President Trump said some time ago that he believes his personal finances should be off limits to investigators. In an interview with the Times in July, 2017, he asserted that if Robert Mueller, the special counsel, sought to investigate the Trump family’s business dealings he would be crossing a “red line.” When, later that year, several news reports suggested that Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records relating to Trump’s businesses, the President reportedly told members of his staff that he wanted to fire Mueller in response. It was never confirmed whether Mueller had 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. On a recent weekend, at a busy restaurant in downtown Burbank, in the heart of his congressional district, Schiff talked about his plans for conducting an investigation that will be parallel to Mueller’s, probing Trump’s connections to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other places around the world. 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.

“Our role is not the same as Bob Mueller’s,” Schiff told me, over a vegan burger. (He changed his eating habits a few years ago, in order to lower his cholesterol.) 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. Mueller is supposed to file a report on his findings, but, in keeping with the regulations for the office of the special counsel, it will be up to his supervisor in the Justice Department, who is now Matthew Whitaker, the acting Attorney General, to determine whether Mueller’s report is made public. 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. Cohen had said earlier that these discussions ended in January, 2016, but he admitted in court that he had been negotiating with Russian officials, and keeping Trump apprised, through the first half of 2016, during the Republican Presidential primaries. Trump has denied that he was doing business with the Russians during this period.

Schiff went on, “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. “There’s a whole constellation of issues where that is essentially the center of gravity,” Schiff said. “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 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, a journalist who lived in the United States.

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.” All of these subjects, Schiff averred, were fair game for investigation by the committee that he will soon chair.

As the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, Schiff has directed a staff of eleven. As the chairman, he will direct twenty-five, some of whom will be devoted to the Russia investigation. “We’ve been deluged with résumés,” Schiff said. 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.

Since the beginning of the Trump Administration, Schiff has been a ubiquitous presence on television, speaking about matters related to the Russia investigation. “The voice that Adam gives to these issues is one that is calming, logical, linear, measured but forceful,” Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader and likely the new Speaker of the House, told me. “I have complete confidence in him to be very strategic in how he returns the Intelligence Committee to a bipartisan arena, without doing what Devin Nunes did as chairman of the committee, which I thought bordered on the criminal.” The government watchdog Campaign for Accountability has filed complaints against Nunes for leaking confidential information from the ongoing Russia investigation. (Nunes’s office denies these accusations as “discredited fake news stories.”)

Schiff repeatedly chastised the Republicans on his committee, led by Nunes, for their refusal to conduct a thorough investigation into Trump’s possible misdeeds, and he defended Mueller’s efforts to impose some accountability for the issues that fall within the special counsel’s purview. With the Democrats now in control of the House of Representatives, Schiff’s responsibilities as chair of the committee will present both great opportunities and significant peril. Schiff will no longer be able to blame the Republicans for wasting time. It’s his investigation now, and he’s planning to heed the advice, familiar to viewers of the movie version of “All the President’s Men,” to “follow the money.”