[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 117 (Thursday, July 12, 2018)]
[House]
[Page H6117]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           RUSSIAN COLLUSION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Schiff) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, it was almost exactly 2 years ago, as Donald 
Trump closed in on the Republican nomination, that the Russians began 
weaponizing stolen emails it had acquired some time earlier.
  This disclosure of stolen emails was only one vector of the Russian 
active measures campaign. At the same time, the Russians were engaged 
in a surreptitious social media campaign and a very overt use of their 
paid media platforms, like Sputnik and Russia Today, to influence the 
American electorate.
  What was this about? Was this new and unprecedented intervention in 
our affairs merely about choosing one candidate over another in the 
American Presidential system? Or was there something broader within the 
Russian aims?

                              {time}  1015

  It is certainly true that the Russians had a preferred candidate in 
Donald Trump. Candidate Trump had talked disparagingly about NATO. He 
had talked about doing away with sanctions on Russia over its invasion 
of its neighbor. He had talked about making common cause with Russia in 
Syria, where our interests are not at all aligned. And most 
significant, he had talked about doing away with the penalties we had 
imposed for Russia's invasion of its neighbor, something we never 
thought would take place in the last century, the remaking of the map 
of Europe by dint of military force. That is something we thought we 
would never see in this century.
  It is certainly true they had a preferred candidate in Donald Trump, 
for all those reasons. It is also true that they had a deep antipathy 
towards Hillary Clinton, someone who, when people gathered in massive 
numbers in Russia to protest fraudulent elections in 2011, spoke out on 
behalf of people's right to protest and assemble, something that the 
Kremlin felt was a direct threat to the regime.
  But far more fundamental was the Russian object of sowing discord in 
the United States, of pitting one American against another, of playing 
along the fault lines in our society, of weakening the very fabric of 
our democracy.
  It is very important to recognize that what the Russians did here, 
they did not do alone in the United States. Yes, it was new and 
unprecedented for us, but what the Russians did here, they have been 
doing for years elsewhere in Europe and around the world. It is an 
attack not only on our democracy, but on the very idea of liberal 
democracy. This attack takes place at a time in our lives where, when 
you look around the world, you must conclude objectively that the 
autocrats are on the rise in places like Poland and in Hungary and the 
rise of the far right parties in Germany, Austria, and France, with 
Erdogan in Turkey--Turkey is the now the leading jailer of journalists 
in the world--and in the Philippines with Duterte.
  It cannot be said that an iron curtain is descending, but there is a 
rising tide of authoritarianism that threatens to submerge some of the 
great capitals around the globe. For those of us who had lived in the 
post-World War II generation, I think we were always under the 
assumption that our freedoms around the world were ever-increasing, 
that it was some immutable law of nature, that our freedom to express 
ourselves, to practice our faith, to associate with whom we would, was 
ever-increasing. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, the moral arc of the 
universe may be long, but it bends toward justice, only to find that 
today, it does not bend towards justice.
  As much as the idea of America as the indispensable Nation has been 
given a bad name, we truly are indispensable. All around the world 
people look to us: people in prison who gathered in Tahrir Square 
wanting a better government; people in the Philippines, the victims of 
a campaign of mass extrajudicial killing; people in prison in Turkey 
for journalism.
  People all over the world look to us. They are not going to look to 
Russia; they are not going to look to China; they are not going to look 
to Europe, with all of its problems; and increasingly they do not 
recognize what they see. They look to our White House and they do not 
recognize what they see. They see a President more comfortable with 
autocrats and dictators than they do with Democrats and democracy. This 
is a terrible tragedy for us. It is a bigger tragedy for the rest of 
the world.
  In 1938, Winston Churchill published a series of speeches he gave on 
the rise of Nazism. In America, the book was titled, ``While England 
Slept.'' America is not sleeping, but one of its great parties is. As 
John Boehner said recently, the Republican Party is off taking a nap 
somewhere.
  Wake up. Freedom-loving people all around the world are looking to 
us. Wake up. Our democracy is at risk at home, and the very idea of 
liberal democracy is at risk around the world. Wake up.

                          ____________________