Do we like Adam Schiff?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in his own words or acts, plus real work for LGBTQ+ students and disaster victims, but the Israel arms votes split opinion and there is a denied allegation.
Schiff was born in Massachusetts and grew up in California's East Bay, where his dad sold clothes. He went to Stanford and Harvard Law, then prosecuted the first FBI agent indicted for spying for Russia. He was elected to Congress in 2000 and became the face of the first Trump impeachment as lead House manager.
In 2023 the Republican-led House censured him 213-209 over comments he made years earlier about the Trump-Russia investigations. Republicans blamed him for the fallout from those probes, while Democrats called the vote a political stunt. Schiff said he would wear it as a “badge of honor”.
The messy bit is the mortgage saga. Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department in May 2025 alleging mortgage fraud. Schiff denies any wrongdoing, and his lawyer Preet Bharara called the effort politically motivated. NBC reported in October 2025 that prosecutors hadn't gathered enough evidence to charge, and in November that a grand jury was examining how the probe itself was handled. We found no charges and nothing newer than that.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty in his own words or acts. He called a Florida-style proposal to track student athletes' cycles “a not-at-all disguised effort to discriminate against trans students”, and he's a former vice chair of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus. The contested part is Israel: in April 2026 he voted to block a bomb sale for the first time, which some Democrats welcomed and others thought too late or too far. Where you land depends on how you read that shift.
The recent stuff is mostly about elections. In February 2026 he said on ABC's This Week that he thinks Trump “intends to try to subvert the elections”, and urged record turnout as the best defence. That's a prediction and an opinion rather than a proven fact, and it's a position his political opponents reject.
The good stuff is practical. He teamed up with Republican Tim Sheehy on a home-hardening tax credit that firefighter groups endorsed. Then in August 2026 he pushed disaster tax relief through with Republican Rick Scott, and Spencer Pratt, a Republican who lost his home in the 2025 Palisades fire, thanked them both. His recent bills also include an oil windfall profits tax, a plastic-tracking bill and safer standards for wildland firefighters.