7EJpiKtF-dD0uTbpU1py57Ol7n0Q

Adam Schiff Is Ready to Rumble
The mild-mannered, vegan congressman from Burbank has become the GOP’s worst nightmare—but is he tough enough to take on the Trump smear machine?
By Bryan Smith -
November 12, 2019

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He is world-famous now. The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence can now see himself caricatured on Saturday Night Live. In Trump’s Twitterverse, he’s the limp, Ivy League-educated elitist scheming to bring down the President of the Real America. To his supporters, he is Elliot Ness chasing Al Capone, Joseph Welch facing down Joseph McCarthy. Which of these images wins out may ultimately determine nothing less than the fate of the free world.

Or, as Schiff put it while sitting in his office, his expression indicating a half-hearted attempt at gallows humor: “Just another day.”

He may not want to play the leading man, but Schiff’s confrontation of Trump is the stuff of a Frank Capra film. The by-the-book former prosecutor, who seems every bit the embodiment of the process he champions, is poised to take down a president whose primary mission has been to blow up the system for his own gain, regardless of how many laws (or reputations) were trampled in the process.

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The rest of the day included House votes, a meeting with a delegation of Armenian interns, a radio interview on the Mueller investigation, recording several spots for the Democratic Caucus, and, finally, an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

As Schiff drove me to the studio, he looked almost cool in his reflective shades. (It’s a fleeting moment. He drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from The Big Lebowski: “I don’t roll on Shabbos.”) Once inside the studio, just before he was miked up, Schiff tapped a small toy wolf on a shelf. “It’s a tradition,” he said, “for good luck.” At Blitzer’s desk—a small, red, glass-topped island in a sea of Pacific-blue tile—Schiff waited patiently as Blitzer recounted the day’s news, including Trump’s callous reaction to a photo of two immigrants, a father and daughter, found dead on a riverbank near the Mexico-U.S. border. “Does it ever stop?” Blitzer asked. The congressman responded with a withering takedown of Trump that left the room silent for a moment.

On the way back to his car, Schiff still seemed incensed, showing the rare flash of anger he had spoken about earlier. But there was no time to dwell—fresh outrages were piling up almost hourly. As fate would have it, he was one of the few people in America who could do something about it.