Trump Digs Into Schiff's Financial Records and Threatens to Prosecute the Senator on Dubious Grounds as Payback for Impeachment

Jul 15, 2025

Donald Trump has promised retaliation against his political opponents, and one of his chief targets is Sen. Adam Schiff, a leader of the first impeachment inquiry against Trump and the congressional investigation into his coup attempt in 2021. Now Trump is targeting Schiff for prosecution on a dubious charge of mortgage fraud.

See an overview from Axios:

President Trump accused Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) of mortgage fraud on Tuesday, calling Schiff a “scam artist” who “needs to be brought to justice.”
Trump’s call for Schiff to be prosecuted is part of a larger pattern of the president seeking retribution against Americans who have spoken out against him.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that Schiff reported his primary residence incorrectly from 2009 to 2020, which the president called a “sustained pattern of possible Mortgage Fraud.”…
A spokesperson for Schiff said the senator maintained a home in Maryland for easy access to Washington, calling it “routine for a member of Congress representing a district thousands of miles away.”
“The lenders who provided the mortgages for both homes were well aware of then-Representative Schiff's Congressional service and of his intended year-round use of both homes, neither of which were vacation homes,” the spokesperson added. “He has always been completely transparent about this.”

It’s pretty rich for Trump to accuse someone else of a “sustained pattern of fraud” when this is precisely what he was found guilty of in New York, making flagrantly false claims to lenders and insurers for decades.

Connect this to Trump’s plan to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The letter firing Powell was reportedly drawn up by William J. Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—the same person behind this new accusation against Sen. Schiff. In the report on Powell, The New York Times notes:

Mr. Pulte has also emerged as an aggressive force in the Trump administration targeting some of the president’s perceived enemies, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff of California, Democrats who were involved in investigations into Mr. Trump.

That is the pattern for this administration, in which agency heads and top officials function as enforcers of the president’s personal grudges.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.