California U.S. Representative Adam Schiff questioned on Tuesday whether President-elect Donald Trump’s next attorney general will go after the grand jurors who voted to indict Trump.
“Is she also going to go after the grand jurors who found there was probable cause to believe he was engaged in multiple crimes?” Schiff said on MSNBC, referring to Trump’s attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s office secured two grand jury indictments against Trump: one in Washington, D.C., in connection to his activities surrounding efforts to subvert the 2020 election results and in the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol; and another in Florida, related to Trump’s handling of classified documents.
Smith’s office this week moved to dismiss the January 6 case, and prosecutors also dropped an appeal to the dismissal of the classified documents case.
Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP
A jury in New York also returned an indictment charging Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He was convicted of all 34 charges earlier this year, but his sentencing has been indefinitely postponed.
And the president-elect and several of his allies were indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, on racketeering charges, but that case has been placed on hold amid a legal challenge to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ role in the case.
During his MSNBC interview on Tuesday, Schiff, who recently won his Senate race in California, mentioned special counsel John Durham, who was tapped to investigate the Justice Department’s inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Durham did not secure convictions in any of the cases.
“You can very well see a lot of prosecutors, like Durham, who spend millions of taxpayer dollars to come up with nothing,” Schiff told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. “Pam Bondi follows through with what she’s pledged to do, which is to investigate nonexistent voter fraud, for example, or to go after the prosecutors.”
Schiff, a Democrat and former federal prosecutor, frequently drew Trump’s ire during his first term in the Oval Office, largely because he spearheaded the House of Representatives’ impeachment proceedings against Trump over the White House’s Ukraine scandal in 2019.
Trump repeatedly suggested arresting Schiff for “treason,” though there was no evidence that Schiff had engaged in any wrongdoing.
In one post to X, formerly Twitter, Trump demanded that Schiff be “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason,” claiming his “lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber.”
“Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people,” Trump wrote the next day. “It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?”
