Adam Schiff

You can't give a pardon as part of a corrupt criminal scheme. You can't give a pardon as part of a bribe, for example. I will make illegal campaign contributions if you will pardon me.

I'm most offended by the pardons in the Iraq war crimes because here you have the absolute worst of America followed by the best of America.

It's a direct assault on the rule of law. It's also the worst form of cronyism and self-interest at work.

You can't trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can't. He will not change, and you know it.

Well, look, we wanted larger checks all along. We wanted larger package all along. We recognize the immense need in the country. People are lining up in food lines miles long.

The Protecting Our Democracy Act that I introduced along with my fellow chairs months ago tries to put some limits on the abuse of this power.

He has pardoned people who are loyal to him. He has pardoned people who are corrupt. And he has pardoned people who were adjudicated by a court in a lengthy trial to have murdered innocent people.

They're grotesque. They're morally repugnant and they're exactly what you expect of Donald Trump.

If you lie to cover up for the president, you get a pardon. If you're a corrupt politician who endorsed Trump, you get a pardon. If you murder civilians while at war, you get a pardon.

This is exactly who Donald Trump is. He would like to be an autocrat. He has nothing but disdain for the institutions of our democracy. And if he can stay in power through cheating, lying, stealing, he will do it. He's going to fail at it…

So a terrible precedent has been set. And once it is set, of course, it takes years and years, sometimes decades to obliterate that precedent. So he is doing real harm and as I mentioned before, part of that harm is in creating this group…

It is enormously dangerous. Look, there's going to be -- whether he runs again or he doesn't, there is going to be someone running in the Trump lane, someone running in the xenophobic populist, I don't care about democracy lane. And this…

He is creating a permanent class of aggrieved Americans who think their election was stolen from them. So, he is going to go out of office the same way he came in like a wrecking ball, just destroying the foundation of our democracy.

The Republicans don't agree with Donald Trump about Russia. I mean, privately, they don't agree with his sycophancy, his deferential character when it comes to Vladimir Putin, the false equivalence he gives between the Russia -- the…

You can't count on Mitch McConnell, I think, in any way on just about any issue.

We must act as if the Russian government has control of all the networks it has penetrated.

The seriousness and duration of this attack demonstrate that we still have enormous and urgent work to do to defend our critical information networks, that we must move quicker than our adversaries to adapt.

We don't want to become them.

They're doing injury to the country as it is. Right now, they are creating a permanent set of aggrieved Americans who feel their election was stolen for that. That is lasting damage.

What I find, frankly so astonishing is that the lawsuit was filed to begin with, and that so many of my colleagues in the GOP, including Kevin McCarthy, would lend their names to this effort to overturn our presidential election.

This wasn't a close call. It wasn't a hard call. It was really no call at all. What it was is essentially an effort to overturn our democracy dressed up in shabby legal clothing.

I think the president has probably broader fears than that about his children. There are any number of reported investigations, some state, some federal, in which he may be concerned that they're facing criminal liability.

The Constitution, as our justices have written, is not a suicide pact.

It would make you the judge in your own case. It would put you above the law.

I have to think they would decide you can't pardon yourself, along the lines of the Office of Legal Counsel opinion from the early 1970s.