[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 90 (Tuesday, June 18, 1996)]
[House]
[Page H6487]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     HOUSE URGED TO ISSUE CONTEMPT CITATIONS CONCERNING TRAVELGATE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida [Mr. Mica] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I come before the House today to again call on 
the Speaker and House leadership to bring forward the contempt citation 
against Mr. Quinn, legal counsel to the President, and other White 
House officials who have been involved in keeping documents relating to 
``Filegate'' from the Congress and also from the Special Counsel.
  I serve on the committee charged with the jurisdiction of 
investigations and oversight. It is the House Committee on Government 
Reform and Oversight. We have been investigating this matter now for 
over 2 years. We have requested files for over 2 years. The pattern of 
evasiveness, the pattern of deceit by the White House in keeping these 
records both again from the Congress, the Special Counsel, and our 
committee is abhorrent.
  Let me just cite from our report, the contempt proceedings that were 
offered to the House, some of the facts relating to this matter. This 
all deals with Travelgate which our subcommittee was investigating.

  Weeks after the firings of 7 long-time White House Travel Office 
employees, President William J. Clinton staved off a congressional 
inquiry into the growing controversy by committing to House Judiciary 
Committee Chairman Jack Brooks on July 13, 1993, and this is what the 
President said: ``You can be assured that the Attorney General will 
have the administration's full cooperation in investigating those 
matters which the Department wishes to review.''
  No mention then of executive privilege from the President on 
withholding documents from the investigators. In fact this is quite 
unprecedented. Even in Irangate, President Reagan offered all materials 
to congressional investigators. This is almost unprecedented, and again 
an issue that does not deal with foreign policy or national policy but 
is an investigation of the conduct within the White House, that this 
information is kept from us.
  This is what the President said in January 1996, this year. He 
stated, ``We've told everybody we're in the cooperation business. 
That's what we want to do. We want to get this over with.''
  Yet we still have not, as of this day, gotten one-third of the 
documents relating to this matter. Let me read really the essence of 
what this is about, and let me quote from notes from a White House aide 
that we obtained just recently this year, dated May 27, 1993. This is 
the date of the document.
  White House Management Review author Todd Stern wrote this. This is 
not the Republicans, this is a White House operative. He said: 
``Problem is that if we do any kind of report and fail to address those 
questions, the press jumps on you wanting to know answers; while if you 
give answers that aren't fully honest, e.g., nothing re: HRC''--Hillary 
Rodham Clinton, he uses the initials--``you risk hugely compounding the 
problem by getting caught in half-truths. You run the risk of turning 
this into a cover-up.''
  Now, I did not say this. Our committee did not say this. No 
Republican said this. This is a White House aide.
  We see why they have kept these documents from us. The fact is that 
two-thirds of the documents we sought, were sought by a bipartisan 
subpoena, have been withheld from the Congress by the White House.
  The fact is, we now know why the White House has stonewalled the 
Congress. The fact is, the White House in this case misused the IRS and 
the FBI, the chief law enforcement agency of this Nation, in an 
incredible abuse of power. The fact is, and this will come out, the 
civil rights, the privacy rights, the Hatch Act, all of these laws I 
believe we will find have been violated. These are the rights and the 
privacy of past and present Federal employees. One of the most 
egregious violations is that they obtained the files of three of our 
staff directors of our Investigations, and Oversight Committee, the one 
on which I serve.

  The fact is that more than 2,000 pages of documents are still being 
kept from the Congress, from the media, from the Special Counsel 
relating to this matter.
  I call on the Speaker, I call on Chairman Clinger, I call on the 
House leadership to bring forward to the floor of the House of 
Representatives this contempt citation. We must vote on it, and we must 
find Mr. Quinn and officials at the White House in contempt of Congress 
for their actions in this matter.

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