Trump impeachment: President has demeaned ‘Shifty’ Schiff as deranged but the experienced prosecutor will prove a dangerous foe

The former California prosecutor, who has been repeatedly insulted by the president, already has a successful impeachment to his name

If Donald Trump follows the example of the two US presidents who were impeached before him, he will not be at his upcoming Senate impeachment trial.

But the historic clash between his attorneys and the House Democrats charged with presenting the case against him will give Mr Trump a chance to vicariously face-off against a longtime nemesis: House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff.

The California Democrat, who on Wednesday was named by house speaker Nancy Pelosi as one of the Democratic “managers” who will take charge of the case in the Senate, first drew the president’s ire in July 2017, when Mr Trump tweeted that Mr Schiff, who was then working on the intelligence committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election as the panel’s ranking member, spent “all of his time on television pushing the Dem loss excuse”.

Over the course of his presidency, Mr Trump has attacked and demeaned Mr Schiff in over 300 tweets and countless public statements using terms like corrupt, deranged, shifty and “pencil-neck,” while Mr Schiff has called the president “infantile” and accused him of bringing “ill repute to the office” of the presidency.

And if Mr Schiff had been one of Mr Trump’s betes noires before the inquiry began, his opening statement at a 26 September hearing of his committee guaranteed that the president would not stop targeting him.

Mr Schiff described the reported contents of the phone call between Mr Trump and Mr Zelensky in theatrical terms – at one point comparing it to a mafia-style shakedown – although he never claimed that he was speaking the actual words spoken by the president.

In response, Mr Trump claimed Mr Schiff had “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”, and suggested that he be arrested for treason.

He has repeatedly assailed Mr Schiff for “making up” what Mr Trump has called a “perfect” phone call, and suggested that the US constitution’s “speech or debate” clause should not provide him immunity for statements made in the course of his official duties.

Since then, Mr Schiff has remained a constant hate figure for Mr Trump and his supporters by virtue of his status as a leader of the investigation into whether Mr Trump committed impeachable offences.

He is accused of withholding $391m in military aid to Ukraine in order to force that country’s president to announce investigations into former vice president Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory which posits that Ukraine – not Russia – interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Mr Schiff, a former prosecutor, won plaudits for keeping his committee’s impeachment investigation under control and shutting down Republican attempts to disrupt proceedings, such as the time he told Florida Republican Matt Gaetz to “absent yourself” from a closed-door deposition that had been crashed by a number of House members who weren’t entitled to be in the room.

Republicans, however, have claimed – without offering evidence – that Mr Schiff was somehow violating House rules by conducting depositions in a secure room used by his committee, and by not allowing House members who were not members of the investigating committees to be present in closed depositions.

But despite efforts to paint Mr Schiff as a hopelessly biased, cartoonish figure in the eyes of voters, the nine-term congressman is uniquely qualified for this moment in history as one of the few living people who has actually successfully led an impeachment in the upper chamber.

In 2010, the House voted unanimously to approve four articles of impeachment against then-US District Court Judge Thomas Porteous for engaging in corrupt conduct and making false statements to investigators.

Among the three Democrats and two Republicans who were appointed to present the case to the Senate was Mr Schiff, who helped obtain a unanimous vote to convict on one of the four articles and two-thirds votes to convict on the remaining three, as well as a vote to disqualify Mr Porteous from holding “any office of honour, trust or profit under the United States”.

It was a task well-suited to Mr Schiff, who came to congress from the US Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, where he had achieved prominence in the late 1980s by convicting an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of passing secret documents to the Soviet Union in exchange for promises of money and gold.

That experience factored heavily into Ms Pelosi’s decision to tap her fellow Californian as both the House’s chief investigator and chief prosecutor.

“He’s a full package,” Ms Pelosi said of Mr Schiff in an interview with the New York Times last year. “He knows his purpose. He knows his subject. He always thinks strategically, and he respectfully connects with people.”

Indeed, Mr Schiff’s ability to speak extemporaneously while making passionate arguments was on full display during his committee’s hearings, and during the House’s debate on whether or not to make Mr Trump the third impeached president in US history, after Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson.

While his recent performance may have been at the front of Ms Pelosi’s mind when deciding who to select to present Democrats’ case to the Senate, that 1980s spy case might have been a factor as well.

When making his closing argument in the case after persisting through three separate trials, Mr Schiff argued for conviction because it was one “of government misconduct and government corruption of the highest and most disturbing order”.