October 11, 2025 - Washington, D.C. — On Friday, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) delivered remarks on the Senate floor to denounce President Trump’s pattern of political retribution and intimidation tactics against law firms, universities, and the media. Schiff called out Trump’s misuse of the military as the President continues to deploy the National Guard to Democrat-led cities over the objections of states’ governors and mayors. 

Schiff underscored the critical need to push back against Trump’s unlawful and illegal misuse of the military for political theater. 

Watch his full speech HERE. Download remarks HERE.

Read the transcript of his remarks as delivered below:

I want to take a look at the last nine months in this country. The first nine months of this administration, and just how far we have traveled down the road towards dictatorship in nine months. So let me see if, in less than nine minutes, I can summarize nine months.  

First, let’s look at the president’s early attacks on our universities. The president withholding federal funding from universities that are using a curriculum he doesn’t like. Or employing professors he doesn’t want. Or unwilling to make changes that sacrifice their academic freedom that suit the ideological predilections of the administration. So, an attack on our institutions of higher learning, unprecedented in our history.  

Some of the first attacks on the freedom of the American people were attacks on our universities. They were in quick succession, followed by attacks on law firms. That is the President of the United States telling law firms that you must not represent these unpopular clients. Unpopular to the president because they took action against the president. Or they spoke out against the president. Or they belonged to the Justice Department when the Justice Department was investigating the president’s corruption. So, the president has tried to dictate to the legal community who it can defend and who it cannot.  

Our country in its founding underscored, our founders underscored the importance of the right of representation, of the right to jury trial, of the right, even for unpopular causes, to have representation. Indeed, John Adams took on one of the most unpopular cases of his time and represented those clients because he wanted to establish the principle in American jurisprudence that everyone is entitled to counsel. But under this administration, that’s not true. This administration has attacked law firms and said, “You shall not represent these clients, and if you do, we will cut off your access to courthouses, or we will cut off your access to federal contracts, or security clearances that you would need to represent your clients.” And sadly, as in the case of universities, many law firms crumble having given years of lip service, decades of lip service, to the idea that everyone is entitled to vigorous representation. They crumbled.  

But the administration wasn’t content to try to silence universities or professors or to silence law firms. The censorship, the intimidation campaign continued. The president using the power of the regulation, of the regulatory bodies of the Federal Communications Commission to try to silence late night comedians because they told jokes about the president. So, effectively Paramount which wanted to merge with Skydance. It is made abundantly clear that merger, that multi-billion-dollar merger, won’t go forward unless you pay off the president in his litigation against CBS. Unless you pay the president millions of dollars personally, that merger is not going to go through.  

And what’s more, “that pesky late night comedian Stephen Colbert needs to go.” And so, Stephen Colbert gets his show cancelled. Jimmy [Kimmel] gets his show cancelled. His show thankfully brought back. But the administration is using the regulatory power to censor late night comedians. He’s going after the press, the freedom of the press. Telling the AP if you don’t use my Gulf of America lexicon instead of the Gulf of Mexico, you’re not going to be able to cover certain things at the White House. You’re not going to be able to accompany the president on certain trips. He’s suing the Wall Street Journal because they’re reporting about his contacts with Jeffrey Epstein. He is trying to silence the media, intimidate the media, chill the media, and it’s working. You see the Washington Post change their editorial policy. You see the LA Times withhold its editorial in the presidential election. This censorship is working. But it’s not just the press, it’s not just late-night comedy, it’s not just universities, not just law firms. The president is telling corporate America, “You can’t hire this person. Microsoft, you can’t hire this person.” The threat is, if they do, they won’t get government contracts. The president is saying to other companies, “You want to export your product, you got to give the U.S. government a share. You got to make the U.S. government an equity partner in your company.” And if, under Bill Clinton, the era of big government was over, the era of big government is back with Donald Trump. A big government that can make decisions about who corporations can do business with and where and what they can export, and who they can hire.  

But it doesn’t stop there, of course, because now the president is using the Justice Department to go after his political enemies. This week, it’s James Comey. Next week, it will be someone else, and the week after that, who knows? It is a long and growing list of enemies. The president tweeting out who he wants prosecuted, he wants investigated. Commanding, dictating, vindictive prosecutions almost every day. Abusing the department that I once served in for almost six years in a way we have never seen before in this country. Threatening to take people’s liberty away from them if they stand up to the president.  

And now we have this, what brings us to the floor tonight, and that is the unprecedented use of the military, the U.S. military, and our Guard against our own people. You have the president telling a room full of generals and admirals that there is an enemy within, and that enemy is the American people. Or at least those American people who didn’t vote for him, they are the enemy within. And he’s going to go after them, and he wants the military to use those American cities that didn’t vote for him as their training grounds. And no sooner is it said, then we see helicopters over skies in Chicago, and we see military troops repelling from Black Hawks, and we see the military being used against our own citizens.  

We see children shackled, crying for their parents in the middle of the night. We see signs of horror and chaos. We see a president so determined to use the military against our own people that when a governor says, “No, you cannot use our National Guard in this lawless way,” he commandeers the military anyway.  

California was the test case. We were the first. Los Angeles was the first. Over the objections of the Mayor of Los Angeles, over the objections of the Governor of California, the President of the United States, commandeered California’s National Guard to use against our own people. To increase the risk of violence and disorder.  

So, the president might have a pretext to order in more military troops. Now in California, like most states, we revere our National Guard. For what they do for us during good times and hard times, how they protect us from fire and flood. And to abuse the Guard in that way, to try to breach the trust the Guard has with our own citizens, is a calamity.  

That is gravely damaging the morale of the troops in the guard, even as it is damaging the trust of the people of the state in their Guard. And now we see this replicated in Portland, this militarization, this attack on American cities. We see this in court in Portland, where the judge hearing the government’s case for the use and misuse of this military force says that its presentation is untethered to fact, untethered to fact. That there is no lawful basis, no factual basis, to use the military in this way. And now they’re doing the same in Chicago, threatening San Francisco. And if they can’t get a state’s own National Guard to be used against its own citizens, they are now inviting the Guard from other states like Texas to leave their state, with a willing governor, to send them to another state. And I was grateful to see the Republican Governor of Oklahoma speak out against this terrible abuse of the National Guard. Which not only undermines the military readiness of our forces to be abused this way but is so deliberately divisive. That we would have one state now turn against another state. We would have Texas against Illinois. And deploy Texas military in that way, its Guard in that way was previously unthinkable. It should be unthinkable today.  

Today, it’s California. Today, it’s Illinois. Today, it’s Oregon. Where will it be tomorrow? Where does this end? I’ll tell you where it ends. It ends in more civil strife. It ends in more morale problems in the military. It ends in a lesser democracy. And if we are here in nine months, where will we be with four years of this? And I’ll tell you this, we will not be a democracy. At the pace we are going in four years, we will not be a democracy.  

But today, nine months into this, it is not too late to put a stop to this. All that it would require is a handful of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to say, enough. Enough already. Enough of the attacks on our universities and our press. Enough of the attacks on our cities. Enough of the weaponization of our Department of Justice. Enough of the lawlessness. We are going to be Senators once again. We are going to assert the power of Congress once again to put an end, to put a stop to this lawlessness. That is all it would take is a few people of conscience to stand up to this president and say, enough.   

Source: Senator Adam Schiff