[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 98 (Thursday, June 8, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H4809-H4811]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I am delighted to be here on behalf of the 
Progressive Caucus. This is our Special Order hour. We have decided to 
devote our remarks this evening to the testimony of former FBI Director 
Comey, who testified in the U.S. Senate today.


                             General Leave

  Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members 
may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and 
include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Maryland?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, today, America watched former FBI Director 
Comey offer his testimony before the Senate Select Committee on 
Intelligence. It was a dramatic and serious moment in the history of 
our country and in the unfolding of the crisis related to the 
investigation of Russia's involvement in the U.S. election and then the 
firing of General Flynn by President Trump.

                              {time}  1745

  This was the first time that Director Comey spoke publicly about his 
firing by President Trump and the investigation since he left the FBI, 
and his testimony confirmed much of what has been reported about the 
matter.
  Now, what any reasonable-minded observer would have to conclude after 
watching the testimony today, after reading Mr. Comey's testimony, is 
that President Trump was trying mightily to use his office and his 
influence to get Director Comey to drop the investigation of General 
Flynn, his former National Security Advisor. Indeed, President Trump as 
much as said so when he said that he had fired Director Comey because 
he was unhappy about the Russian investigation and, presumably, the 
Russian investigation into General Flynn.
  Now, Madam Speaker, distinguished colleagues, look how far we have 
come over the last several months. The President of the United States 
hired a National Security Advisor after being warned not to by the 
former President of the United States, by then-President Obama. That 
National Security Advisor lasted a total of 24 days in office, when it 
was determined that he had lied to Vice President Pence about his 
dealings with Russia. And then later we learned that he was a 
registered foreign agent, or he registered retroactively as a foreign 
agent, an agent for a foreign government. Now, think how dramatic this 
sequence of events is.
  Imagine, if you will, if President Barack Obama had met with Attorney 
General Eric Holder and Vice President Joe Biden and FBI Director Comey 
in his office and then asked Vice President Biden and Attorney General 
Holder to leave his office, saying that he wanted to speak alone to the 
FBI Director, and then proceeded, essentially, to tell FBI Director 
Comey that he wanted him to drop the investigation into Hillary 
Clinton's emails, saying, you know, ``Hillary Clinton's a good woman. 
She's a good person, and I hope you can just let the investigation into 
her emails go. Just let it go,'' and to demand repeatedly for absolute 
personal loyalty.
  Now, as it happened, Director Comey refused to take a vow of absolute 
loyalty to the President. After all, he takes an oath of office to the 
Constitution of the United States and the people of the country, so he 
couldn't say that he would give absolute loyalty to the President of 
the United States. That is not consistent with our constitutional form 
of government.
  But imagine that this had happened under the Obama administration. 
Obama had made a similar demand of FBI Director Comey who was 
investigating, after all, Hillary Clinton's emails, had dismissed the 
Vice President and the Attorney General to have a one-on-one 
conversation, and then said, ``I really hope that you let this go,'' 
using the full trappings of his office and his influence to try to get 
the FBI Director to drop the investigation.

[[Page H4810]]

  If that happened, I dare say that every Member of this body, every 
Member would have recognized that as an attempt to obstruct justice by 
the President of the United States, and lots of Members certainly would 
have been calling for impeachment of President Obama for interfering 
with an ongoing investigation by the FBI.
  Well, what is happening now in Congress?
  Well, lots of our colleagues are murmuring a defense of President 
Trump saying: Well, it doesn't look good and maybe he shouldn't have 
done it, but he is new to government. Trump is new to Washington. He is 
not schooled in the ways of Washington, it is being said. He is 
actually a breath of fresh air that he doesn't know how Washington 
operates.
  I think that that completely confuses the question. Dear colleagues, 
Madam Speaker, the law against obstruction of justice in the United 
States, which is a felony criminal offense, 18 U.S.C. 1503, applies 
against experienced government officials and inexperienced government 
officials. It applies to all citizens of the United States. It applies 
to people who have worked in Washington their whole life and people who 
have worked in Washington for several months. In fact, it applies to 
people across the country.
  It is not a law that applies just in the District of Columbia. It 
applies in New York. It applies in Mar-a-Lago. It applies in 
California. It applies everywhere.
  No American citizen can interfere with the due administration of 
justice, whether it is trying to persuade a juror to do a certain 
thing, whether it is trying to influence a judge in a particular case, 
or whether it is trying to get a prosecutor to drop an investigation 
into a particular person or into an entire subject matter.
  No one has the right to interfere with the due administration of 
justice in America. That is both a criminal statutory principle in 18 
U.S. Code. It is also a constitutional principle, which is well 
recognized because democracy, our constitutional democracy, depends 
upon the rule of law; and there is no rule of law if there is no 
evenhandedness and no impartiality in the administration of justice. No 
one has the right to interfere with justice.
  Now what should be done about this?
  Nobody quite knows what to do at this point. We do have a special 
counsel, Mr. Mueller, who has been appointed, and that is good, but 
what he is looking for is counterintelligence information, and he is 
looking for possible criminal activity.
  But if we take a step back, what is all of this really about?
  I was very pleased that former Director Comey talked about this in 
his testimony today. What this is about was a concerted, deliberate, 
comprehensive effort, orchestrated from the very top of the Russian 
Government, to interfere with the U.S. election. That is something now 
that former FBI Director Comey has spoken about publicly, and it is 
something that 18 of our intelligence agencies have reported to 
Congress and the American people in a public report with a high degree 
of certainty that there was an orchestrated campaign to undermine and 
subvert our campaign, starting at the highest levels of the Russian 
Government. That took place, okay?
  So the criminal or counterintelligence investigation doesn't go to 
the question that has got to concern us in Congress, which is the 
threat to our democratic form of government. As FBI Director Comey 
restated today, 2016 could just be a dress rehearsal for what is coming 
at us in 2018 and 2020. The intelligence agencies said that they would 
try to do it again.

  Russia is no match for the military might of the United States of 
America. Russia is no match for the economic might of the United States 
of America. Russia's autocratic, kleptocratic, dictatorial-style 
government is no match for the constitutional democracy that we have 
built up in the United States of America. But the Russians have figured 
out a way to use the internet to try to penetrate the democracies of 
the world on the cheap. It is not that expensive to have paid trolls to 
orchestrate fake news and propaganda and to try to distort the 
electoral process in the United States of America--or in the 
Netherlands, or in France, or in other countries around the world.
  Now, we don't have all of the facts. That is why what we need is an 
independent, outside investigation by a commission that we set up 
outside of Congress--no Democratic Members of Congress, no Republican 
Members of Congress, no elected officials. What we will put on there 
are statesmen and stateswomen who are experienced in questions of 
democracy and foreign policy, who are trusted, and we will ask them to 
give us the kind of report that the 9/11 Commission gave to us but 
about what happened in the 2016 election and how do we prepare to stop 
it from happening again to us in the future.
  Now, notice that you can support this, and I think you should support 
this, whether or not there was any collusion by anybody within the 
Trump administration. You can be completely convinced that there was 
collusion between particular members of the Trump administration or 
Trump campaign and Russia or you could be completely convinced that 
there was no collusion at all, that they knew nothing about those 
efforts. It doesn't make any difference. There was still a massive 
assault on American democracy, and we have got to respond to it.
  That is why I think the pathway forward for us now is for both sides 
in Congress, both parties, to come together and to act in a patriotic 
way, not in a partisan way, to say let's create an objective, 
disinterested, outside commission to get to the bottom of what happened 
to us in this election. And we will let, for the time being, the 
Department of Justice and Special Counselor Mueller deal with the 
question of criminal culpability and criminal deeds, but that is of 
less importance, in truth, than the integrity of our political 
institution and the future of American democracy.
  There is the question which remains unresolved and, at this point, 
still relatively untouched, about what is so special about Michael 
Flynn.
  We have a President who is unafraid to offend anybody. He told our 
best allies in the world in NATO that NATO is obsolete. I think he has 
changed course on that, but he was very willing to basically wave off 
the importance of NATO.
  He was willing to tell one of our biggest trade partners in the 
world, Mexico, that he was going to force them to build a wall on the 
border, force them to pay for it. And again, I think he seems to have 
backtracked from that. I don't know where he stands on that now.
  He was willing to insult and affront the Government of Australia, 
which has been a great ally of America.
  He had a TV show called ``You're Fired,'' so he is not afraid of 
offending people, and we see him offend people all of the time and pick 
fights with people all of the time. He picked a fight with Meryl 
Streep. He is willing to tweet at anybody.
  But suddenly, with Michael Flynn, this disgraced National Security 
Advisor whom he fired, President Trump goes to great lengths to try to 
interfere in an ongoing investigation which I think everybody can 
recognize is obstruction or attempted an obstruction of justice. He 
interferes with the FBI Director in a really astonishing and 
unprecedented way to try to get Flynn carved out of the investigation.
  Why? What does Flynn know? What is the nature of their relationship 
such that the President goes to such extraordinary lengths to carve him 
out from the investigation?
  That is something that we are going to need to get to the bottom of 
because democracies operate on the truth. Truth is built into our 
system. That is why we have judges and we have juries. That is why we 
have due process. That is why we have congressional oversight over the 
President of the United States. That is why all of us in public service 
swear an oath to the Constitution. The truth means something in a 
democracy, so we are going to have to get to the bottom of that.
  But, in the meantime, Congress can act effectively and in a unified 
way. And I was encouraged by what both Republican and Democratic 
Senators on the Senate committee today were saying, which is that 
everybody agreed, or at least a lot of them agreed, that there had been 
this unacceptable assault on the electoral institution of our political 
democracy in 2016, and we have got to prevent it from happening again.

[[Page H4811]]

  We need to have a bipartisan, or nonpartisan, independent commission 
outside of Congress to study exactly what happened and to report back 
to us about what we need to do to build up our defenses so our 
democracy is as strong as our economy and as our military. So our 
democratic institutions need to be fortified against subversion, 
against hacking, against cyber propaganda and fake news and so on.
  Madam Speaker, I am going to call up and invite the very 
distinguished Congresswoman from Seattle, Washington, Pramila Jayapal, 
who has been a terrific leader for human rights and for democracy in 
the U.S. House of Representatives since her arrival in January.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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