Midnight in Washington, page 1
Copyright © 2021 by Adam Schiff
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the house colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780593231524
Ebook ISBN 9780593231548
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Carlos Beltrán
Cover photo: Yaya Ernst/ Getty Images
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue: Why Should I?
Part One: Against Our Will Comes Wisdom
Chapter 1: Insurrection
Chapter 2: The One Thing They Can Never Take Away
Chapter 3: Take Out Your Rolodex
Chapter 4: A Man May Change His Clothes, but He Is Still the Same Man
Chapter 5: You Know How It Goes
Part Two: Truth Isn’t Truth
Chapter 6: Two Stories
Chapter 7: The Midnight Run
Chapter 8: Keep Doing What You’re Doing
Chapter 9: If I Could Only Speak to a Couple Hundred Million People
Chapter 10: The Barr Deception
Chapter 11: You Might Think It’s Okay
Part Three: Impeached for Life, Impeached Forever
Chapter 12: Crossing the Rubicon
Chapter 13: I Would Like You to Do Us a Favor, Though
Chapter 14: You Need to Come Home on the Next Plane
Chapter 15: This for That
Chapter 16: Here, Right Matters
Chapter 17: Everyone Was in the Loop
Part Four: Impartial Justice
Chapter 18: The Four and the Forty Million
Chapter 19: Does He Really Need to Be Removed?
Chapter 20: One Man Had Said “Enough”
Part Five: Someone’s Going to Get Killed
Chapter 21: Heads on Pikes
Chapter 22: Right Would Have to Wait
Epilogue: He Is Not Who You Are
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
About the Author
For truth is truth
To the end of reckoning.
—William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
PROLOGUE
WHY SHOULD I?
The Senate chamber was so much smaller than I remembered. I had tried an impeachment case against a federal judge ten years earlier and hadn’t been on the Senate floor since. In the House, I could see members on the other side of the chamber, but only dimly, their faces indistinct in the distance. Some of the Republican members of the House have been there for years, but sit in the far corner and are not on any of my committees, and if I passed them at the airport, I wouldn’t know them from a stranger. Indeed, I have passed them at the airport and not known who they were until they stopped and introduced themselves. But as I walked onto the Senate floor again after so long, I couldn’t get over how intimate it was—how closely I could observe each of the senators and their expressions, faces so familiar to me even if I had never worked with them, or spoken with them, before.
During the trial, with one glance I could tell how closely they were paying attention, or not paying attention—frowning, thoughtful, drifting off, engaged, moved, angered, or, worse, indifferent. You could see when their eyelids got heavy after lunch or long argumentation, or when their eyes glistened with emotion. We had twenty-four hours, spread out over three days, to make our case for the impeachment of a president, which didn’t seem like much, which wasn’t much, to sum up all of the reasons why Donald J. Trump posed a continuing danger to the Republic. We had spent two of those days making what I thought was a powerful case, my talented colleagues and incredible staff having put together a series of compelling presentations, integrating the testimony of the witnesses, documentary records, constitutional sources, and all of the powerful argumentation we could muster—but before the last argument of the day, one of my staff put his hand on my arm and stopped me.
“They think we’ve proven him guilty. They need to know why he should be removed.”
I didn’t have time to ask my staff who “they” were. We had been getting feedback during the course of the trial, sometimes directly from senators who would walk past us in the small lobby behind the Senate floor, going to and from lunch, or on a break, or who would wander up to our small table on the Senate floor when the day’s presentations were done. But the best sources of information came from Senator Schumer’s staff, passed on to my staff in whispers and handwritten notes. Were these questions coming from Democratic senators, like Joe Manchin from West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, or Doug Jones of Alabama? If so, we were in trouble.
Or was this feedback coming from Republican senators, several of whom had kept their cards close to the vest? If the Republican senators were asking, that meant their minds were still open to conviction, and that was good, even though at this point in the trial they had yet to hear the defense case.
And still, what were “they” really asking? If senators believed that we had proven Trump guilty of withholding hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid from an ally at war in order to coerce that nation into helping him cheat in the upcoming election, wasn’t that enough? Had the bar become so high with this president that that wasn’t enough? It was like a juror in an extortion case involving the president asking the judge, “Okay, he’s guilty, but do we really need to convict? Can’t he just go on running the country?”
But as I walked to the lectern, I suddenly understood, in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated until that moment, that this was the central question: Why should he be removed? He was the president of their party. He was putting conservative judges on the court. He was lowering their taxes. Why remove him? I had watched during breaks in the trial as the president’s Senate defenders took to the airwaves to proclaim his innocence, and I had believed them—not their claims about the president’s conduct, but that they believed what they were saying, that they believed there had been, to quote the president’s mantra of defense, no quid pro quo. But I could see now that that wasn’t it at all.
I should have known better. For the past three years, Republicans had confided, to me and to many of my Democratic colleagues, their serious misgivings about the president. Some would go on Fox News and bash me, only to urge me privately to keep on with the investigation. And it became clear that many Republicans felt someone needed to do it, someone needed to put a stop to it all, even if they couldn’t, or wouldn’t. And the question wasn’t so much “Why should he be removed?” as “Why should I be the one to remove him? Why should I risk my seat, my position of power and influence, my career and future? Why should I? Why should I?”
There was only half an hour left of our case that day when I pulled my thoughts free of my staff to make those seven short paces from the House managers’ table to the lectern, and I had no idea how I was going to answer that question. I had prepared to go through the record of the president’s call again, the one in which he says “I want you to do us a favor, though”—because I had discovered there was so much more to that transcript, so much more now that we understood the whole scheme, and I had planned to go through it, line by line. It had become a practice of mine, during the hearings in the House, to do a kind of impromptu summary at the end of each proceeding, to try to distill the importance of what we had heard or learned, to try to express simply the significance of something that had struck me as particularly powerful or telling. It didn’t even have to be all that important in its own right, as long as it spoke to something larger, something that shed light on the bigger issue, on what was at stake. But the call record now seemed insignificant, compared to the question: Why should I?
I needed time to think, and so I did go through the call record with the senators, pulling out a line here or there to explain its new significance. Most of the senators were listening politely after a long day, but not all, and their concentration was wandering, and so was mine. I was doing a kind of extreme multitasking, reading and speaking about the call but thinking about the question I needed to answer, and all the other questions that it presumed: What made this man so dangerous? What had he done to the country? How, in three short years, had he been able to so completely remake his own party, get it to abandon its own ideology, get my friends and colleagues to surrender themselves to his obvious immorality? How had he caused us to question ourselves, our values, our commitment to democracy, what the country even stood for? How had he been able to convince so many of our fellow citizens that his views were the truth, and that they should believe him no matter how obvious the lies?
When I was finished going through the call record, when I could delay no longer, I told the senators,“This brings me to the last point I want to make tonight.” At the end of the trial, I said, I believed that we would have proven the president guilty—that is, h
* * *
—
In the year and a half since that day, I have thought a lot about what I might have said differently, or done differently, to persuade the senators of what a danger the now former president posed then, and poses still. Whether there was any course we might have taken, not just in the trial but in the years that preceded it, to prevent what was coming: a violent insurrection against the Capitol, a wave of antidemocratic efforts aimed at the heart of our democracy, and a full-out assault on the truth.
There is now a dangerous vein of autocratic thought running through one of America’s two great parties, and it poses an existential danger to the country. In this we are not alone. All around the world, there is a new competition between autocracy and democracy, and for more than a decade, the autocrats have been on the rise. This trend toward authoritarianism began before Donald Trump and will not have spent its force when he steps off the political stage for good. The experience of the last four years will require constant vigilance on our part so that it does not gain another foothold in the highest office in our land.
The actions of our government, like the broader sweep of history, are not taken on their own, they are not the product of impersonal forces operating without human actors and agency. We made Donald Trump possible. We the voters, yes, but we in Congress even more so. He would not have been able to batter and break so many of our democratic norms had we not let him, had we not been capable of endless rationalization, had we not forgotten why we came to office in the first place, had we not been afraid. How does that happen? How do good people allow themselves to be so badly used?
As the pandemic hit and I was forced into seclusion, along with the rest of America, I set out to write a book about what I witnessed at that very human level, about the friendships I lost with colleagues on the other side of the aisle that I had long worked with and admired, about their failings and my own, about the heroism of people I had never met but who would enter my life and change it, sometimes with only a few words, like “Here, right matters.” I tried to draw on my experience, not only in Congress, but growing up in a close-knit family that valued its immigrant history, as a prosecutor handling cases like espionage, and living overseas in a country broken up by the same kind of xenophobic populism we would see unleashed here.
Midnight is the darkest moment of the day, everywhere in the world. But it is also the most hopeful, because everything that comes after holds the promise of light. America has a genius for reinvention, and we must use it. As Lincoln said, we must “disenthrall ourselves” to save our country. From the same forces of bigotry that divided and nearly defeated the country in the Civil War, yes, without a doubt, but from something new to the American landscape as well, from a dangerous experimentation with a uniquely American brand of authoritarianism. We must all play our part. We must all confront the question—Why should I?
Here is my answer.
PART ONE
AGAINST OUR WILL COMES WISDOM
1
INSURRECTION
“Please grab a mask!” a Capitol Police officer shouted from the well of the House floor. Up until this point, I still wasn’t sure what was happening outside the chamber and whether we were at serious risk. There were rioters in the building, that much I knew. How many of them, or how great a threat they posed, it was impossible to tell. I looked around at my colleagues to see if they were as perplexed as I was, and besides, what were we supposed to do in an emergency? I suddenly wished I had been paying more attention at freshman orientation twenty years earlier.
Sensing our confusion, the officer continued: “Be prepared to don your mask in the event the room is breached.” He told us that we did not need to put the masks on yet, but tear gas was being deployed, so we should get them ready. “Be prepared to get down under your chairs if necessary. So, we have folks entering the Rotunda and coming down this way…. Just be prepared. Stay calm.” I pulled a rectangular canvas pouch from under my seat and unzipped it. Inside was a strongly sealed plastic container with no obvious opening. I flipped it from side to side and upside down, trying to open the damned thing. Finally figuring it out, I helped the members around me open theirs, and we removed the plastic hoods. These hoods didn’t resemble the gas masks you see police wearing during a riot; instead, they were a large polyethylene bag that you pulled over your head, with a small motor attached to circulate and filter the air. As you removed the hood from its packaging, the motor began running, and suddenly there was a din of dozens of these hoods buzzing, which only added to the growing sense of alarm.
“When you put on the hood,” one of my colleagues and a former Marine, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, shouted, “breathe slowly.” Ruben was standing behind me, and he could see the panic spreading from member to member. “Take slow, steady breaths. Your impulse will be to hyperventilate, but you need to breathe slowly.” This was very helpful advice. I have a bit of claustrophobia, and the idea of pulling a bag over my head already had my pulse quickening. I resolved to wait until the last moment before I had to don the thing, since I wasn’t smelling tear gas, not yet. “Breathe slowly when you put it on,” Ruben intoned again, “or you will pass out. That is how people can die from wearing these.” Okay, that wasn’t so helpful.
“This is because of you!” yelled Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota from the gallery at Representative Paul Gosar, who had been at the microphone. “Shut up!” came the Republican reply. “Call Trump, tell him to call off his revolutionary guards,” screamed Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee. He was also in the gallery, above me and to the right, his face red with anger. Other members tried to settle things down and not allow the recriminations to spread, but Phillips wasn’t wrong. We were here for what should have been the ceremonial certification of the 2020 presidential election results, but instead we were now in danger. For months, GOP members of Congress had propagated the president’s big lie about the elections, and you could draw a direct line between those lies and the threat we all now faced. Because of the pandemic, Phillips, Cohen, and other members had been required to wait in the gallery before their chance to speak, and they were the most exposed. Down on the House floor, we could barricade ourselves in, but upstairs there are multiple doors to the gallery and little to prevent the rioters from entering.
“Lock the gallery doors!” someone shouted from down below, but it wasn’t clear to police upstairs which doors in the gallery remained open. “Not those doors—those doors!” came another excited shout. “Those doors over there!”
A police officer returned to the well again: He told us that they had secured an escape route and he wanted us to exit the chambers and proceed immediately down the stairs. Now. There are two sets of double doors behind the Speaker’s chair and raised dais, and the doors to our right were pulled open. Members and staff quickly moved toward the exit and I was suddenly aware of just how many people had been on the floor, in the cloakroom or elsewhere, as they crowded by the exit and created a real logjam. I waited by my seat, still feeling relatively calm and wanting to give other members and staff a chance to go first. Besides, so many of the Republican members were not wearing masks, I wasn’t eager to be jammed in with them shoulder to shoulder on my way out the doors. Eventually, I wandered over to the GOP side of the chamber and waited there alone, several rows above the well, until a young staff member approached me, perplexed why I wasn’t leaving.
