[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 59 (Thursday, April 10, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H3189-H3192]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
WAR ON CONSERVATIVES
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. GOHMERT. It is amazing some of the efforts made to rewrite
history and cast things in a light that doesn't exist. So as some
people in the administration step up the continued trashing of
conservatives in America--we have already seen the assault on
conservative groups by the IRS, that does need a special prosecutor,
clearly--the assault on people with whom some in the administration
disagree, they can't answer questions, and so they make personal
attacks.
Then our Attorney General makes a speech yesterday in which, because
he was busy helping, perhaps, terrorists or Marc Rich or things like
that he didn't notice, because I am sure he wouldn't be untruthful or
tell a lie, but he doesn't even know how bad it gets in Washington if
you are a conservative, if you are George W. Bush, if you are John
Ashcroft, if you are Alberto Gonzales.
It got pretty brutal here, a lot worse than anything our current
Attorney General has seen, and that is even without having to go back
and recall the treatment that John Mitchell got. I would say,
deservedly so, John Mitchell got the treatment he got. But for any
Attorney General to be so ignorant of what has happened in very recent
years of the maltreatment and malignment and basically slander of
Republicans and a Republican President and Republican Attorneys General
is a bit breathtaking.
There is a Web site that is Boycott Liberalism. It has a lot of
quotes from people. Senator Harry Reid said:
President Bush is a liar.
I don't recall anyone saying that at our hearings with our current
Attorney General.
The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said:
Bush is an incompetent leader. In fact, he's not a leader.
I don't recall anyone saying anything of that magnitude of our
current Attorney General or President, not in any of our hearings.
Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and U.S. Senator, said:
We have a culture of corruption. We have cronyism. We have
incompetence.
This actually raises a question about pots and kettles calling each
other names.
Other quotes. John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator and Democratic Vice
Presidential nominee:
I would say if you live in the United States of America and
you vote for George Bush, you've lost your mind.
Senator Al Franken said:
I think the President highjacked 9/11 and used it to go to
war with Iraq in a way that was very divisive.
The late Ted Kennedy, as Senator, said:
No President in American history has done more damage to
our country and our security than George W. Bush.
Amazingly, I am not aware of any U.S. President in one party reaching
out more to a Senator in the other party than did George W. Bush with
Senator Ted Kennedy, and these are the kind of comments he got in
response.
Senator Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, said:
I predict to you that this administration will go down in
history as one of the worst that has ever governed our
country.
We are just talking about there has never been an Attorney General or
[[Page H3190]]
President treated as have been the current ones.
Senator Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, said:
There has never been an administration, I don't believe, in
our history more intent on consolidating and abusing power to
further their own agenda.
She also said:
I have been absolutely amazed, even shocked, at the
combination of arrogance and incompetence that marks this
particular administration.
We are just helping those who have short memories or maybe were busy
helping terrorists or others get pardons and didn't notice these kind
of statements being made.
Former Senator and former Vice President Al Gore said:
While President Bush likes to project an image of strength
and courage, the real truth is that, in the presence of his
large financial contributors, he is a moral coward.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said:
Bush is an incompetent leader. In fact, he is not a leader.
He is a person who has no judgment, no experience, and no
knowledge of the subjects that he has to decide upon.
{time} 1315
Quotes go on and on, pages of quotes.
But Democratic Senator from Washington, Patty Murray, said,
``He's''--talking about Osama Bin Laden--``been out in these countries
for decades building schools, building roads, building infrastructure,
building daycare facilities, building health care facilities, and these
people are extremely grateful. We haven't done that.''
Former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi said, ``I believe that the
President's leadership and the actions taken in Iraq''--talking about
President Bush--``demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge,
judgment, and experience in making the decisions that would have been
necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our
troops and the cost to our taxpayers.''
She also made this statement, former Speaker of the House, Nancy
Pelosi, talking about President Bush: ``I believe that the President's
leadership and the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in
terms of knowledge, judgment, experience in making the decisions that
would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the
deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers,'' basically the
same thing again.
But, there are some of us that could care less about someone's party
or someone's race or someone's gender, someone's age. We don't care. We
care about whether you are helping or hurting our country if you are in
a position to do one or the other.
I would also direct my friends who would care to do research and get
the truth before they go accusing, ignorantly, someone who has the gall
to question refusal to turn over documents that were provided by the
Justice Department to terrorists, convicted terrorists.
People who financed terrorism, which made them a part of the
terrorist act, convicted of over 100 counts, they were given, their
lawyers were given thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of
documents. Lawyers were given 9,600 or so transcripts or summaries of
transcripts.
And Members of Congress are told, as I was in a letter this year in
response to my years of trying to get these documents that the Justice
Department provided to terrorists, I get a response, basically, saying,
hey, here is a Web site, you can look up some exhibits that were
admitted in evidence. And here is a public access Web site.
I have been asking for 3 years, just give us the documents Justice
gave to the terrorists. If somebody wants to try to make something of
that, that is their problem. But the Constitution provides that
Congress has oversight because that is the only way we know what to
fund and what not to fund. That is part of article I, section 8 of the
Constitution.
So, to be denied documents for 3 years, as I have been, with little
coy, useless answers, and then allegations of ulterior motivations,
when I want to protect America--and I travel around the world, and I
hear moderate Muslim friends, leaders in other countries say, why are
you not helping us against radical Islam anymore? You are helping the
bad guys.
I want to find out what the documentation was and is that the Justice
Department has. And they know how to reduce it to disk and provide it
to others. I am told they have done that to others in the Justice
Department, so do that for Congress.
At one point I was told, well, there are classification issues. You
gave them to terrorists, your Department did, so it shouldn't be a real
classification problem to give them to Members of Congress.
So for those who wonder about the treatment of an Attorney General
coming for an oversight hearing, we have already seen that the Justice
Department repeatedly refused to provide the documentation of what
happened in Fast and Furious.
And if someone wants to talk about unprecedented treatment, let's
look at the facts, just the little ones we know that haven't been
covered up by this administration, that haven't been kept secreted by
this administration.
Thank God, one of the gun store owners who was being pressured by the
Justice Department to sell to the people he knew he should not sell to,
he recorded some of the conversations. If he had not, you can't help
but believe they would have turned on him bigger than they did, because
once they found out he had tapes of the conversations, they knew they
couldn't completely blame him, because he was saying, in essence, I
shouldn't be selling to these people. But he was coerced into selling.
People were coerced into selling weapons to people that should not
have had them, morally or legally, because the Justice Department
wanted to get them to drug cartels in Mexico, where they did, and we
know, we have heard that at least a couple of hundred or so Mexicans,
each one of them a life worth saving, those lives were taken by guns
that this Justice Department forced into the hands of criminals, people
that should not have had them. So we would like to know more
information about how this all came about.
And it is not good enough to say, hey, the Bush Justice Department
had a scheme where they had devices, they had guns that they were going
to track, just like in drug sales, where you have a controlled sale so
you can try to arrest the bad guys and, because of a problem, they got
away from them.
That is a different thing entirely, of intentionally letting guns get
away to criminals who killed hundreds of Mexicans, and at least one
American, Brian Terry, and perhaps more.
It would be nice if we could get to the bottom of that. Wherever
there are big problems in our government, we need to know what they are
so we can defund them, or at least bring about accountability, just as
my Democratic friends in the Senate repeatedly said, except not so
kindly, about the Bush administration and John Ashcroft and Alberto
Gonzales.
And there were some things I agreed with Senator Schumer on in the
Gonzales Justice Department. It was outrageous that they allowed so
many National Security Letters to go out without proper basis. I was
outraged about that.
In fact, if someone cares to check the Record, they can see the way I
went after the Bush FBI Director, because I believed then and still
believe he did some serious damage to the FBI during the Bush
administration.
The only difference is, I never heard him run out and give a speech
whining about how he was mistreated as he came before me for
questioning. He didn't do that. And he actually tried to take actions
to correct the problems that I got all over him about.
Another difference is, he was a Republican President's FBI Director.
But I didn't care what his party was. I didn't care who he was. I
thought he was hurting the FBI, and I sounded off. And I was shocked
that I did not have more friends on the Democratic side of the aisle
join me in going after the Republican-appointed FBI Director.
And of course, once he held over and became the FBI Director for this
administration, the other side of the aisle got even more kind in its
questioning. But one of us--I certainly stayed consistent.
But there are many problems in this Justice Department that are very
clear. There is an article from 2011, August 26, by Christian Adams, a
guy that should know. He was in the Justice Department and had a case
ready for
[[Page H3191]]
judgment against the New Black Panthers who were intimidating voters at
a voting place, until the Holder political appointee stepped in and
stopped it.
Yes, they got one judgment, but basically of no effect. They can go
intimidate others at other polling places, and there were no legal
actions that were really pursued to provide any teeth.
But Christian Adams has an article entitled ``The Politicized Hiring
of Eric Holder's Compliance Section.'' He says every single new
attorney hired has a history thick with left-wing activism.
And then he goes through and talks about it in a very long article,
very well-documented.
My friend across the building, Ted Cruz, Senator Cruz, invoked
Watergate in blasting DOJ's probe of the IRS scandal. This was March
20, this year, this article from The Blaze by Fred Lucas.
Senator Cruz said the investigator is a partisan Democrat who has
donated over $6,000 to President Obama and Democratic causes. Just as
nobody would trust John Mitchell to investigate Richard Nixon, nobody
should trust a partisan Obama donor to investigate the IRS' political
targeting of President Obama's enemies.
But he makes a good point. John Mitchell deserved the criticism he
got, but no Attorney General since John Mitchell has the truthful
history in their favor to stand up and say, no Attorney General has
ever been treated worse than I have.
You just have to go back to Alberto Gonzales. Again, I think he
deserved some of the criticism he got, especially on the National
Security Letter issue, and I am right there thinking it was a disaster,
and it shouldn't have been allowed to happen, and that people needed to
be held accountable, which is why I called the White House after it
came to light that a report had been on the Attorney General's desk
before he testified before the Senate that there were no known abuses
of the National Security Letters.
I told the White House, this is indefensible. This isn't right. We
can't defend this.
And I wish colleagues across the aisle, when they found similar
abuses, problems, fault, would not let party politics or other divisive
issues stand in the way of doing what is right.
There are transcripts of Senators going after Attorney General
Gonzales, Attorney General Ashcroft, or even going back to John
Mitchell. This Attorney General, compared to them, doesn't have a lot
to complain about.
And one thing is interesting. You know, when I was a freshman, the
Bush administration was in power. We had a lot of trouble getting
documents from the Bush administration. The difference between that one
and this one: they would eventually get us the documents.
The difference here is they have been there 5 years and they still
will not produce documents that should be of critical concern to every
American.
{time} 1330
Some would say, look, there is no other issue than and concern for
America when, in May of 2013, as this article points out from
Breitbart:
On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder testified in
front of the House Judiciary Committee about the recent
scandals plaguing the Obama administration. Unfortunately,
the committee and America did not learn very much because
Holder apparently does not know much about what happens in
Washington, D.C.
The AP claims the Department of Justice violated their
constitutional rights when they obtained 2 months of phone
records of reporters. When asked about the scandal, Holder
claimed ignorance and that he was not part of the
decisionmaking process.
He did defend the effort to subvert the press, saying the
DOJ wanted to find who leaked information to the AP about a
CIA operation in Yemen to stop an airliner bombing plot
around the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death.
On Tuesday, Holder recused himself from the investigation
into the AP scandal and told the committee it was because he
had the leaked information. He could not give the exact date
he recused himself, and he never put it in writing. It took
quite awhile for him to receive confirmation it was Deputy
Attorney General James Cole who signed the subpoena for the
AP phone records.
There are all kinds of reasons to be concerned about what is going
on. There are plenty of stories out there.
Oh, gee, how about the speech that my friend across the, aisle Keith
Ellison of Minnesota, gave where, as reported here from the Minneapolis
Star Tribune, Mr. Ellison said, talking about comparing September 11:
It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of
that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the
communists for it, and it put the leader of that country--
Hitler--in a position where he could basically have authority
to do whatever he wanted.
The fact is that I am not saying September 11 was a U.S.
plan or anything like that because, you know, that's how they
put you in the nutball box or dismiss you.
But he went on, basically comparing September 11 to Hitler's
Reichstag fire, which was set and then blamed on the communists.
From CNN, a report on this, Keith Oppenheimer had stated:
Well, first of all, Wolf, some of the themes that Keith
Ellison is talking about are themes that he has been sounding
off for a while.
And then Oppenheimer said:
The Minneapolis Star Tribune, quoting Ellison at the forum,
is saying this about the Vice President: ``It is beneath his
dignity in order for him to answer any question from the
citizens of the United States. That is the very definition of
totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and dictatorship.''
In response to a question as to whether Ellison supports a
new investigation of the causes of September 11, Ellison made
a comparison to the Reichstag fire in Berlin that Adolf
Hitler used to consolidate power.
And then he quoted my friend across the aisle, with what I just
mentioned.
So anyway, there are all kinds of accusations. I thought both George
H.W. Bush and George W. Bush should have done more to defend themselves
against the outlandish claims; but one thing George H.W. Bush and
George W. Bush never did--no matter what race, creed, color, national
religion, gender, age, whenever anybody attacked them--he never
resorted to name-calling and, in fact, would often try to point out,
actually, they have the right to their opinion.
Nowadays, it is a different matter. If someone is concerned that your
department or their department would provide discovery documents to
convicted terrorists that they are refusing to provide to Congress,
that is not an issue of anything other than just not doing what the law
requires in the way of oversight.
There is so much going on in this country that needs our attention,
and one of them is the Department of Justice. Is it the Department of
Justice? Is it the Department of ``just us''?
There is an article from Red State by Candice Lanier, June 26, 2013,
where she entitles the article, ``Sixteen Scandals: The Legacy of Eric
Holder,'' and then she goes through and cites 16 reasons we should be
very concerned about this Justice Department. One of them quotes
Discover the Networks.
She says:
Holder also took a leadership role with the Student Afro-
American Society, which at one point demanded that the
school's abandoned ROTC office be renamed the ``Malcolm X
Lounge''--``in honor of a man who recognized the importance
of territory as a basis for nationhood. In 1970, Holder was a
participant in a 5-day occupation of that office. And,
according to some accounts, the occupiers were armed. In
addition, Holder and SAAS also occupied the office of Henry
Coleman, Dean of Freshmen, until their demands were met.
It would appear the SAAS was an advocate of the Black
Panthers because, in March 1970, the SAAS released a
statement supporting the Black Panthers who were charged with
plotting to blow up a police station, department stores,
railroad tracks, and the New York Botanical Gardens.
It references the discriminatory hiring practices in the Department
of Justice. This article points out:
In June 2008, Holder admitted to the American Constitution
Society, an organization started as a liberal counterweight
to the Federalist Society, that the Justice Department was
``going to be looking for people who share our values.''
Then it references Fort Hood and the fact that:
Following the Fort Hood attack on November 5, 2009, not one
of the postattack reports issued by the Department of Justice
mentioned Nidal Hasan's Islamist ideology.
It talks further about that, and then it talks about the AP
surveillance, the way it went after the Associated Press and cowed
them.
Number four, the Department of Justice secretly targets Fox News
reporter James Rosen.
There were issues of credibility in comparing our Attorney General's
testimony, saying he didn't know of anyone ever being prosecuted, in
essence,
[[Page H3192]]
and then his signing off on the pursuit of James Rosen.
Five is the Marc Rich pardon and that Eric Holder played an important
role in what was arguably the most infamous of President Clinton's 176
pardons. He was the billionaire financier and fugitive oil broker who
illegally bought oil from Iran.
Anyway, President Clinton signed the pardon, later crediting Holden's
recommendation as one of the factors that had convinced him to issue
the pardon.
Number six was the Weather Underground pardon.
Holder, as Deputy Attorney General, ``was the gatekeeper
for presidential pardons.'' Two of the recipients of Holder's
pardons were former Weather Underground members Susan
Rosenberg and Linda Evans.
Number seven--and I am not reading off all the information about
these--but seven was:
Holder's DOJ threatens free speech. The American Muslim
Advisory Council of Tennessee sponsored an event on June 4,
called ``Public Disclosure in a Diverse Society.'' The main
speakers for the event were DOJ official Bill Killian, who is
the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and
FBI Special Agent of the Knoxville Division, Kenneth Moore.
What is troubling about the event is that Killian addressed
how social media posts and documents deemed inflammatory
toward Muslims can be considered a violation of civil rights
laws.
He went on and he quoted the law, talking about how anybody critical
of Islam could be violating the law. He quotes the law:
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress,
threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, territory,
commonwealth, possession, or district in the free exercise or
enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the
Constitution or laws of the United States, they shall be
fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years,
or both.
Talk about a chilling effect.
Number eight, hostility towards conservatives. At an American
Constitution Society gathering in 2004, Holder made the following
comments--and these are all quotes:
Conservatives have been defenders of the status quo, afraid
of the future, and content to allow to continue to exist all
but the most blatant inequalities.
Conservatives have ``made a mockery of the rule of law.''
Conservatives are ``breathtaking'' in their ``arrogance,''
which manifests itself in such things as ``attacks on
abortion rights,'' ``energy policies that are as shortsighted
as they are ineffective,'' and ``tax cuts that
disproportionately favor those who are well off and
perpetuate many of the inequities in our nation.''
The hallmarks of the ``conservative agenda'' include
``social division, mindless tax cutting, and a defense
posture that does not really make us safer.''
Anyway, he has got quite a few quotes like that.
But number nine, opposition to Second Amendment rights:
In 2008, Eric Holder claimed that the Second Amendment does
not protect an individual's right to keep and bear arms, but
only applied to government militias.
Number 10 was the treatment of terrorists as criminal defendants
instead of enemy combatants, as the laws that were passed should have
indicated.
Number 11 was the Arizona immigration law, how he went after that and
he had not even read it. Filed pleadings--his department filed
pleadings, and he made statements about how bad the law was, and he had
not even read it.
I thought my friend from Texas, Ted Poe, a former judge, had asked
one of the stupidest questions I had ever heard in our Judiciary
Committee hearing when he asked: Had you read that law before you filed
that suit?
And the answer was no. I couldn't believe that no lawyer would file a
suit declaring a law unconstitutional and he hadn't even read it.
Twelve, New Black Panther intimidation.
Thirteen, opposition to voter ID laws--and by the way, we have
evidence--you have places where photo IDs have been required, and there
was actually an increase in minority voting.
Fourteen, Fast and Furious, that we can't get to the bottom of
because they continue to secrete information about the department's
involvement and what they did.
Fifteen, purges references to radical Islam, and we know about the
purging of FBI training documents so that we don't offend people that
want to destroy our way of life and us.
Sixteen, about the Islamic outreach, when I was grilling FBI Director
Mueller about not even pursuing adequately the information about
Tsarnaev being radicalized, I said: you didn't even go to the Muslim
mosque in Boston to ask about their radicalization.
He said: oh, yes, we did go to the mosque--and then muttered ``in the
outreach program.'' They never went to talk to anybody that might know
whether Tsarnaev had been radicalized.
Then The New York Times has a story blaming the Russians. The
Russians and our own intelligence community know anytime you give a
heads-up to another country about information that may be helpful to
them, you may end up giving away how intelligence is obtained.
So it was wonderful that, twice, Russia gave us a heads-up, and
instead, we go to the mosque that Tsarnaev attends, with our outreach
program from the FBI, instead of to investigate how radicalized this
young man had become and the damage and the death and mayhem he was
about to cause.
If someone wants to say there is another motive for being critical,
well, they are living in their own little world.
If somebody wants to bring up race, Mr. Speaker, for the record, let
me just say, there is one African American I am still furious with. His
name is Fred McClure. He was the president of the State of Texas Future
Farmers of America. He was the student body president at Texas A&M
University, where I attended. He was a good friend.
I went to Baylor Law School before him. People say: wow, you really
did well, you know, you won an award for a law review article, won best
brief award, won moot court.
Fred came in behind me and set the place on fire, figuratively
speaking, with how well he did and the things he accomplished.
{time} 1345
But he went to work for President George H. W. Bush, and in 1990, in
December, I begged Fred to come back to east Texas where he grew up in
San Augustine and that there were a lot of us that loved him and would
get him elected to Congress so we could come back up here to Washington
and set things right.
And the thing I am still furious at Fred about is, if Fred had taken
the encouragement to heart and come back and run for Congress, we could
have gotten him elected. And if we had done that, I could have been
about a normal life and not had to be here in Congress.
With that, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________