10 Things You Didn't Know About Adam Schiff

1. Adam Bennett Schiff was born June 22, 1960, to Edward and Sherrill Schiff in Framingham, Massachusetts. His father was a salesman, and 10 years after Adam was born, moved the family to Arizona, then California, purchasing a lumber yard where his two sons worked growing up.

2. Schiff majored in political science and pre-med at Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1982. He went on to study law at Harvard University, earning his degree in 1985.

3. As an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Schiff gained recognition for his successful prosecution of Richard Miller, an FBI agent who was passing documents to what was then the Soviet Union.

4. He lost his first attempt to run for public office, losing to Republican James Rogan for a state Assembly seat in 1994. He won a seat in the State Senate in 1996, and in 2000, he defeated Rogan in a rematch, this time to represent California in Congress.

5. Schiff is Jewish; he and his wife Eve have two children, Alexa and Elijah.

6. He has completed several triathlons, and in 2014, rode his bicycle from San Francisco to Los Angeles, an activity he says "helps me maintain my sanity."

7. In Congress, Schiff has been praised for representing the diverse interests of his north Los Angeles-area district. Among the issues he has tackled over nine terms are measures to reduce helicopter noise, improve earthquake warning systems, and pushing for international recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide at the behest of the sizable Armenian-American population in his district.

8. He has been a strong proponent in favor for Congress to pass a new official Authorization for the Use of Military Force to combat the Islamic State group, a politically difficult vote resisted by members of both parties. Under former President Barack Obama, Schiff called the 2001 AUMF, which launched the Afghanistan war and has been used to justify the ongoing global fight against terrorism, "legally unreliable."

9. Schiff was a member – and frequent critic – of the House committee investigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya. He pushed for the committee to be disbanded, accusing Republicans of using the committee as a political platform to attack former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

10. Schiff has emerged as a Democratic hero as the ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, on which he has served since 2008, using his skills as a prosecutor to raise concerns about Donald Trump's presidential campaign's possible collusion with Russia. He pointedly stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the committee's chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., but turned on Nunes and called for him to step aside as head of the Russia investigation after Nunes appeared to try to give the Trump administration cover.