[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 90 (Wednesday, May 24, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3111-S3115]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                     Nomination of Courtney Elwood

  Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, the Senate will shortly consider the 
nomination of Courtney Elwood to be the CIA's General Counsel. I wanted 
to take a few minutes this morning to discuss the nomination and put it 
in the context of the extraordinary national security challenges our 
country faces.
  It is hard to imagine a more despicable act than the terrorist attack 
in Manchester Monday night, killing innocent teenagers and children who 
were out to enjoy a concert. The suffering that Americans and all in 
the Senate have been reading about and watching on television is 
heartbreaking by any standards. I think it is fair to say that, as 
Americans, we stand in strong solidarity with our British friends, our 
allies, as they confront this horror. Our country will, as we have for 
so many years, stand shoulder to shoulder with them as there is an 
effort to collect more information about this attack, about what 
actually happened, and work to prevent future attacks.
  Not everything is known about the attack, but one thing Americans do 
know is that it can happen here. That is why, as I begin this 
discussion on this important nomination and the challenges in front of 
our country, I would like to start, as I invariably do when we talk 
about intelligence matters, by recognizing the extraordinary men and 
women who work in the intelligence community, who work tirelessly 
across the government to keep our people safe from terrorist attacks. 
So much of what they do is in secret, and that is appropriate. It is so 
important to keep secret what is called the sources and methods that 
our intelligence community personnel are using. It is important to the 
American people and it is important to our country to make sure that 
the people protecting them every day can do their jobs.
  The reason I took this time this morning to talk about this 
nomination is to talk about the broader context of what we owe the 
American people, and I feel very strongly that we owe the American 
people security and liberty. The two are not mutually exclusive, and it 
is possible to protect the people of our country with smart policies 
that protect both their security and their liberty.
  Smart policies ensure that security and liberty are not mutually 
exclusive. For example, I would cite as a smart policy something I was 
proud to have been involved in. Section 102 of the USA FREEDOM Act 
sought to make sure that we weren't just indiscriminately collecting 
millions of phone records on law-abiding people. A provision, section 
102, says that when our government believes there is an emergency where 
the safety and security and well-being of the American people is at 
stake, our government can move immediately to deal with the problem and 
then come back later and settle up with respect to getting a warrant. 
That was something that, I thought, really solidified what was a smart 
policy.
  Our Founding Fathers had a Fourth Amendment for a reason--to protect 
the liberties of our people. What we said is that we are going to be 
sensitive to those liberties, but at the same time, we are going to be 
sensitive to

[[Page S3112]]

the security and well-being of the American people at a dangerous time. 
We are going to say that, if the government believes there is an 
emergency, the government can go get that information immediately and 
come back later and settle up with the warrant process.
  Issues ensuring that we have security and liberty are especially 
important today. We obviously face terrorism. We are challenged by 
Russia and North Korea, and the list can go on and on. The fact is, 
there are a host of these challenges, and it seems to me that if we 
look at the history of how to deal with a climate like this, too often 
there is almost a kind of easy, practically knee-jerk approach that is 
billed as dealing with a great security challenge that very often gives 
our people less security and less liberty. At a time when people want 
both, they end up getting less. That is what happens so often in 
crises, and far too often it happens in large part because senior 
lawyers operating in secret give the intelligence community the green 
light to conduct operations that are not in the country's interest.
  I am going to walk through how misguided and dangerous decisions can 
be made and how much depends on how the lawyers interpret current law. 
In past debates people have said: You know, that happened years ago, 
many years ago, and various steps were taken to correct it. Today, I am 
going to talk about how misguided and dangerous decisions can be made 
today.
  At the center of this question is the nominee to be the CIA general 
counsel and what I consider to be very troubling statements that have 
been made on a number of the key issues that involve decisions that 
will be made now. In outlining those, I want to explain why it is my 
intention to vote against the confirmation of Courtney Elwood to be the 
CIA's general counsel.
  The key principle to begin with is that there is a clear distinction 
between keeping secrets of sources and methods used by the intelligence 
community, which is essential, and the creation of secret law, which is 
not. We in the Senate have a responsibility to make sure the public is 
not kept in the dark about the laws and rules that govern what the 
intelligence community can and cannot do.
  I believe the American people understand that their government cannot 
always disclose who it is spying on, but they are fed up with having to 
read in the papers about the government secretly making up the rules. 
They were fed up when they learned about the illegal, warrantless 
wiretapping program. They were fed up when they learned about the bulk 
collection of phone records of millions of law-abiding Americans.
  What our people want to know is that the rules are going to be, No. 
1, clear to everybody and, No. 2, that the government is operating 
within those rules. That is why the nominations for the intelligence 
community are so important. The American people need to know how these 
men and women understand the laws that authorize what they can and 
cannot do in secret.
  Shortly, the Senate will consider the nominee to be the CIA's general 
counsel. I believe there are few more important positions in government 
than this one, when it comes to interpreting key laws. The advice the 
general counsel provides to the Central Intelligence Agency will be 
shielded from the American people and possibly from Congress as well. 
There is almost never accountability before the public, the press, 
watchdog groups, or other public institutions that help preserve our 
democracy. There are almost never debates on the floor of the Senate 
about the legality of the CIA's operations. It is all in secret.

  The advice of this general counsel will carry especially important 
heft, given what CIA Director Mike Pompeo said during his confirmation. 
Again and again during those confirmation hearings, when asked what 
boundaries Director Pompeo would draw around the government's 
surveillance authorities, the Director responded that he was bound by 
the law. In effect, the Director said to the Senate and this body that 
he would defer to the lawyers. So if Congress and the American people 
were to have any clue as to what the Central Intelligence Agency might 
do under Director Pompeo, we were going to have to ask the nominee to 
be general counsel. That is why it is critical that she answer 
questions about her views of the law and that she answer them now 
before a confirmation vote.
  I asked those questions, and what I heard in return was either a 
troubling response or some combination of ``I don't know,'' and ``I 
will figure it out after I am confirmed.''
  Now, without answers, we are left largely to judge Ms. Elwood by her 
record. So I am going to start by looking back at her previous service 
and what she says about it now.
  With respect to the National Security Agency's illegal warrantless 
wiretapping, that became public at the end of 2005 when Ms. Elwood was 
at the Department of Justice. She reviewed public statements about the 
program and held discussions about those public statements with 
individuals inside and outside the administration. That includes 
discussions with the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel 
about the Department's legal analysis justifying the warrantless 
wiretapping program. She was especially involved when the Attorney 
General made public statements about the program. So the committee 
asked her about some of that Justice Department public analysis, and, 
in particular, the Department of Justice January 2006 white paper that 
was thought to justify the warrantless wiretapping program. Ms. Elwood 
responded that she thought at the time that the Department of Justice's 
analysis was ``thorough and carefully reasoned and that certain points 
were compelling.''
  This was an illegal program. It violated the Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance Act. No interpretation of the law that defended that 
warrantless wiretapping program is carefully reasoned or compelling. It 
was an illegal program.
  Ms. Elwood also said that some of the analysis ``presented a 
difficult question'' and that ``reasonable minds could reach different 
conclusions.'' Of course, the point is not what ``reasonable minds'' 
might conclude. The point for us in the Senate is what her mind would 
conclude. Remember, this is the Department of Justice's conclusion that 
the laws governing wiretapping of Americans inside the United States 
could be disregarded because the President says so or because the 
Department of Justice secretly reinterprets the law in a way that no 
American could recognize. Remember, too, that we are talking about a 
program that may have begun shortly after 9/11, but it was still going 
on secretly and without congressional oversight more than 4 years later 
when it was revealed in the press. That was the context in which the 
Department of Justice--at the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006, 
when Ms. Elwood was at the Department--determined that the warrantless 
wiretapping program was perfectly legal and constitutional.
  This is--to say, in my view--at the least, dangerous, and it could 
happen again.
  I wanted to give Ms. Elwood every opportunity to reconsider and 
distance herself from these assertions I described. So I asked very 
specific questions. First, did the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement 
apply? No, she responded. She endorsed the view that the warrantless 
wiretapping of Americans on American soil did not require warrants 
under the Fourth Amendment. That was not very encouraging.
  What about the other arguments made to try to justify this illegal 
program?
  The first was the notion that the 2001 authorization for use of 
military force somehow gave the government the green light to conduct 
warrantless wiretapping of Americans inside the United States. This 
argument was ludicrous. The authorization for use of military force 
said nothing about surveillance. The applicable law governing national 
security wiretapping was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--
period. If the Bush Administration had wanted the law to conduct 
warrantless wiretapping after 9/11, it could have asked the Congress to 
pass it as part of the PATRIOT Act. It didn't. So when they got caught 
and had to explain to the public what they had been doing all these 
years, they said that the authorization for use of military force, 
which the Congress understood as authorizing war in Afghanistan, 
somehow magically allowed for

[[Page S3113]]

wiretapping in the United States. The second argument was that the 
President had something called ``inherent power'' to disregard the law.
  I asked Ms. Elwood if she agreed with either of these arguments. She 
wouldn't answer the question of whether the authorization for use of 
military force authorized warrantless wiretapping, and she wouldn't 
answer the question of whether the President's so-called inherent power 
authorized the warrantless wiretapping. That was not very encouraging, 
either.
  I did get one answer. Ms. Elwood said that the arguments that the 
Bush Administration's secret interpretation of the authorization for 
use of military force, combined with the President's so-called inherent 
powers, allowed for the warrantless wiretapping, in her view, that 
``seemed reasonable.'' That definitely was not encouraging.
  Then it occurred to me that having asked her about the past in some 
of these concerns that I have just raised, I thought maybe that is all 
part of yesteryear. Maybe that is all in the past. Let bygones be 
bygones. So I looked for assurances that Ms. Elwood's defense of 
warrantless wiretapping wasn't relevant now. After all, Ms. Elwood's 
response to questions about the program referred to the law at the 
time. Maybe current law makes clear to everyone, including the nominee, 
that there will never again be warrantless wiretapping of Americans in 
the United States.
  So what does the law actually say now? Back in 2008, Congress took a 
big part of the warrantless wiretapping program and turned it into the 
law now known as section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance 
Act. The Congress wanted to make it absolutely clear that our country 
had really turned the page and that Americans wouldn't have to worry 
about any more violations of the law. So the Congress included in the 
law a statement that said: We really mean it. This law is ``the 
exclusive means'' by which electronic surveillance could be conducted.

  I asked Ms. Elwood about whether the President's supposed powers 
under the Constitution could trump the current statutory framework in 
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Specifically, I asked her 
whether that provision in law--the one passed in 2008 that explicitly 
states that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive 
means for conducting wiretapping--would keep the President from 
asserting some other constitutional authority in this area.
  She said she had not studied the question. This was the most 
troubling answer of all because this is about how the law stands today. 
This is not talking about yesteryear. This is about how the law stands 
today, and this was the nominee to be general counsel to the Central 
Intelligence Agency's not ruling out another assertion of so-called 
inherent Presidential power to override the law.
  My fear is that if the public cannot get reassuring answers now to 
these fundamental questions of law, then Americans could end up 
learning about the nominee's views when it is too late--when our people 
open up the newspapers someday and learn about an intelligence program 
that is based on a dangerous and secret interpretation of the law. It 
happened repeatedly in the past, and my message today is that the 
Senate cannot let it happen again.
  One of the reasons Ms. Elwood's views on whether the government was 
obligated to respect the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is so 
important is that, for the most part, the Central Intelligence Agency 
operates under authorities that are actually more vague than is the 
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In fact, those authorities are 
not even established in a statute that people in Iowa and Oregon could 
just go and read. The CIA's authorities to collect and use information 
on Americans and even to secretly participate in organizations in the 
United States are conducted under an Executive order, Executive Order 
No. 12333.
  In January, during the last 2 weeks of the Obama administration, the 
intelligence community released two documents that offered a little bit 
of insight into how intelligence is collected and used under this 
Executive order. It was good that the Obama administration released the 
documents. More transparency is why I can come to the floor and be part 
of this conversation.
  These and other publicly available documents demonstrate the extent 
to which the CIA deals with information on Americans all of the time. 
Right now, the CIA is authorized to conduct signals intelligence as 
well as the human intelligence that is generally associated with the 
Agency, and the intelligence the CIA obtains from various sources, 
which can be collected in bulk, inevitably includes information on law-
abiding Americans.
  What do the rules say that apply to all of this information on 
Americans? What these rules say is, under this Executive order, the CIA 
can mostly do what it wants. If Ms. Elwood could find wiggle room in 
the airtight restrictions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 
I think the Senate ought to be asking: What might she do with the 
flexibility in the rules that govern what the CIA can do under this 
Executive order?
  In fact, even when this Executive order includes limitations, there 
are usually exceptions. Guess who decides what the exceptions are. The 
CIA Director and the CIA General Counsel.
  In short, the rules look like an invitation for the CIA Director and 
the general counsel to conduct secret programs and operations that rely 
on case-by-case decisions that have no clear or consistent legal 
framework. That is why it is so important that these nominees give us 
some sense of where they stand before they are confirmed.
  I started with Mike Pompeo, who is now the Director of the Central 
Intelligence Agency. He wrote an article--an op-ed piece as it is 
called in the press--that called for the government to collect the bulk 
records of law-abiding Americans' communications and to combine all of 
those records--``publicly available financial and lifestyle information 
into a comprehensive, searchable database.''
  That, in my view, is breathtaking. It makes what everybody was 
talking about with regard to the old phone records collection effort 
look like small potatoes.
  At his hearing, I asked then-Congressman Pompeo whether this database 
would have any boundaries. In other words, he is setting up a brandnew 
database--bigger than anything people have seen. He is going to collect 
people's lifestyle information and who knows what else.
  He said ``of course there are boundaries. Any collection and 
retention must be conducted in accordance with the Constitution's 
statutes and applicable Presidential directives.''
  The real question is, What does that mean?
  It means the person who is deciding what, if anything, Director 
Pompeo's CIA cannot do is the lawyer, and that is where the nominee--
Ms. Elwood to be general counsel--comes in.
  We might ask: How would these questions come up at the CIA?
  As a hypothetical, one question I asked Director Pompeo was: What 
happens when a foreign partner provides the CIA with information that 
is known to include the communications of law-abiding Americans?
  For example, what if the Russians collected information on Americans 
and, instead of providing it to WikiLeaks, gave it to the CIA? It could 
be sensitive information about political leaders and our country and 
journalists and religious leaders and just regular, law-abiding 
Americans. What would Director Pompeo do in that situation? When, if 
ever, would it be inappropriate for the CIA to receive, use, or 
distribute this information?

  His answer was that it is highly fact-specific. He said he would 
consult with lawyers.
  So, when she came for her nomination hearing, I said this is our 
chance. Let's ask the lawyer, Ms. Elwood, who is the nominee to be 
general counsel.
  She said, like Director Pompeo, it would be based on all of the facts 
and circumstances. She said she had no personal experience with such a 
decision and was unable to offer an opinion.
  This, in my view, is a prescription for trouble. We have a CIA 
Director and a nominee to be general counsel of the Agency, and neither 
of these two individuals will tell the Congress and the American people 
what the CIA will do under these circumstances which relate directly to 
the privacy of law-abiding and innocent Americans.
  In her responses to committee questions, Ms. Elwood referred to one 
of the

[[Page S3114]]

documents that was released in January--the revised Attorney General 
guidelines--which she said imposed ``stringent and detailed 
restrictions'' on what the CIA can do with the intelligence it collects 
that is known to include information about Americans.
  We are not talking about an insignificant amount of information on 
Americans. We are talking about bulk collection. We are talking about 
information on Americans that the rules, themselves, describe as 
``significant in volume, proportion, or sensitivity.'' Obviously, the 
mere fact that the CIA collects and keeps this kind of information 
raises a lot of concerns about infringements of Americans' privacy.
  I wanted to know what these stringent restrictions were that Ms. 
Elwood was talking about that she said would, again, just sort of 
magically protect the rights of Americans.
  One of the issues our people are especially concerned about is 
whether the government, after it has collected lots of information on 
Americans, can conduct warrantless, backdoor searches for information 
about specific Americans. Those who dismiss the concerns about these 
backdoor searches argue that if the intelligence has already been 
collected, it is just no big deal to search it, even if the search is 
intended to obtain information on innocent, law-abiding Americans. The 
problem is, the more collection that is going on, the bigger the pool 
of Americans' information that is being searched.
  This has come up with regard to section 702 of the Foreign 
Intelligence Surveillance Act, which we are going to debate in the 
coming months. As my colleagues know, a bipartisan coalition--a 
bipartisan group of Senators and House Members--has been trying for 
years to get the intelligence community to tell us how many innocent, 
law-abiding Americans are being swept up in the section 702 collection. 
That number, if we can ever get it, is directly related to whether the 
intelligence community should be allowed to conduct warrantless 
searches on particular Americans, and it is directly related to the 
point I offered at the outset, which is that we must have policies that 
promote security and liberty. If we do it smartly, we can have both.
  These questions I have described also apply to information that is 
collected under the Executive order. In the case of the Executive 
order, there is not even a discussion about how much information about 
Americans gets swept up.
  So what do the rules say about backdoor searches that have been 
conducted by the CIA under this Executive order?
  It turns out, the CIA can conduct searches through all of this 
information on law-abiding Americans if the search is ``reasonably 
designed to retrieve information related to a duly authorized activity 
of the CIA.''
  Ms. Elwood has told the Intelligence Committee that there are really 
stringent requirements on this, but as I just read--``reasonably 
designed to retrieve information related to a duly authorized activity 
of the CIA''--that sure does not sound like it has much teeth in it to 
me. It does not sound very stringent to me.
  I asked Ms. Elwood at the hearing what other restrictions might 
apply.
  In a written response, she referred to training requirements, to 
recordkeeping, and to the rule that the information must be destroyed 
after 5 years. None of that changes the fact that there is no 
meaningful standard for the searches. There is no check. There is no 
balance. Even the CIA's rule that the information can only be kept for 
5 years has a huge loophole in that it can be extended by the CIA 
Director after consultation with--guess who again--the general counsel.
  Again, we have rules that are vague to begin with, whose 
implementation is up to the discretion of the CIA Director and the 
general counsel. At this point, the Senate has virtually nothing to go 
on in terms of how this nominee for this critical general counsel 
position would exercise all of this power.
  Another aspect of CIA activities that are authorized by the Executive 
order is that of the secret participation by someone who is working on 
behalf of the CIA and organizations in our country.
  These activities would obviously be concerning to a lot of Americans. 
Most Americans probably believe the CIA is not even allowed to do this 
anymore, but it is. The question is, whether there are going to be 
rules that prevent abuses.
  Since that is yet another modern-day, present-time topic, I said I am 
going to ask Ms. Elwood some questions on this. For example, for what 
purposes could the CIA secretly join a private organization in the 
United States?
  The rules say the CIA Director can make case-by-case decisions with 
the concurrence of the general counsel, so I thought it would be 
appropriate to ask what the view is of the nominee to be the general 
counsel. Ms. Elwood's response was that she had no experience with this 
matter and looked forward to learning about it. And that, of course, is 
typical of so many of her answers. Repeatedly, she declined to provide 
any clarity on how she would interpret the CIA's authorities under this 
sweeping Executive order, but these are the calls she could make every 
single day if confirmed. At this point, the Senate has no clue how she 
would make them. It is my view that we cannot vote to confirm a 
nominee--particularly one who will operate entirely in secret--and just 
hope for the best.
  I have other concerns about the Elwood nomination, particularly some 
of her views with respect to torture.
  I asked Ms. Elwood whether the torture techniques the CIA had used 
violated the Detainee Treatment Act, often referred to as the McCain 
amendment. She had no opinion. I asked her whether those techniques 
violated the statutory prohibition on torture. She had no opinion. I 
asked her whether the torture techniques violated the War Crimes Act. 
She had no opinion. I asked her whether the torture techniques violated 
U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture, the Geneva 
Convention and other U.S. treaty obligations. She had no opinion.
  How could she have no opinion? She has said that she read the 500-
page executive summary of the Intelligence Committee's Torture Report. 
The horrific details of waterboarding, extended sleep deprivation, 
stress positions, and other torture techniques are known to everyone, 
but the nominee to be the CIA's General Counsel has no opinion on these 
matters.
  Ms. Elwood did, however, commit to complying with the 2015 law 
prohibiting interrogation techniques not authorized by the Army Field 
Manual. That gets us again to the question of what decisions she would 
make now, based on current law. Everyone agrees that waterboarding is 
prohibited by the Army Field Manual, but the Army Field Manual can be 
changed. Fortunately, the 2015 law also prohibits any changes to the 
Army Field Manual that involve the use or threat of force. I asked her 
whether the CIA's torture techniques fell safely outside of anything 
the Army Field Manual could legally authorize. Her response, again, was 
that she had not studied the techniques.
  So that was her position. She said she will comply with the law and 
agreed that the law prohibits interrogation techniques that involve the 
use or threat of force, but she refused to say whether waterboarding or 
any of the other CIA torture techniques falls outside that prohibition.
  Finally, I asked the nominee how the constitutional rights of 
Americans would apply when the government seeks to kill them overseas. 
She responded that she had not considered the matter. Do these rights 
apply to legal permanent residents of the United States who are 
overseas? She did not have an opinion on that either.
  To fully understand why this kind of avoidance is such a problem, we 
need to consider again what the CIA general counsel does and how she 
does it. I have been on the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2001. I 
have seen far too many intelligence programs go on for years before we 
find out about them. In so many of these cases, the problem lies in how 
senior lawyers interpreted their authorities. These interpretations are 
made in secret. They are made by a handful of people, and they are 
revealed to almost no one. We place almost immeasurable trust in the 
people who make these decisions. We cannot take this lightly.
  The Senate and the American people have one shot--and one shot only--
to get some insight into how those lawyers will make their decisions 
and how

[[Page S3115]]

they view the laws that apply to them. That one shot is the 
confirmation process. So when a nominee refused to take positions, it 
short-circuits the process. This is not acceptable. We cannot just 
confirm someone to be the CIA's general counsel without knowing what 
she will do in that position. That would be an abdication of our duty.
  I want to close by saying that, at this extraordinary time in 
American history, a time when our country--and if you sit on the 
Intelligence Committee, as I have for a number of years, you go into 
the Intelligence Committee room, and it is all behind closed doors, and 
you often walk out of there very concerned about the well-being of our 
people, given some of the grave national security threats we hear about 
once or twice a week.
  The point is that our choice is not between security and liberty; it 
is between smart policies and ones that are not so smart. For example, 
on this floor, when the leadership of the committee was interested in 
weakening strong encryption, which is what keeps our people safe--we 
have our whole lives wrapped up in a smartphone, and smart encryption 
ensures that terrorists and hackers can't get at that information. It 
ensures that pedophiles can't get access to the location tracker and 
pick up where your child might be. We all know how much our parents 
care about the well-being of kids.
  People are saying: Let's just build backdoors into our products, and 
I said I am going to fight that. I will fight it with everything I have 
whenever it is proposed because it is bad for security, bad for 
liberty, bad for our companies that are trying to continue to offer 
high-skill, high-wage jobs because our competitors won't do it, and so 
far we have been able to hold it off.
  As we seek in the days ahead to come up with smart policies that 
protect security and liberty, we have to get answers from those in the 
government who are going to have these key positions. Given the fact 
that the CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, made it clear in his hearing that 
he was going to rely on the person chosen by the Senate as his general 
counsel, I felt it was very important that we get some answers from the 
person we will be voting on shortly.
  I regret to say to the Senate that this morning we are largely in the 
dark with respect to Ms. Elwood's views on the key questions I have 
outlined today.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam President, President Trump has routinely 
attacked basic American freedoms--of the press, of peaceful assembly, 
of religion, of speech. When he lost the popular vote, President-elect 
Trump assailed the integrity of our electoral process and falsely 
claimed that millions of people voted illegally. When the press exposed 
those falsehoods, Mr. Trump dismissed credible reporting as ``fake 
news.'' When the courts ruled that his travel ban was unlawful, 
President Trump accused judges of abetting terrorists.
  These actions have consequences beyond our own borders and embolden 
dictators around the world. President Trump displays a worldview that 
favors the military over diplomacy and transactional relationships over 
strategic alliances. President Trump's uncritical embrace of autocrats 
like Russian President Putin, Egyptian President Sisi, Turkish 
President Erdogan, and Philippine President Duterte is a repudiation of 
every reformer and activist seeking freedom from tyranny. It is a 
repudiation of America's values and founding principles.
  President Trump's approach to the world is shortsighted and self-
defeating. The greatest threats to U.S. national security come from 
countries that are corrupt, poorly governed, and fraught with poverty 
and disease. These countries require sustained engagement and 
assistance to prevent the kind of threats that could require American 
soldiers to go into war. These countries require American leadership 
and the American example to help address the root causes of conflict 
and to give a voice to the aspirations of their people.
  That is why President Trump's proposed 32 percent cut to the budget 
of the State Department, his failure to put forward nominees for 
leadership positions, and his disrespect for the career employees who 
serve our country are so dangerous. By undermining American influence 
abroad, President Trump erodes American strength.
  While John Sullivan has an extensive career in public service, I am 
concerned that he lacks experience at the State Department. An 
understanding of the institution is, in many ways, as important as an 
understanding of our complex diplomatic terrain. Despite these 
concerns, I was encouraged by the statements and commitments he made at 
his confirmation hearing.
  In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. 
Sullivan committed to promoting American values abroad, saying: ``Our 
greatest asset is our commitment to the fundamental values expressed at 
the founding of our nation; the rights to life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness. These basic human rights are the bedrock of our 
republic and at the heart of American leadership in the world.''
  He underscored that our alliances and partnerships ``have been the 
cornerstone of our national security in the post-war era.'' He 
commended the foreign service officers, civil servants, and locally 
employed staff who faithfully serve our country every day.
  These statements are a rejection of the worldview proposed by 
President Trump. I hope that Mr. Sullivan honors these statements in 
office. For this reason, I support his nomination for Deputy Secretary 
of State.
  Mr. WYDEN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Perdue). The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.