Schiff is refusing to move on. The future of liberal democracy in the United States and around the world is at stake, he told me, and the U.S. government is rapidly running out of time to respond to the threat (Schiff says he has no confidence that Trump will punish Russia over its role in the election). In Trump’s denial of Russian meddling, Schiff sees a “president-elect who cannot accept any facts that diminish any of his achievements, no matter how well-established the facts are.” But Schiff is also critical of Obama, whose “excess of caution” ended up “inviting too much Russian interference.” And he’s critical of his own party. “Democrats failed to persuade the American people why they should care” about Russia’s intervention, he said.

Below, in an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation, Schiff makes his case for why Americans should care.

Uri Friedman: What just happened? And what I mean by that is not just: Did the Russian government direct a cyber campaign against the U.S. in the midst of its election? Michael Morell, the former acting CIA director, recently said that a foreign government interfering in [a U.S.] election is an “existential threat to our way of life” and the “political equivalent of 9/11.” Do you agree with that assessment? If not, how would you describe what just happened?

Adam Schiff: I do agree with the assessment that the combination of cyber hacking, dumping of information, dumping of potentially forged information in the future, the propagation of fake-news stories—all of these “active measures” by Russia to interfere in our elections, to interfere in European elections—is a game-changer. It is of phenomenal importance and it’s a grave danger to the country. It’s a grave danger to liberal democracy, period. We’ve seen a creeping authoritarianism around the world, and this has been enabled by the cyber revolution. What we saw the Russians do in our presidential election was just utterly unprecedented in its scope and in its impact.

I think this began as a cyber infiltration, and maybe this is the reason why the FBI wasn’t more diligent about its investigation. Initially [the FBI] may have viewed this [campaign] as for intelligence-gathering and been unaware that the Russians would later weaponize this information. This isn’t the first election where foreign nations have shown an interest in what the political parties are doing, what the political candidates are doing, what anyone, any institution that may have an impact on policy toward that country may be thinking. What made this so unique was the Russian willingness to dump this information in a way to damage one of the candidates, Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton, and in so doing help another candidate, Donald Trump.

What made it so powerful was that we had the unusual specter of a major party and its nominee giving the Russians deniability. In any other election in modern U.S. history, had Russia been interfering in the political process in a way that benefitted one candidate, you would have had both candidates repudiating it. Neither would want to be associated with Russia, neither would want to be the beneficiary of stolen information. But here you had, in Donald Trump, someone who was willing, on the one hand, to egg on the Russians to hack more, but on the other to give them deniability—a feat of both mental and rhetorical gymnastics that few could pull off. But he did.