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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. Who heard Mara Liasson on NPR over the weekend reporting on Donald Trump happy to indulge what might seem like crazy talk to most people? If the Republicans take back the house in the midterm elections next year, they might elect him not a member of Congress, as speaker of the house. Who knew you could even do that? But apparently, you can.

That kind of talk is one reason that Congressman Adam Schiff wrote his new book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. Of course, Adam Schiff is one of the main impeachment managers when Trump was trying to get Ukraine to announce a phony investigation of Joe Biden before the phony claim that Biden's election was rigged and riling up the crowd for insurrection on January sixth shouting that he would never concede, but Donald Trump, private citizen as speaker of the house?

With me now is Congressman Adam Schiff Democrat from the Southern California District that includes Pasadena, West Hollywood, and elsewhere around there. We'll also touch on his party's high-stakes negotiations still ongoing, of course, over the Physical and Human Infrastructure Bills and how crucial those might be to keeping the house majority in Democratic hands next year, the surest path to not having speaker Trump. Congressman Schiff, thanks for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Congressman Adam Schiff: Thank you. It's great to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Can you explain to many listeners who might be baffled right now hearing this for the first time and asking themselves, "Can they really do that? Appoint a non-member of Congress as speaker of the house?

Congressman Adam Schiff: They can do that. It is not a requirement that the speaker actually be a member of the house. While I don't think that's likely to happen, who knows, but the practical matter is if Kevin McCarthy were to become a speaker, there's nothing that Kevin McCarthy wouldn't do if Trump told him to. Functionally, Donald Trump would be the speaker and that is a terrifying prospect.

We cannot allow someone of that lack of ethics, that lack of decency to ever regain power in this country, but yes, technically he could actually be the speaker. Functionally if McCarthy were ever to set foot in that office, Trump could tell him whatever Trump wanted him to do.

Brian Lehrer: I guess that's one way to look at it, but would that person, Donald Trump or whoever get a vote like an elected member if a non-house member was elected speaker?

Congressman Adam Schiff: They would not get a vote, but they could essentially run the house with the other duties that the speaker has and exert enormous influence over public policy, but my understanding of it is that that they would not

have a vote.

Brian Lehrer: I hear that you think the Trump's scenario is unlikely. I think it's unlikely, but Trump is indulging this talk. Just one more thing on this, because part of Mara Liasson analysis was the politics that could make this possible, which would be that Trump is the most influential Republican, just as you're saying, he could dictate to speaker Kevin McCarthy what to do.

In so many congressional districts, he could potentially bully the local Republican congressperson to vote for him for speaker rather than McCarthy by threatening to have someone primary that congressperson. As an observer of house politics, do you think that could conceivably happen? That he could have that much sway in that particular way?

Congressman Adam Schiff: Yes. I think we have to admit that that is certainly possible. It may not be probable, but it is certainly possible. After all, this is a man who incited an insurrection that put the lives of members of Congress in jeopardy, and even after the insurrection, those members of the GOP were back on the house floor most of them still trying to overturn the election. I still would not discard Donald Trump as president or presidential candidate even though he had brought such disaster upon the country. He apparently has an iron grip on the GOP at the moment and it is very hazardous to Republican members to defy him in any way.

Brian Lehrer: Congressman Adam Schiff is our guest if you're just joining us. His new book is called Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. For the Democrats to keep the house and prevent any of this, you might need to show you can govern even within your own party by getting to yes on both the Physical Infrastructure Bill and the Human Infrastructure Bill or Reconciliation Bill as it's often called. Do you think that's necessary to keeping power in the house next year?

Congressman Adam Schiff: I do think it's very important to keeping power in the house. I think it's also very important to showing that our democracy can work. Our democracy is very much on the ballot for so many reasons, but among them is the fact that at the end of the day, a government if it's going to persist, needs to be able to deliver and meet the needs of its people.

There is a very strong policy imperative to make sure that we expand Medicare to help seniors with their eye care and their dental and their hearing, to expand childhood, to expand early childhood education, help kids with college, deal with climate change, paid family leave. All of these things enormously popular, enormously important to the country. I think the policy imperative is so great.

It will get done, but also the political imperative. My feeling is if we can't get these two bills done, then we might as well just walk across the aisle and hand the keys over to the other side and say, "We're not interested in driving, why don't you go ahead and take the wheel?" I just can't imagine that any of my colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle are prepared to do that. I'm certainly not.

Brian Lehrer: People may think of January six and StopTheSteal, that lie, as different from the events that caused the Trump and Ukraine impeachment that you helped to lead, but how much do you see them as parts of a whole?

Congressman Adam Schiff: I write about this a great deal in the book. They're really natural continuation actually of several things. First, when Donald Trump was able to escape any accountability for inviting Russian interference in our election and lying to cover it up, it was the very next day after Bob Mueller testified. After Donald Trump felt that he had escaped the jailer, the very next day he was on the phone with the president of yet a different country, this time, Ukraine, but once again seeking foreign help in his election.

When he was acquitted of that crime in the Senate during the first impeachment trial, I think you can draw a straight line to even greater abuses of his power that ultimately led to that insurrection. One thing proceeded from another and I have to say, were we ever to return him to the oval office, you could expect that continuing progression to more and more serious abuses of power to take place.

Brian Lehrer: Congressman Adam Schiff with us. His new book, Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could and I should mention that he's doing a 92nd Street Y event tonight. It's at seven o'clock in conversation with Ron Chernow who wrote the Hamilton biography that the play was based on among other things so seven o'clock tonight, Adam Schiff with Ron Chernow at the 92nd Street Y. Is that an in-person event? Are you in New York right now?

Congressman Adam Schiff: I am. It is in person and it's going to be wonderful to see people again in three dimensions.

Brian Lehrer: Indeed. We got the sad and shocking news this morning that General Colin Powell died from COVID complications and among many things, of course, he was both the first Black secretary of state and first Black joint chiefs of staff chairman. He was a child of the South Bronx here in New York and of the Jamaican immigrant parents who raised him here. He was 84 years old. Did you know Colin Powell?

Congressman Adam Schiff: I did. I can't say that I knew him well, but I have met him on a couple of occasions. I think we lost a great patriot. It's really a terrible loss and I think he served the country very well and very ably. He recognized that the appearance that he made to push the intelligence onto rock was a terrible mistake, but I think he had a very distinguished career and the country is really I think sad appropriately so to lose him.

Brian Lehrer: I was looking back at that February 2003 pre-Iraq war speech to the UN trying to convince the world that there were weapons of mass destruction when it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction. A lot of people say Colin Powell lied to the world. Now for you as a leading member of the intelligence committee, this is in your portfolio to some degree.

I looked at a quote that he gave PBS frontline years later. He said, "It was deeply troubling and I think it was a great intelligence failure on our part because the problems that existed in that national intelligence estimate should have been recognized and caught earlier by the intelligence community." That's a later Colin Powell quote. I'm curious Congressman Schiff if you have an opinion, lie because remember from the time, maybe you were one of the Democrats saying if Bush lies who dies about WMDs? Was it a lie by Colin Powell? Was it a lie to Colin Powell or was it an honest intelligence failure?

Congressman Adam Schiff: I don't think it was a lie by Colin Powell in the sense of that he knew the intelligence was flawed, but he was willing to misrepresent it to the American people. I was not a member of the intelligence committee at the time, and I was misled by the same intelligence and made the same mistake. I do think, now that we have a fuller picture of what that intelligence was, and the dissenting voices within the intelligence community that really weren't aired to the degree that they should have been that others than the Bush administration were hyping the intelligence.

I recall in particular being at a meeting at the White House prior to the vote in the Iraq war and asking George Tenet, who was at the time, the director of the CIA and had served in Democratic administrations and Republican administrations and asking him about the strength of the intelligence on Iraq, on a scale of 1 to 10, with one being purely speculative and 10 being absolutely certain that Iraq had this ongoing nuclear weapons program. He was a 10, and I would come to subsequently learn that the intelligence really did not back that up in any way.

Brian Lehrer: Does Powell come up in your book in any way, as a previous Republican or anything like that?

Congressman Adam Schiff: I don't refer to Powell specifically, but I talk about how my family in a way I was born bipartisan. My mother's family were all Republicans. My father's family were all Democrats. I have a wonderful photograph in the book of my grandfather with Eisenhower and Henry Cabot Lodge when my grandfather was a delegate for Eisenhower. That was a time when they were Rockefeller Republicans. That branch of the party really doesn't exist anymore. We desperately need a Republican party to be a party of ideas again.

At the moment, it is devolved into a cult around the former president and an autocratic cult, at that. As long as, it is not a party of ideas, there's really no accommodating them. They have to be beaten at the polls because right now they are holding up Victor Orban, the wannabe dictator in Hungary as their preferred model. They're hosting conservative political conventions in Budapest to tout that model and really moving dramatically away from the proud legacy our country has of being a leading democracy.

Brian Lehrer: To that point, the subtitle of your book is midnight-- Well, the title is Midnight in Washington. The subtitle is How We Almost Lost our Democracy and Still Could. On the still could part looking ahead further to 2024, whether it's Trump or another Republican on the ballot, one of the things I know you're concerned about

that I think it's worth saying out loud is these new voting laws being passed in Republican legislature states and not even so much on the part that I think makes the news most of the time, which is making it hard to vote by mail or making it hard to vote on the weekends, those sorts of things, but these legislatures giving themselves the power to actually nullify the real results. Can you talk about how that would work and where you're seeing new laws like that, that concern you?

Congressman Adam Schiff: Absolutely, I think you've really put your finger on it. The laws to disenfranchise people, particularly people of color are vile and dangerous and return to Jim Crow, but these other laws that are stripping independent elections officials of their duties and handing them over to partisan legislatures or partisan boards or attacking and really driving out lower level independent elections officials and replacing them with sycophants of the former president is the most direct threat to our democracy.

As a member of the January 6th Select Committee, I have to acknowledge there may be another attack on the capital, but if there is, it will fail like the last one, but where they may succeed in overturning our democracy is by overturning the next presidential election through the use of these quasi-legal means, these mechanisms they're now setting up around the country.

It seems the lesson that Donald Trump and the Republican party leadership took from the failed insurrection is the way to make it succeed is not a bigger or more violent attack on the capital, but if they couldn't get Brad Raffensperger, the current Secretary of State in Georgia, if they couldn't get him to find 11,780 votes that don't exist, they want to make sure that in the next election, they have somebody who will, and this is how democracies come to an end. It's not always through violent means, it's I think more often by using the instruments of a democracy against itself.

Brian Lehrer: You made a nice Freudian slip there calling Brad Raffensperger the former Secretary of State of Georgia even though he is still technically in office. That Georgia bill takes the power of certification away from him. Doesn't it?

Congressman Adam Schiff: That's my understanding. Yes. It's being replicated in other parts of the country as well. This is just a clear and present danger to our democracy, but I do want to underscore because one of the reasons I chose the title of Midnight in Washington is it may be the darkest moment of every day, midnight, everywhere in the world but it's also a hopeful time because what follows is filled with light. I believe that we're going to get through this. I really believe it in my core. I believe it because of a lot of people that inspired me over the last four years, who stepped in this breach.

People like ambassador Marie Ivanovich and Fiona Hill and Alexander Finman and Bill Taylor, people like Dan Coates, the Republican head of the intelligence communities who wouldn't lie to suit Donald Trump and lost his job over this, so many others who were willing to stand up and be counted. I fully believe that those examples will lead the way and that our democracy will continue because there are far more of us in this country that love our democracy than there are people that are

willing to tear it down.

Brian Lehrer: California, Congressman Adam Schiff, his new book is called Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. Again, he will be at the 92nd Street Y tonight at seven o'clock in conversation with Ron Chernow. Congressman, thanks so much for joining us today. Enjoy your time in New York.

Congressman Adam Schiff: Thank you. Great to be with you.

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