Transcript: NPR's Full Interview With Rep. Adam Schiff On Impeachment Inquiry
Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep interviews House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., about the public phase of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Schiff will preside over televised hearings set to begin on Wednesday.
Steve Inskeep: I want to begin with some words in the Constitution about impeachment. The document says that an official can be impeached and removed for treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors. Which are these, in your view?
Rep. Adam Schiff: Well, I don't think any decision has been made on the ultimate question about whether articles of impeachment should be brought. That will be the purpose of these hearings and the subsequent work done in the Judiciary Committee. But on the basis of what the witnesses have had to say so far, there are any number of potentially impeachable offenses: including bribery, including high crimes and misdemeanors. The basic allegations against the president are that he sought foreign interference in a U.S. election, that he conditioned official acts on the performance of these political favors — and those official acts include a White House meeting that the president of Ukraine desperately sought with President Trump, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funded military assistance for a country that is at war with Russia and a country that the United States has a deep national security interest in making sure it can defend itself.
Can you explain for the layman how those acts — if everything happened, as you suspect it did — how those acts would be "bribery" – the word you used?
Well, bribery, first of all, as the founders understood bribery, it was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader. It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you're offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation's interest. Here you have the president of the United States seeking help from Ukraine in his reelection campaign in the form of two investigations that he thought were politically advantageous, including one of his primary rival.
That's a payoff, is what you're saying. That would be the payoff in this scenario.
Well, bribery
