[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 108 (Friday, June 23, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H5134-H5137]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I have to say that it is a privilege and it 
is good for the House and good for America when Judge Ted Poe is on the 
floor making a case. He was a great judge, a great prosecutor before 
that, and we will always need his voice making a case here on the 
floor, especially the kind of strong case he was just making. And I 
want to follow up with that.
  There was a story yesterday, June 22, by Kristina Wong. It says:
  ``James Comey may have misled Senators on May 3, when he testified to 
the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had never been an anonymous 
source in news reports related to the Russia investigation.
  ``By that time, he had already leaked several private conversations 
he had with President Trump to his friend Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-
chief of the blog Lawfare and former editorial writer for The 
Washington Post.''
  Mr. Speaker, I am sure you will recall, as we see every day, evidence 
that The Washington Post does not just despise Donald Trump, they are 
actually malicious in their reporting. President Trump, as a public 
figure, would normally have a tough time making a case as a public 
figure for libel or slander because you have to prove malice. The 
Washington Post has proved repeatedly they are not interested in 
fairness or anything resembling balance. They can't stand Donald J. 
Trump, and they are out to try to get him in a malicious fashion.
  So when anybody, especially somebody with the FBI, leaks anything to 
people that may have it end up in The Washington Post, they, indeed, 
themselves become part of the malice for our President.
  The article says:
  ``Wittes wrote in a piece on May 18, only 9 days after Comey was 
fired, that the former FBI Director had shared those conversations 
`over the previous few months.' He wrote:
  ``Comey never told me the details of the dinner meeting; I don't 
think I even knew that there had been a meeting over dinner until I 
learned it from the Times story. But he did tell me in general terms 
that early on, Trump had `asked for loyalty' and that Comey had 
promised him only honesty. He also told me that Trump was perceptibly 
uncomfortable with this answer.''
  Now, let me insert here because obviously Mr. Comey does not 
understand what loyalty means and why a President of the United States 
would ask for loyalty from the Director of the FBI. But what loyalty 
means from a Director of the FBI is: Mr. President, I will be loyal to 
the administration. I will not go out and leak things to the media and 
I will not go out and stab you in the back every chance I have, even 
though I have these friends that hate your guts. And I know when I leak 
things or share things to people that can't stand the President, it is 
going to hurt him and it is going to be disloyal.
  That is what loyalty is. It is outrageous for someone to try to make 
an obstruction case out of a President asking for loyalty.
  Look at what the Obama administration did. They prosecuted more 
people that they alleged were leakers than all other administrations 
put together. They were aggressive in prosecuting disloyalty.
  Donald Trump, on the other hand, as President of the United States, 
wasn't threatening to prosecute the way the Obama administration 
obviously had done. And he didn't try to make an example of everybody 
by having them prosecuted if they leaked anything. Otherwise, Comey 
would be standing before a judge answering charges right now; and maybe 
that should come later.
  All he was asking for is: I need you to promise me loyalty.
  And the very question of a President just asking for loyalty ended up 
being a source of evidence that Mueller--not Mueller. That is another 
case altogether. There is plenty of evidence about him--that Comey is 
probably the most disloyal FBI Director since J. Edgar Hoover was 
taping Presidents himself and having them watched and spied on.
  So it is amazing, as smart as James Comey is--I have questioned him a 
number of times, so I know how smart he is. But as smart as he is, he 
couldn't figure out that loyalty would mean you don't run--try to make 
your President look bad after a simple meeting where the President just 
asked: Would you be loyal? I am not asking for the Moon. I am not 
asking for anything outrageous. I am simply asking: Would you please be 
loyal?
  And even as President Trump was, apparently, asking for loyalty, this 
disloyal, dishonest Director of the FBI was already turning wheels in 
his head: How can I hurt this President? I know a reporter that hates 
Trump, who worked for the Trump-hating Washington Post. Even though he 
is not there now, he will know how to help me hurt Trump.

[[Page H5135]]

  I mean, even as the President is asking for loyalty, that is what he 
is getting in the mind of the FBI Director.
  So is it any mystery when we look back at the case history we have 
talked about here on the floor about how Comey manipulated John 
Ashcroft into recusing himself so Comey could push his own dear friend 
and godfather of his child, Patrick Fitzgerald, into being special 
counsel to go after the Bush administration?
  Clearly, Comey and Fitzgerald were hoping to nail Karl Rove's and 
Dick Cheney's hide to the wall. That is what they were after.
  And how do we know?
  Because on day one--well, of course, the fact that Comey would push 
the godfather of his child into that position tells you all you need to 
know, but there is plenty more.
  They both knew that Richard Armitage had leaked Valerie Plame's 
identity as a CIA agent. And they knew that there was no need for a 
special counsel or a special investigation. Yet they spent millions of 
dollars and man-hours trying to get beyond that and find some way to 
nail somebody they didn't like.
  You would call that dishonesty or disloyalty because honesty would 
have had Comey and his dear friend and godfather of his child 
immediately going public on day one.
  This would be honesty, to go forward and say: We know that the 
godfather of my child here, Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed to find 
out who leaked information about Valerie Plame and her dishonest 
husband, Joseph Wilson, who lied to the CIA and lied to Congress, but 
we still need to know.
  And guess what. We already know on day one who leaked it. It was 
Richard Armitage. There is no need to squander taxpayer dollars and 
there is no need for the government to pay massive amounts of money to 
Patrick Fitzgerald to do this investigation.

                              {time}  1230

  We are honest individuals. We are coming forward, and, yeah, maybe it 
wasn't all that honest for me to put my dear close friend, Fitzgerald, 
in this position, but I am going to be honest now. We don't need this 
investigation.
  But that is not what they did. They were disloyal and dishonest to 
the American people, to the Bush administration, and to justice. They 
asked for expanded jurisdiction, made it seem like they were on the 
trail of something big.
  No, they weren't on the trail of anything big. They had nothing. They 
wanted to try to get somebody prosecuted, and that way they could try 
to justify the massive amount of expenditures for nothing, for no good 
reason, that they were about to go through.
  Eventually, they prosecuted Scooter Libby for allegedly being 
inconsistent with something he said--same thing they went after Martha 
Stewart for.
  There was no insider trading that Martha Stewart engaged in. And I 
know she is not a fan of Republicans--seems like a very nice person 
when I talked to her--but she was treated grossly unfairly. There was 
no insider trading. So they keep talking to her until they find they 
think she said something inconsistent so they could get a conviction, 
get a scalp under their belt, figuratively speaking, and claim they had 
done some great good. Comey was underneath, behind the scenes in that 
as well.
  So it is amazing to me how anybody could try to be accusatory of 
someone, a President that said: Can you please promise me you will be 
loyal?
  He didn't ask for anything illegal, nothing unethical, but 
apparently--you know, I didn't know Donald Trump. I supported Ted Cruz 
for over a year for President. But I have come to understand, this man 
has amazing instincts with people, amazing business acumen, figures out 
when something makes sense and something doesn't make sense.
  One of the other Members of Congress just this morning was saying: 
You know, I never realized until I had seen the President in person, 
the man really has a big heart.
  Okay. It was kind of surprising to some folks. But you get the 
inkling of it the more you are around him. And you see the way he 
treats kids, and we saw the way he treats children. You know, we saw 
the way he was so good to all kids. It didn't matter--he didn't care if 
they were Democrats' kids or Republicans' kids.
  But I do recall, 8 years ago, one of my friends from Texas had a 
daughter, had her little book and pen, saw kids lined up getting an 
autograph from President Obama. So she ran over to get an autograph, 
and she came back in tears because she said when he got to her, he 
said, ``I am not signing yours,'' and walked away. Her parents assured 
her it was nothing personal. He just obviously had some kind of 
emergency.
  But then later on, before the congressional picnic was over, she saw 
other children lined up getting an autograph. She ran, got to the end 
of the line, and once again, when President Obama got to her, he said, 
``I told you, I am not signing yours.'' It took a long time to get over 
that.
  But a lot of the people that saw the way President Obama treated some 
kids--not all of them, but some--saw the way President Trump didn't 
care anything about their background, what party their parents 
supported. He was just a gracious guy, obviously showed a big heart for 
kids.
  So it would be understandable that somebody in business, doing 
multimillion-dollar deals, would need to know people were going to be 
loyal. And I have come to know enough about Donald Trump and his 
intuition about people he is dealing with, if he asks someone to be 
loyal and that person hedges their bets, said, well, I will be honest--
I haven't asked him, but I am willing to bet when James Comey refused 
to say he would be loyal but said he would be honest, I would be 
willing to bet you Donald Trump knew immediately this man is not going 
to be loyal or honest, and that is exactly what has happened.
  James Comey has been both disloyal to his country, to the FBI, and to 
the President he was serving. He admitted leaking information. And some 
of us believe that if President Trump had not tweeted out, making 
reference to potential tapes of their conversations, that the disloyal, 
dishonest former Director of the FBI would probably not have been as 
honest as he was about some other things that were said.
  But for anyone in the media to make some kind of big deal, potential 
obstruction of justice charge, just bringing up ``I need you to be 
loyal; tell me you will be loyal'' is absolutely outrageous.
  I would expect every President, surely, if they were a good 
President, at one time or another needed to ask for a pledge of 
loyalty, not that you are going to lie, not that you are going to 
commit a crime, but you are not going to run out and leak stuff more 
than once the way James Comey did. You are going to be loyal to me. And 
if there is a problem, you come to me. You don't go leak it to your 
leftwing friends.
  And also being loyal, I would think, would include that, if you 
believe there is a need for an independent counsel, a special counsel, 
and that you are a critical witness, that being loyal and being honest 
would--and being ethical would require that you not look forward to 
having one of your best friends in the world, Bob Mueller, being the 
special counsel.
  My friends, my very dear friends, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, Jody 
Hice--I have an article from yesterday. I have been talking about this 
for a week or so with different people, but we do need an independent 
counsel. We need a special counsel. And courts have made clear, 
Congress cannot appoint an independent counsel. It is an executive 
branch function. It is a violation of the separation of powers.
  It has been made very clear: Congress can appropriate for independent 
counsel, they can make laws that create an office of independent 
counsel or a special prosecutor, they can do all those things, but they 
cannot, Congress cannot appoint an independent prosecutor, a special 
counsel. That is an executive branch function, and everyone in the 
executive branch derives their power, any that they have, from and 
through the President of the United States.

  We know, there is no question about it, President Barack Hussein 
Obama regularly and intentionally obstructed justice, but we know that 
for a President to obstruct justice the way President Obama did was 
legal. He has the power to legally obstruct justice a number of ways, 
whether it is at the very end, just an outright pardon, or whether it 
is a dictation of policies the

[[Page H5136]]

way President Obama did: We are not going to go after and prosecute 
this group of people that have come in and committed crimes from other 
countries.
  Some of us felt like it was terrible judgment, but President Obama 
had the legal authority to obstruct justice in directing the Justice 
Department not to pursue and prosecute certain groups of people or even 
individuals. He could pardon them outright before or after 
investigation. The President has that power. So does President Trump.
  But as my friends point out in this article, Mr. Comey misled the 
American people in the early weeks of the Trump administration by 
furthering the perception that President Trump was under investigation 
when, in fact, he was not. He, again, did this willfully and 
intentionally, and, I would add, he did it disloyally and dishonestly.
  They point out that Comey recently admitted that, after being fired 
from the FBI, he had a friend leak an internal FBI document to The New 
York Times detailing a conversation Comey had with President Trump. 
Comey testified under oath that he had ordered the leak to help create 
public momentum for the appointment of a special counsel, which we now 
know is Comey's mentor, predecessor, dear friend, Robert Mueller.
  Unless anyone be confused--and I have even heard our great Speaker of 
the House say: Yeah, well, you know, the fact is his credentials are 
impeccable. We trust him.
  Well, anybody who looks into Mueller's situation deeply enough will 
not say that his credentials are impeccable. He served honorably, 
heroically in Vietnam, but as FBI Director, he set a policy in place 
that would run people out of the FBI that had years of service and 
experience as supervisors. One article pointed out, he had run off 
thousands and thousands of years of experience.
  I would submit it is because his egotistical narcissism would not 
allow him to have anybody that knew more than he did so they could 
question or offer suggestions contrary to what Director Mueller wanted. 
That is why he cost the FBI millions of dollars. And because of his 
poor leadership, his purging of the FBI training materials so that all 
these new people, after he ran off the experienced people that knew 
what radical Islam was--they had been trained to recognize it--ran them 
off, had younger people in there who were not allowed to learn what 
radical Islam was, so when the Orlando shooter or Tsarnaev or any of 
these others that were on the radar were investigated by Mueller's 
trained FBI, they didn't know what they were looking for. Because of 
the poor training--it wasn't intentional by Mueller that they would end 
up costing people their lives, but that is what happened.
  An article points out: ``On May 7, 2014, the House of Representatives 
passed a resolution calling for a special counsel to investigate the 
IRS targeting of conservatives for their political beliefs. Comey and 
Attorney General Eric Holder blocked the appointment. This despite the 
fact that the lead investigator they assigned to the case, Barbara 
Bosserman, was a max-out contributor to President Obama's reelection 
campaign.
  ``This is the type of unequal justice the Americans despise. No 
special counsel in the IRS targeting investigation. No special counsel 
for the Clinton email investigation. But if it's about protecting 
Comey's reputation and hurting President Trump, then of course there 
has to be a special counsel.
  ``Throughout 2015 and 2016 there were calls from Congress for a 
special counsel in the Clinton email scandal.''
  I mean, for heaven's sakes, when you have someone go out and destroy 
known evidence that has been subpoenaed with a hammer, now that is 
illegal obstruction of justice.
  But, no, Comey didn't want that investigated. Oh, no, his dear friend 
Hillary Clinton, the dear couple that was so close to Loretta Lynch 
that she would order him to misrepresent what the FBI was doing, that 
she would get on a plane knowing he is the spouse of somebody they are 
supposed to be looking at prosecuting, that there is plenty of evidence 
to show she violated the law many times, criminal law many times, oh, 
no. But this Justice Department refused, even after it was revealed 
that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with Bill Clinton 
less than a week before the FBI interviewed Hillary Clinton.

                              {time}  1245

  No special counsel was established, even allowed, or even 
recommended, even after some unusual Justice Department immunity deals, 
the deals the Justice Department made with Comey there as Director when 
he, apparently, was a big enough shot he could do his job and Loretta 
Lynch's; say, I'm not going to let anybody--what he said was no good 
prosecutor, in essence, would prosecute this case.
  That was a lie, but he went before the public to say it to help his 
friends, the Clintons or, rather, better friends of Loretta Lynch and 
the President.
  Boy, if President Trump had ever gotten the loyalty from James Comey 
that President Obama got, in numerous cases, undeservedly, people would 
be recognizing prior criminal activity for what it was and is.
  Anyway, in one of the hearings, Mueller was asked about this 
incredible, horrendous activity of persecuting conservative 
organizations, refusing to allow them to form because they could go 
against President Obama in the next election. The Obama administration 
clearly used the IRS as one of its most effective campaign operative 
groups, and it worked. They were able, in 2012, to prevent conservative 
groups from forming and from coming after President Obama for problems 
he had created.
  But with all the national furor over the IRS, Mr. Mueller was 
supposed to be so fair, so impartial. He is asked: Okay. Well, we're 
told we don't need a special counsel because you, the FBI, are all over 
this. You don't need any special prosecutor. You've got this under 
control. Who is the lead agent?
  He couldn't answer the question.
  He is asked: Okay. Well, how many agents have been assigned to the 
case?
  Mueller could not answer that question.
  He is asked: Have any victims been interviewed?
  The answer again was: I don't know.
  The reason was Mueller is not objective. He is not fair and balanced. 
He despises this President, like his and Comey's friends at The 
Washington Post, The New York Times, and elite circles. They have shown 
they are and have been disloyal to the President. They have been unjust 
to this President.
  And Mueller, I mean, going back to when William Jefferson was being 
investigated, I haven't seen the articles in many years, but I do 
recall, because we were paying attention, when Mueller had a 
congressional office searched without having--there are many times 
Members of Congress have potentially probable cause they committed a 
crime, and the way it was always handled, for over 200 years, you go to 
the Speaker of the House, because things in a Member of Congress' 
office--like, at that time, nobody should have come into my office, 
even with a warrant from the FBI, and been able to get material that 
said what FBI agents were giving me information about the terrible 
administration in the FBI.
  The only way we can have a balance of power and the only way we can 
have oversight is if the FBI has no right to come in and find out who 
the whistleblowers are, because they do come after them. We have seen 
that over and over.
  But Mueller was out for blood. They get a search warrant. Forget 200 
years of law. We are not going through the Speaker so they can preserve 
things that are privileged that the FBI shouldn't get. Always in the 
past--there have been many people prosecuted with things that came from 
their office, as I understood it.
  I was in on one of the meetings between the Attorney General's 
lawyers, the House lawyers, and the FBI. They said: You know, many 
times we have given you--when you show us what it is, we make sure what 
is privileged stays privileged and give you the evidence that lets you 
prosecute.
  But Mueller went straight there, as a smack at Congress: You better 
not have oversight of me, or I will come after you.
  And when he was questioned about this issue that Congress was 
raising, his response was: Maybe it's time I appointed 400 agents to 
investigate Congress.

[[Page H5137]]

  He was threatening Congress.
  This is mean-spirited. This is an unfair, unjust man. And there is 
only one answer because he leaked out, ``I am investigating the 
President for obstruction of justice.'' Now if the President fires him, 
oh, it will be another Saturday night massacre.
  So the answer is that the President has all the authority to appoint 
special counsel. He has got to appoint somebody to investigate Mueller, 
his chummy buddy Comey, their chummy buddy Loretta Lynch, and the 
Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton couple so we can finally find out 
truth, honesty, and loyalty in this country.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________