[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 103 (Wednesday, June 20, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H5355-H5358]
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 am grateful to my Republican friends for 
pointing out the advantages of natural gas.
  I might add that we had, in the last Congress, a hearing about what 
was the world's largest solar plant. This wasn't a plant that had solar 
panels. It had thousands of mirrors pointing to three different towers 
that would superheat the water, which would turn to steam and would 
drive turbines to produce electricity.
  I have one article here. This was from February 2014. It talked about 
the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, sprawling across roughly 
5 square miles of Federal land; that is Mojave Desert area near the 
California-Nevada border. It had opened, and it was glorified. There 
was $1.6 billion in Federal loans, $600-some-odd million in grants to 
help them make their payments. Years later they paid 7 million--well, 2 
years ago, they had paid back, I think they said, $7 million of the 
$2.2 billion.
  Anyway, this article was about the world's largest solar plant 
scorching birds in the Nevada desert. From testimony we heard, 
apparently this solar plant, as birds would fly through the superheated 
sunlight, it would cause them to explode in flames, which is why the 
locals called them flamers.

  Originally, they were not expecting to have to spend a lot of money 
cleaning mirrors with water. They thought it would just be dust. They 
didn't anticipate all the flaming bird debris--some of them endangered 
species, I am quite sure.
  In a period of February through June, there were 290 of those flamers 
that exploded in flames and scattered their bird debris. Anyway, that 
was the solar side of it.
  Since they had a contract to provide all this electricity and they 
had used up their $2.2 billion, what do you do when you don't have $2.2 
billion and the ability to burn up endangered species and you don't 
have that kind of government grant? Well, you take just a little bit of 
money and you do what they did: you use natural gas--very 
environmentally friendly.
  You can create a natural gas electrical plant very, very cheaply and 
make up for what the fire, the flaming birds, and all the other things 
did to slow down this great solar-powered plant. So there is a lot to 
be said for natural gas.
  We did have a hearing yesterday, and one of the things I did not get 
to point out that I had highlighted but just didn't have enough time to 
ask the inspector general about, since his conclusion was, even though 
there were hundreds of pages that clearly reflected not just bias, but 
angry, hateful animus against Donald Trump, Republicans--but certainly 
Donald Trump--the IG, it seemed very clear to me, with hundreds of 
pages documenting the overwhelming bias among those who were supposed 
to be fair and impartial, figuratively depicting justice being blind, 
well, it was as if IG Horowitz decided: Well, we have got all this 
overwhelming bias, so that will make the Republicans happy. But I have 
got so many Democratic friends, I don't want to get them permanently 
upset with me, so I will just conclude that there is no evidence that 
bias affected the investigation at all.
  Yet, in his own report, IG Horowitz said, and this is in the 
executive summary, page 9: ``Most of the text messages raising such 
questions pertained to the Russia investigation, and the implication in 
some of these text messages, particularly Strzok's August 8 text 
message ('we'll stop' Candidate Trump from being elected) was that 
Strzok might be willing to take official action to impact a 
Presidential candidate's electoral prospects. Under these 
circumstances, we did not have confidence that Strzok's decision to 
prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the 
Midyear''--the Hillary Clinton--``related investigative lead discovered 
on the Weiner laptop was free from bias.''
  Boy, is that an understatement. Here it is established beyond any 
reasonable doubt Strzok not only hated Trump, was trying to impress his 
mistress, but clearly, things he did showed their bias; and it is IG 
Horowitz's own words that it was Strzok's decision, heading up this 
investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. Here they had tens or 
hundreds of thousands of emails that were found on the Anthony Weiner 
laptop, and it was Strzok's decision.
  He had the authority to decide, and he did decide: We are not going 
to really investigate that. We are not going to make that a priority. 
We are going to push that aside and, instead, go after this so-called 
Russia investigation involving Trump.
  That, even standing alone, is overwhelming evidence of bias that 
affected the investigation. I know Mr. Horowitz apparently was just 
trying to keep from making all of his Democratic friends mad, so he 
threw them this little gift: Clearly, there was all kinds of bias, but 
I will say in my conclusions that I couldn't find that bias affected

[[Page H5356]]

the investigation where clearly it did. He said it in his own words it 
was Strzok's decision, and he decided not to follow up on that.
  In fact, with all of my friends across the aisle who continue to 
repeat the mantra that Comey's October press conference cost Hillary 
Clinton the election, despite the evidence that she was not a good 
candidate, she didn't do what was needed to honestly and openly win an 
election, when it came to these emails that needed to be investigated, 
it sounds a whole lot more like what happened was that even Comey 
calling that October press conference was a cover for Hillary Clinton, 
because the alternative--kept hearing from sources, I believe, that 
there were FBI agents who had found all these emails of Hillary 
Clinton's that were supposed to be gone. They didn't have them. They 
were destroyed. They were unavailable because she had obstructed 
justice. She had obstructed justice by destroying evidence.
  They thought all these emails were gone, and all of a sudden FBI 
agents are in possession of these massive number of Clinton emails. And 
so Comey sat on them.
  If Comey had not called that press conference, then it appears what 
was likely going to happen, you were either going to have FBI agents 
who learned from Comey how you go about leaking--and we saw the 
information from IG Horowitz that apparently there were agents at the 
top who were quite good at leaking information, even getting tickets 
and different things in return for their leaking, that those agents 
would have leaked that information.
  And when it came out that they knew they had found all these missing 
Clinton emails and Comey was sitting on it, he was obstructing justice, 
then that would have doomed the Clinton campaign. She would have lost 
by a whole lot bigger once it came out that Comey was blocking, 
obstructing, not allowing them to investigate these newfound--well, 
they had been found for a month. They were sitting on them.
  We found out at the hearing yesterday that, actually, Rosenstein made 
the decision not to allow Congress to have those for the last month. 
Who knows how long he may have known about them.
  He really does need to be fired. He needs to go. Clearly, he has 
obstructed Congress' investigation. The question is how much 
obstruction of justice did Rosenstein do back in 2016. We don't know. 
But we do know there was obstruction.
  Apparently, according to Horowitz, it was Strzok who had the 
authority to decide are we going to dig into these newly found or 
month-long found emails from Hillary Clinton or are we just going to 
set those aside because they might hurt Hillary Clinton's election and, 
instead, go after this Russia investigation--totally bogus--based on 
purchases by the Clinton campaign.

                              {time}  1815

  And Strzok--his decision--he decided, I am not going to pursue this 
evidence that actually blows Hillary Clinton's claims out of the water. 
Instead, we are going to pursue Trump.
  That is one overwhelming piece of evidence where the bias affected 
the investigation. It could have blown the campaign out of the water 
where it wouldn't have even been close.
  But rather than Comey allowing it to leak out, there were also 
rumors--and, like I say, I had good sources and others had good sources 
and indications that we might even have one or more FBI agents resign 
over Comey and Strzok obstructing the Clinton email being investigated. 
If FBI agents had either resigned and had a press conference and 
disclosed how Strzok and Comey were obstructing justice and preventing 
the investigation into Hillary's emails that had been in their 
possession for a month, that would have devastated the Clinton campaign 
far worse.
  So Comey, not wanting to hurt the Clinton campaign, preferring to 
hurt Trump, called a press conference. As I said in some interview back 
in October when I was asked about whether or not this was a serious 
investigation, I said: Well, if he comes back in 2 or 3 days and says 
there is nothing there, then we will know for certain that this was 
simply an effort to protect Hillary Clinton, because, clearly, they 
could not properly investigate all of those emails in such a short 
period of 2 or 3 days.
  Sure enough, just a couple of days later, Comey comes out of a press 
conference: Gee, we have investigated this massive number of emails, 
and Hillary Clinton is clean.
  So, rather than destroying her campaign, Comey's action, it appears--
more likely, actually--saved her campaign and allowed it to be closer.
  So that is just a little bit of information that I didn't get to 
yesterday.
  Now, it is absolutely incredible what has gone on, not on our 
southern border--that is amazing enough--but all of the mayhem that has 
been raised by the media. All of the outrage that has been expressed by 
Democrats is really extraordinary when we look at the facts about what 
has been going on since 1997--not new laws, not terribly new laws that 
this administration is working with. Unlike the Obama administration, 
this administration has not seen fit to just speak new laws into 
existence.
  Like with DACA, President Obama, like any good totalitarian monarch, 
spoke that he wanted this law. He didn't even sign the new royal edict; 
he just spoke it into law. Then Jeh Johnson, head of Homeland Security, 
drafted some memos to create it. Now, it overruled existing law, 
overruled law that had been passed by bipartisan efforts here in the 
House and Senate, signed by people like Bill Clinton and others. But, 
anyway, he spoke it into law.
  Here we have an administration that really does want to follow the 
law. I had been down on the border all hours of the night and day as 
well. But during the Obama Presidency, I had been down on our border. I 
had seen children separated from the adults they were with talking to 
Border Patrol agents.
  We have heard from ICE. Of course, what is being thrown figuratively 
and literally at ICE agents is really outrageous. What is being hurled 
in the way of both words and actions toward people simply following the 
law that even Democrats helped create is really outrageous.
  There is an article here by Michelle Mark dated June 19 from Business 
Insider: ``Several former Obama administration officials took to social 
media and news outlets last month to explain a gallery of years-old 
photos that showed immigrant children sleeping in shoddy conditions at 
a government-run holding facility in Arizona.
  ``The images, which the Associated Press first published in 2014, 
resurfaced recently for reasons that remain unclear, and quickly 
prompted viral outrage on Twitter. One particularly disturbing image 
showed two children sleeping on mattresses on the floor inside what 
appeared to be a cage.''
  That was the Obama administration, the very thing that people are 
going nuts about, screaming and hollering.
  ``A number of prominent liberals--and even a former Obama 
administration official--shared the photos, mistakenly believing they 
depicted the Trump administration's treatment of immigrant children who 
were forcibly separated from their parents.''
  Obviously, these former Obama officials did not realize that this was 
what they did to children. And then to be holier-than-thou with an 
administration that simply is enforcing the law the Obama 
administration often violated when they were guilty of actually 
following the law themselves? They could have made better conditions.
  I am happy to report that the conditions I see under the Trump 
administration down on our southern border are much better than they 
were under the Obama administration. The facilities for children are 
much, much better. I mean, there were some really terrible situations 
that the Obama administration created down on our border during 
President Obama's terms, especially the second term. It was a bit 
shocking what was happening to children then.
  It has been amazing. There was one child holding on to a fence, and 
that was used to show how terrible it was for this sweet little child. 
It turns out that was part of an immigration protest. This kid wasn't 
in any kind of cage. In fact, the other pictures that have now been 
discovered show that it was apparently some adult figure who was part 
of the protest and dragged the kid there, but it certainly was not 
someone caged by the Trump administration.

[[Page H5357]]

  But this goes on to say: ``Jon Favreau, who worked as a speechwriter 
for former President Barack Obama, tweeted, `This is happening right 
now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to 
get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.'

  ``Favreau said he later deleted the tweet after social media users 
pointed out that the photos were taken during the Obama administration. 
But by that point, critics had already rushed to accuse him of 
concealing Obama's own harsh immigration tactics while condemning 
Trump's.
  ``Favreau said in a series of tweets that he made a `mistake' by not 
checking the date of the photos before sharing them on Twitter. He 
explained that the photos were taken in 2014, when the Obama 
administration faced `an influx of unaccompanied minors who showed up 
at the border, fleeing violence from Central America.' ''
  Well, I can tell you, there were many of these people I saw all hours 
of the night that weren't fleeing violence, but they had heard they had 
opportunities. I have been there when small children were being passed 
among--well, the Border Patrol is at one end of the group of people 
that had come in illegally asking questions, and they are shuffling 
around trying to decide who is going to claim this child. And then, on 
some occasions, they say: Oh, no, no, no, not with me, not with them. 
No, they are by themselves.
  Well, I watched you just walk up here taking care of this child.
  No, they were unaccompanied.
  It is also interesting, with all of the outrage about the 12,000 
children that were being so well taken care of, 10,000 of the 12,000 
came unaccompanied, was the claim, and 40 percent of those coming are 
teenage males of gang age. We know, it turns out, many of them are gang 
members.
  We know, just recently, there was an MS-13 member claiming a child. 
It may have been his child. But that child did not need to be with a 
MS-13 gang member.
  We know, during the Obama administration, during the George W. Bush 
administration, and during the Clinton administration, it was not 
uncommon to separate children from a parent if they believed the parent 
might not be in the best interest of the child, may be a threat to the 
child.
  Again, for heaven's sake, these children, whether accompanied or 
unaccompanied, were placed by their parents in a position to cross 
deadly territory, be subjected to sex trafficking themselves, be 
subjected to becoming drug traffickers. If those things happen in this 
country, I have seen it as a judge when there were hearings--I didn't 
do juvenile law, but I saw it. I had seen hearings.
  You have parents, if they let their child here in Texas, in America, 
do the things that parents from other countries allowed their children 
to go through, there is a good chance, at least in Texas, Child 
Protective Services would have grabbed that child and said: This is an 
unfit parent to let them go across a desert, to let them be in the 
hands of gang members, or to let them be subjected to sex trafficking 
and drug trafficking.
  I have also been there when the Border Patrol has asked--it wasn't on 
their list--but frequently they would ask: How much do you pay to the 
gang or the drug cartel to bring you in?
  $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000.
  Where did you get that kind of money? You didn't have that kind of 
money.
  Often, the final answer, after, $1,000 or $1,500 here, or $2,000 
there, or somebody from America sent this: Well, where did you get the 
rest? Often the final answer was: They are going to let me work that 
off when I get to where we are going.
  Well, how do you work it off?
  It is either drug trafficking or sex trafficking is the way that 
normally got worked off. Any parent that would subject their children 
to that--like I say, 10,000 out of 12,000 were unaccompanied who are 
down there right now when they are trying to figure out what is to be 
done.
  The outrage ought to be with parents that would allow that to happen, 
and the outrage ought to be with a political party or with any 
political people that would hang out a shiny object of a great life 
here--free benefits, welfare--if you will just come across a desert, 
risk sex trafficking, risk drug trafficking, come on.
  Now, the border has to be secure. That is the humane thing to do. If 
we stop the $80 billion or so in drugs that came across our border, 
estimated last year by some, then the corruption in Mexico and Central 
America dries up to next to nothing. Those people would end up with a 
better economy, a better life, and better jobs. That is what we would 
do if we were a true caring, loving neighbor. We would make sure that 
our wall made a good neighbor stop the drug trafficking.
  And these poor people who made to be drug mules, made to be drug 
traffickers, they are poisoning Americans. I mean, it is a matter of 
national security.
  Donald Trump is exactly right to be so concerned and to want a zero-
tolerance policy, and so is Jeff Sessions.

                              {time}  1830

  We can deal with this issue, but it is a very small percentage that 
are actual parents that are being separated from children. And there 
were parents being separated from children in the prior administration, 
even though the Dallas Morning News obviously either doesn't want to 
admit it or wants to remain in total blissful ignorance. So these 
things have happened, and the Trump administration is trying to fix 
them and do things correctly.
  Now, it turns out that when our Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen 
was at a Mexican restaurant Tuesday night, she had people screaming at 
her trying to ruin her dinner and accusing her of doing what others in 
the Obama administration had done. It turns out one of those was an 
employee at the Department of Justice.
  Some would say, but, again, political beliefs shouldn't adversely 
affect a job with the government.
  Well, it should when that job is enforcing the law. When you work for 
the Department of Justice and you are going to scream at people because 
they are following the law, then you should not be at the Department of 
Justice.
  This person that was screaming and becoming a nuisance and creating 
problems and screaming out in ignorance should not be working at the 
Department of Justice, just as anybody who is biased for Hillary 
Clinton or against Hillary Clinton should not have been investigating 
Hillary Clinton. Anybody biased for or against Donald Trump should not 
have been investigating Donald Trump. It does matter.
  I guarantee you Democratic criminal defense attorneys, even though 
there was some expressed feigned outrage, if they had a client who had 
run for office that was on trial for a criminal charge, that criminal 
defense attorney would want to know which jurors supported their client 
and which were totally opposed to their client in the last election. 
They would want to know that. Maybe you do that in chambers, maybe you 
do that at the bench, but I have a feeling--I have heard those claims 
from defense attorneys about the right to know about things. Sometimes 
it is very personal information, but if it tells a defense attorney 
about someone's bias or prejudice within a potential juror, that 
defense attorney really does have a right to know in order to protect 
their client and to ensure that justice is done by fair and impartial 
arbiters.
  But we have got people at the Justice Department still that are not 
fair, they are not impartial.
  There is a new record here, according to Paul Bedard's article 
yesterday from the Washington Examiner, ``New Record, 99 Percent of 
Seized Border Kids From Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.''
  Obama prosecuted nearly half a million illegal aliens. He did. I 
think in those situations, they were trying to follow the law.
  The only reason I bring that up is the feigned outrage. For some 
people, it is not feigned; they are really outraged, because they 
really don't realize what has gone on before. Some of us have seen it.
  Now, a 100 percent no-tolerance policy, that is much stricter than 
the Obama administration. But President Obama and Hillary Clinton are 
both on video talking about how they were going to do those type of 
things to discourage people from coming in illegally. And now they 
really are feigning outrage, and it needs to stop.

[[Page H5358]]

  Let's work together for a solution.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________