Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) is paying just 3 percent on both his Maryland and California homes since refinancing his mortgages in 2020, even lower than the 5.625 percent rate at the center of a federal mortgage fraud investigation against him, newly released documents reveal.
The Department of Justice is investigating the junior senator from California for claiming two homes as primary residences for more than a decade. Now, the DOJ will likely examine how he managed to score lower mortgage rates and property taxes, The New York Post reported.
A grand jury in Maryland is currently weighing a criminal indictment against the former 12-term congressman.
The newly released annual financial documents show that even after Schiff finally designated his Potomac, Maryland, property as a second home in 2020, after 16 years, he got the same rock-bottom mortgage rate as his California residence when he refinanced both that year.
The average 30-year mortgage interest rate in 2020 was 3.10 percent for primary residences in the U.S., with secondary residences usually subject to rates up to 0.5 percent higher.
Those terms padded his wealth, since the California Democrat would have saved between $30,000 and $50,000 over 16 years, according to an analysis by The Post.
The 3,420-square-foot home, in one of D.C.’s most affluent suburbs, where neighbors say Schiff actually spends most of his time, is now worth $1.4 million, almost double what he paid for it in 2003.
Schiff also benefited from a homeowner’s tax exemption by declaring his much smaller 650-square-foot condo in Burbank, California as a primary home, resulting in a $7,000 reduction in property taxes.
The senator’s bank assets soared to between $1.18 million and $2.63 million in 2024, the records show.
That is up from between $1.02 million and $2.37 million in 2023, and from $578,000 to $1.35 million in 2002, the year before he bought the Maryland home.
Schiff, 65, who led the first House impeachment inquiry into President Trump and has repeatedly said “no one’s above the law,” also failed to disclose his mortgages on annual financial disclosures until 2011, a Post review found, even though he bought the Potomac property in 2003 and the California condo in 2009, an omission he has not explained.
He has been called “crooked” and “low-life” by President Trump.
“I have always suspected Shifty Adam Schiff was a scam artist,” Trump wrote in July on Truth Social.
Schiff is accused of wire fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud and making false statements to financial institutions, charges which carry prison terms of up to 30 years.
He has denied wrongdoing and called the investigation a political witch hunt.
“Since I led his first impeachment, Trump has repeatedly called for me to be arrested for treason,” Schiff wrote on X when news of the investigation broke in July. “This is just Donald Trump’s latest attempt at political retaliation against his perceived enemies.”
“Adam Schiff’s baseless smears of corruption against President Trump and Republicans have one simple explanation — he’s projecting,” Republican National Committee Press Secretary Kiersten Pels told The Post.
“Schiff is a proven liar, a con man, and a fraud,” Pels added.
“Senator Schiff received the rate that each lender deemed appropriate with full knowledge of the senator’s year-round bicoastal work obligations as a member of Congress, his use of two homes for that reason, and his creditworthiness,” a spokesperson for Schiff told The Post.
“It’s laughable that Donald Trump, who turned the presidency into a pay-to-play scheme to enrich himself, is desperate to project his own corruption onto others,” the spokesperson added.
This comes after an intelligence officer who spent over a decade working for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee repeatedly alerted the FBI, starting in 2017, that then-Rep. Schiff had authorized the leaking of classified information to damage Trump during his first term using the now-discredited Russiagate investigation, according to explosive FBI memos recently provided to Congress by Director Kash Patel earlier this month.