Schiff says Trump should be indicted, but supports Pelosi's dismissal position: NPR

There is already enough evidence to support an indictment of President Trump even before the conclusion of the special investigator's investigation, said Tuesday the California representative, Adam Schiff.

The chairman of the House's intelligence committee spoke of Michael Cohen, the president's former personal advocate, in which the government explained how "individual 1" directed and co-ordinated a fraudulent campaign scheme.

"Individual 1" is Trump, and Cohen should start a three-year jail sentence in part because of these crimes.

"It's very hard to argue that the person who was directed and coordinated should go to jail, but the one who directed and coordinated should not," Schiff told reporters at a breakfast Tuesday. over there Christian Scientific Monitor.

Evidence already in place thus pleaded "very strongly in favor of indicting the president when he is removed from office," he said.

Trump says that he never ordered Cohen to break the law and that the actions in Cohen's case do not even constitute a wrongdoing.

Trump and the White House also argue that Cohen's antecedents to lie mean that we can not believe him – that he will say anything to save his image and try to "get him". get a lighter punishment for the other crimes that he has committed.

The current directives of the Department of Justice prohibit indicting a sitting president. But Schiff believes that the ministry should reconsider its position or put Trump on trial if he loses his reelection in 2020.

"The Ministry of Justice's policy against prosecution is bad policy, especially when there is a risk that the statute of limitations will allow a president to escape justice," he said. President.

Schiff did not hesitate to say that he thought Congress should dismiss Trump and remove him from office in order to sue what he called these offenses.

The President recalled the position of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her Monday interview and said that if congressional Republicans, who control the Senate, accepted the process, get into the process today. would be "doomed to failure".

"I do not see much to be gained by the country experiencing such a heartbreaking experience, as I have often pointed out in the past," he told reporters. "The only thing worse than subjecting the country to indictment trauma is to subject it to trauma due to an unsuccessful charge."

The Democrats, however, took care not to close the door completely. Pelosi and others argue that the Justice Department's special advocate, Robert Mueller, or other investigators could find evidence of Trump's wrongdoings so blatant that they could force a bipartisan case for dismissal.

Committee Priorities

With regard to the investigation of the House intelligence committee that he leads, Schiff said he would look for new documents regarding an alleged conversation between Trump and his long-time confidant, Roger Stone .

"We are going to look at all the documentary evidence," he said, to NPR's question asking him if he was looking for phone records that could support Cohen's allegation that Trump would have had a loudspeaker phone conversation with Stone about a future WikiLeaks dump that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign.

"This could take a number of forms, ranging from phone records to social media records, to other documentary evidence."

In the past, Schiff attached great importance to the revelations that, in his opinion, could be extracted from the telephone records of the investigation on Russia. He promised to get phone records from Donald Trump Jr. because Democrats suspected that they could tangle the old Trump, but that did not turn out.

Ultimately, the duration of Schiff's investigation could depend on that of Mueller and the publication by the Department of Justice of the underlying evidence gathered by the Mueller team.

"If the Justice Department tries to hide the Mueller report or the underlying evidence, it may be necessary to ask Mueller to testify," Schiff said. "Many things will be affected … by the extent to which the Department of Justice requires us to investigate all that Bob Mueller has done again … that will have a more direct impact on the length of our investigation. "