Adam Schiff built a career peddling the Russia collusion hoax and dragging Donald Trump through one partisan inquisition after another.
Democrats take back the Senate in January, and their impeachment crowd already wants a sequel.
And Schiff just started dialing colleagues about one promotion that should alarm Trump supporters.
Adam Schiff Wants His Hands on the Democrat Bullhorn
US Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) has been calling fellow Democrats to let them know he wants a seat on the party’s leadership team when the next Congress gavels in, according to Semafor.
A person close to Schiff told the outlet he wants to help fix the Democrats’ messaging operation.
That same source insists Schiff isn’t coming after Chuck Schumer’s job. He also isn’t taking on Brian Schatz, the Hawaii Democrat expected to become the next whip. The opening exists because Amy Klobuchar, currently the No. 3 Senate Democrat, won her race for governor of Minnesota.
Schiff won’t have the field to himself. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are both exploring their options, Semafor reported, and Schumer may still have to fend off a challenge from Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.
But Schiff carries a receipt the others can’t match. He served as a vice chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee this cycle and helped rake in $8.5 million for Senate candidates.
Call it what it is. He’s calling in chits.
The Messaging Office Comes With a Ladder Attached
Anybody who has watched Washington for more than five minutes knows the messaging job isn’t a backroom clerk’s desk. Politico pointed out in 2023 that the post running the Senate Democrats’ central messaging clearinghouse served as the springboard for Schumer himself to become leader.
So when a Schiff ally swears the senator has no designs on the top job, take it with a grain of salt. Maybe he means it. Maybe he really just wants to tidy up the talking points and polish the press releases.
But the last man who sat in that chair ended up running the whole caucus.
And messaging happens to be the one skill Schiff has honed above all others. That’s exactly the problem.
Schiff Wrote the Defense Brief for a Spy Warrant Riddled With Errors
Rewind to 2017. Schiff, then the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, practically lived on cable news, telling viewers he’d seen evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
Special counsel Robert Mueller dug for nearly two years. In 2019, his report found the investigation did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Special counsel John Durham later concluded, in a May 2023 report, that the FBI never should have opened its full-blown investigation based on the raw, uncorroborated intelligence it had in hand.
Then there’s the part of the story Democrats would love everyone to forget.
In February 2018, Schiff released a memo defending the FBI’s surveillance applications targeting Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Schiff’s team insisted the bureau played it straight. In December 2019, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz delivered a 17-count rebuttal, finding 17 significant errors or omissions in those very applications.
Think about that for a second. Federal agents used a deeply flawed application to obtain a warrant and spy on an American tied to a presidential campaign, and Schiff wrote the defense brief. Every conservative who has watched the intelligence agencies abuse FISA, and who opposes handing them another reauthorization, should remember whose name sat on that memo.
The House remembered. In June 2023, members voted 213-209 to censure Schiff, and the resolution declared that he “purposely deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people.”
Schiff shrugged it off. He told reporters he’d wear the vote as a “badge of honor,” while Democrats crowded the House floor chanting his name.
The Sequel Democrats Swear They Aren’t Writing
Russia was only the opening act.
In September 2019, Schiff kicked off a House Intelligence hearing by reading a made-up, dramatized version of President Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president. When Republicans objected, he called it parody. A few months later, he stood in the Senate chamber as lead House manager in the Ukraine impeachment trial. The Senate acquitted Trump in February 2020.
Next came Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 committee, a panel she stacked after rejecting the Republican picks of Jim Banks and Jim Jordan in July 2021. Schiff took a seat. The committee spent its time building a story around President Trump while skipping right past the fact that Trump told supporters that day to march “peacefully and patriotically.”
And the same crowd barely blinked during the summer of 2020, when rioters torched a Minneapolis police precinct, laid siege to a federal courthouse in Portland, and left working Americans and small business owners with billions of dollars in damage. If any events deserved the outrage Democrats poured into January 6, those did.
On his way out the door in January 2025, Joe Biden handed preemptive pardons to the members and staff of that committee. Schiff got one too.
Now Democrats are about to hold Senate gavels again. They’ll swear impeachment talk is overblown, the same assurance they gave voters in 2018 before running two impeachments against Trump once they controlled the House.
What a Schiff Megaphone Would Sound Like
In a majority, messaging isn’t a side hustle. The messaging operation decides which hearings get the cameras, which clips get blasted across social media, and which talking points every Democrat parrots on the Sunday shows.
Schiff already knows how to package a crusade. During his 2024 Senate run, Axios reported, his campaign released an ad called “Danger” that opened with footage from January 6.
So picture the next two years with Schiff helping pick the script. Subpoenas dressed up as accountability. Leaks timed for the evening news. Bold claims of devastating evidence that somehow never seem to arrive.
But the hearings would only be the warm-up. A Democrat majority with a sharper megaphone also means a louder push for amnesty for illegal aliens, government-run healthcare, and gutting the filibuster so the socialist wing can chase its wish list.
To be clear, Schiff hasn’t announced a new investigation into anybody, and Semafor’s report describes a man making phone calls, nothing more. Fair enough. But nobody needs a crystal ball to guess what kind of message the guy behind the collusion tour would want to sell.
After the House censured him in 2023, Schiff posted a message for his critics.
“Your words tell me that I have been effective in the defense of our democracy, and I am grateful,” he wrote.
Sources: Semafor, “Schiff makes calls on potential leadership bid”; Political Wire; Politico (via Yahoo News), “Klobuchar rising: Leadership path opens for Minnesota Dem”; Associated Press, “House censures Rep. Adam Schiff over Trump-Russia investigations”; CBS News; NBC News; Global News; Daily Wire; Axios, “Adam Schiff uses Trump’s Iowa caucuses win to boost Senate bid”; US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, Review of Four FISA Applications (December 2019); Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (2019); Special Counsel John Durham, Report (May 2023).
