Buckle your seatbelts

It was never confirmed whether Mueller [has] actually subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, but the President’s aversion to the scrutiny of his business interests caught the attention of Representative Adam Schiff, who will become the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence next year. [...] As Schiff described his approach, it became clear that he wasn’t just planning to cross Trump’s red line—he intended to obliterate it.

[...]

The job of prosecutors like Mueller is to identify and prosecute crimes, not necessarily to inform and educate the public. Congressional committees, like the one Schiff will soon lead, are supposed to monitor the executive branch and expose wrongdoing. [...] Schiff has his own agenda for areas to investigate. “The one that has always concerned me is the financial issues, which obviously have come much to the fore this week,” he said. Shortly before Schiff and I spoke, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his role in the negotiations for building a Trump tower in Moscow.

[...]

“At the end of the day, what should concern us most is anything that can have a continuing impact on the foreign policy and national-security policy of the United States, and, if the Russians were laundering money for the Trump Organization, that would be totally compromising.” Schiff hypothesizes that Trump went beyond using his campaign and the Presidency as a vehicle for advancing his business interests, speculating that he may have shaped policy with an eye to expanding his fortune.

  New Yorker

I'd say that's a given.

“Obviously, that issue is implicated in efforts to build Trump Tower in Moscow. It’s implicated in the money that Trump is bragging he was getting from the Saudis. And why shouldn’t he love the Saudis? He said he was making so much money from them.” As the Washington Post has reported, Trump has sold a superyacht and a hotel to a Saudi prince, a $4.5-million apartment near the United Nations to the Saudi government, and many other apartments to Saudi nationals, and, since Trump became President, his hotels in New York and Chicago have seen significant increases in bookings from Saudi visitors. In a break with the Republican congressional leadership, Trump refuses to take action against Saudi Arabia, notwithstanding substantial evidence that Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince and the putative head of state, directed the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

[...]

Schiff also pointed out that Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, met with the C.E.O. of a state-owned Russian bank in December, 2016, and that, the following month, Erik Prince, an informal adviser to the Trump campaign, met with the leader of a Russian sovereign-wealth fund in the Seychelles, an East African archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean. “The American people have a right to know that their President is working on their behalf, not his family’s financial interests,” Schiff said. “Right now, I don’t think any of us can have the confidence that that’s the case.”

[...]

It is now clear that during the campaign, when Trump was advocating the removal of sanctions on Russia, he was privately trying to make money in Moscow in a deal that may have required Putin’s help. Schiff wants to know: “Is that why Trump is so pro-Russian? Is his financial interest guiding his foreign policy?” Schiff thinks the answer to those questions may be found in the records of Deutsche Bank, which has been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for laundering money for Russia, and was reportedly the only bank willing to do business with Trump in the nineteen-nineties, when major Wall Street firms declined to loan him money after a series of failed business ventures. “We are going to be looking at the issue of possible money laundering by the Trump Organization, and Deutsche Bank is one obvious place to start,” Schiff added.

[...]

[Devin] Nunes, who represents a district in California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley, and Schiff had a reasonably productive relationship. As the chair and the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, respectively, before Trump became President, they collaborated on bills to improve cybersecurity and to codify the rules on the collection of metadata by the intelligence agencies. But, after Comey confirmed that there would be an F.B.I. investigation of the 2016 election, Nunes slipped into a highly partisan mode from which he has not yet emerged. [...] On the night of March 21st, Nunes leaped out of an Uber, in which he had been riding with a staffer, and made his way to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, where he reportedly met with Michael Ellis, a national-security lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, then the senior director for intelligence for the National Security Council. The next day, Nunes held a news conference, announcing, breathlessly, that he had received secret information corroborating Trump’s recent claim that President Obama had wiretapped his campaign. Nunes’s story quickly fell apart, however, and his late-night visit to the White House complex, known as “the midnight run,” became the source of much mockery. As a result, Nunes recused himself from his committee’s Russia investigation, although he continued to review related intelligence and later resumed leadership. The incident established the lengths to which Republicans on the committee would go to defend Trump’s behavior.

I'm guessing Nunes is one of those Republicans who has been taking money from Russians and desperate to avoid consequences.

The Republicans on the [House Intelligence] committee [to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 election] largely devoted their efforts to damage control on Trump’s behalf.

[...]

According to telephone records available to the committee, three days before the [infamous Trump Tower] meeting Trump, Jr., made a series of calls. In the interval between one call from Russia and another to Russia on that day, Trump, Jr., spoke for three or four minutes to someone whose phone number was blocked. This raised the question of whether Trump, Jr., had advised his father of the planned meeting—which both the President and his son have long denied. Under Nunes, the committee declined to issue a subpoena to the telephone company to determine whether Trump, Jr., had been talking with his father. Schiff told me that, when he takes over the committee, one of his first orders of business will be to issue such a subpoena.

[...]

In late September of this year, the House Intelligence Committee voted to release around fifty transcripts from the committee’s investigation, but, to date, only two transcripts—those of Erik Prince and Carter Page—have been made available. Schiff has promised to expedite the release of the others. Among the interviews to be disclosed is one with Kushner, as well as others with the Trump associates Hope Hicks, Corey Lewandowski, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Those should be meaty.

Nunes and the other Republicans concluded that the “committee found no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the Russian government.” Schiff and the Democrats wrote, “The Majority’s report reflects a lack of seriousness and interest in pursuing the truth. By refusing to call in key witnesses, by refusing to request pertinent documents, and by refusing to compel and enforce witness cooperation and answers to key questions, the Majority hobbled the Committee’s ability to conduct a credible investigation that could inspire public confidence.”

[...]

As Schiff sees it, Trump is pushing the country in precisely the wrong direction, at a pivotal moment. “Normally, America would rise to this challenge,” he said. “We would be championing democracy and human rights. But we have a President who’s very fond of ties with the autocrats, who disdains our fellow-democracies, and he is just adding kindling to this global trend. There is a constituency with the same kind of xenophobic populism that you see in Europe, in South America, and elsewhere, and Trump tapped into that, but he has certainly made that trend so much worse and more pronounced.” He went on, “It’s not just that autocrats are winning in places like Brazil. The far-right parties in places like Germany and Austria are growing. He is undermining people like Merkel and Macron and others who are resisting that.”

[...]

After Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York to facilitating unlawful contributions to Trump’s campaign, specifically the payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, Trump’s alleged former paramours, Schiff said, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” that the President “faces the real prospect of jail time” for his role in the case. Schiff told me, “The prosecutors said that Cohen deserved jail time because he helped conceal payments to women that, if they had been disclosed as they should have been, might have changed the outcome of the election. But that argument applies with even more force to Trump himself, because he was the guy directing the scheme, and the beneficiary of it. No jail time for him would be a terrible double standard.”

And it will be thus.

Calling for the President to be incarcerated when he hasn’t yet even been charged, or the evidence against him fully revealed, is, at the very least, premature, and perhaps irresponsible. Henry Waxman, a longtime congressman from a Los Angeles district before his recent retirement, conducted several successful investigations and has been a mentor of Schiff’s. “Adam has done a superb job this last year,” he said. “He achieved just the right tone in his public statements.” But, Waxman added, Schiff now has a very different task ahead of him, and cautioned, “Don’t make wild accusations and then try to substantiate them. You start with the facts and stay with the facts, and lead them to drawing a conclusion. In terms of congressional investigations, don’t get ahead of the facts. Make them public and let people examine those facts and make their own conclusions.”

He's not ahead of the facts. He's ahead of official acknowledgment of the facts via remaining sealed indictments and trials.

If you want a history of Adam Schiff's political career (and the fact that he writes screenplays on the side), it's all in that article.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.