[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 59 (Wednesday, April 5, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H2706-H2707]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1215
        PUTIN'S ATTEMPT TO HIJACK DEMOCRACY NEEDS INVESTIGATION

  (Mr. HIGGINS of New York asked and was given permission to address 
the House for 1 minute.)
  Mr. HIGGINS of New York. Mr. Speaker, from the North Atlantic to the 
North Pacific, to the Baltic Seas, the Russian people are standing up 
to Vladimir Putin and his decades of egregious corruption. The protests 
in Moscow are punctuated with chants that Putin is a thief. And, of 
course, the anticorruption protest leaders have been jailed. And our 
President, the United States President, the leader of the free world, 
says that he admires Putin's strongman ways.

[[Page H2707]]

  Here is the rub that every American of every political persuasion 
should be concerned with, and that every American family, millions of 
whom have lost a soldier in defense of our democracy, should be 
concerned with: Putin is trying to discredit the exact democracy that 
millions of our brothers and sisters have died for. Putin is a thug and 
a street punk. His attempt to hijack our democracy needs an aggressive 
and honest, independent investigation.

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