WASHINGTON — As President Biden mulls over a preemptive pardon to protect potential targets from revenge prosecution by President-elect Donald Trump, one of those targets said Monday that he doesn’t want Biden to establish a partisan precedent.
Trump said Sunday that members of Congress who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection should be imprisoned.
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump said of elected officials who led the investigation, speaking in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
One of those investigators, former Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), was sworn in Monday as California’s junior U.S. senator. Schiff served on the Jan. 6 committee and led the first impeachment trial of Trump.
“I don’t want to see a precedent where you have presidents, as they leave office, issuing blanket pardons to members of their party or members of their administration,” Schiff said in an interview with The Times. “There was talk of Trump doing that when he left office, of members like Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan seeking pardons from him. It would be another diminution in our democracy, and I just think it’s completely unnecessary.”
Trump said Sunday that he would not directly order his administration to pursue such prosecutions and would leave the decision up to Pam Bondi, his pick for attorney general.
He also said he would “most likely” pardon his supporters who were convicted in the riot.
Schiff said he believes Trump’s comments on prosecuting members of the Jan. 6 committee are intended primarily to create a chilling effect on congressional and judicial oversight. Instead of preemptive pardons, Schiff said he would like the Biden administration to ensure that all records of the Department of Justice’s investigation into Jan. 6 are preserved, and that the special counsel’s report makes as much information public as possible “so that the evidence can’t be buried or misrepresented.”
Asked whether he worries about becoming a target, Schiff said he is more concerned about the increasing acceptance of political violence.
“All of us have been getting threats for years now, and those seem to be escalating,” he said. “That’s a more immediate problem than these sorts of vague threats of ‘You’re going to go to jail.’”
Schiff won the election to replace outgoing Sen. Laphonza Butler, who was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to temporarily fill the seat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein after Feinstein’s death in September 2023.
He gained national prominence during Trump’s first term, leading multiple investigations into Trump and his allies.
Schiff said how much Trump can do to target members of the Jan. 6 committee will depend on who gets confirmed for key law enforcement jobs. He said Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, is unfit for office.
As senator, Schiff said he will consider and have questions for the other nominees, including Bondi, who supported Trump’s assertion that the 2020 election was stolen and threatened to go after Department of Justice prosecutors who indicted Trump.
“I want to know whether those are really her intentions, or whether this was some form of political hyperbole,” Schiff said. “Some of the people he’s nominated, like Marco Rubio, I think are very well qualified. It’s obviously a mixed lot, so I’ll take them one at a time.”
Beyond confirmations, Schiff said he has begun scheduling meetings with Republican senators after spending the last six months meeting with Democratic senators. He said he wants to sift out the nonpartisan, shared challenges he can begin to tackle with colleagues from across the aisle, such as wildfire prevention, rural healthcare and the high cost of housing that drives residents of many states into homelessness.
“When I did the Trump impeachment, the first time I stepped onto the Senate floor, I had the sense that a lot of these folks just knew me from Fox,” he said. “I think they were a bit surprised that I wasn’t this stereotype they’d seen on conservative TV.”
He said he also wants to spend more time in Northern California and the Imperial Valley, much as he has recently done in the Central Valley, to ensure that residents see him not just as someone who represents the Los Angeles region but as a champion for the entire state.
“I want to hear what they want me to focus on, what their priorities are, what I can do to bring back resources for their city or community or region,” he said. “The fact that we’re going to have two male senators means I’m going to work all that much harder to make sure that women are at the table.”
In comments from the Senate floor ahead of Schiff’s confirmation, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York called Schiff “a leading voice among House Democrats, where he was known for his piercing eloquence, his thoughtfulness, his unwavering support of democracy and his courage.”
Schiff was escorted Monday afternoon to his swearing-in ceremony by fellow Californians Sen. Alex Padilla and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). Also in attendance were Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), who ran against Schiff for the Senate seat, and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks).
Schiff, who is Jewish, was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris on a Maimonides Mishneh Torah. He then cast his first vote in favor of Tiffany R. Johnson as a federal district judge for the northern district of Georgia.
Times staff writer Kevin Rector and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
