[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 74 (Monday, May 6, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2629-S2631]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Mueller Report

  Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, the taxpayers spent $30 million on the 
special counsel's investigation. Now we know without a single doubt 
that there was no collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia. For more 
than 2 years, the Democrats screamed collusion and did so not based on 
fact but based on rumor, hearsay, and probably wishful thinking. They 
have done a huge disservice to the American people by taking that 
approach.
  As I have said before, the real collusion was actually with the 
Democrats. Here is how it has evolved. It was the Clinton campaign and 
Democratic National Committee that hired Fusion GPS to do opposition 
research against Candidate Trump. Then Fusion GPS hired Christopher 
Steele, a former British intelligence officer, to compile what we now 
hear always referred to as the Steele dossier. That document was very 
central to the fake collusion narrative, and it reportedly used Russian 
Government sources for information. So the Democrats paid for a 
document created by a foreign national that relied on Russian 
Government sources--not Trump; the Democrats. That is the definition of 
collusion.
  But Democratic collusion didn't stop there. Last week, The Hill 
newspaper reported that a Democratic National Committee contractor 
contacted the Ukrainian Government to get dirt on the Trump and 
Manafort during the Presidential election. Specifically, the Democratic 
National Committee contractor reportedly ``wanted to collect evidence 
that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets working 
to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against U.S. interests.''
  The Democrats were up in arms about the Trump Tower meeting when the 
Trump campaign was approached about dirt on Hillary Clinton. Here, the 
DNC proactively pounded the door of a foreign government for dirt. 
Where is the outrage at that? The special counsel ignored all of that 
in his report; thus, he didn't fulfill all of his responsibilities.
  The Deputy Attorney General appointed Mueller in May of 2017 to 
investigate alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia 
during the 2016 election. The Deputy Attorney General further ordered 
that if the special counsel believed it was necessary and appropriate, 
he was authorized to ``prosecute federal crimes arising from the 
investigation of these matters.'' But that is not what the special 
counsel did on the obstruction question. Instead, the special counsel 
declined to make a traditional prosecutorial decision. The report said 
that ``[t]he evidence that we obtained about the President's actions 
and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively 
determining that no criminal conduct occurred.''
  As the Attorney General said when he released the report and then 
again in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, 
the role of a prosecutor ``is to make a charging decision.'' It isn't a 
prosecutor's job to exonerate a subject; it is to charge a crime or, in 
the alternative, not to charge a crime. But in his report, the special 
counsel explains his decision not to even make a decision. He says, 
among other things, that stating the President had committed a 
chargeable offense without actually charging him, under the Justice 
Department's guidance, would be unfair to the President because, 
according to the special counsel, then the President couldn't defend 
himself properly before a neutral factfinder. Instead, the special 
counsel laid out 200 or so pages of facts and hand-wringing relating to 
the obstruction and then dumped all of this material on the Attorney 
General's desk.
  It reminds me of former FBI Director Comey's declaration in the 
summer of 2016 that Secretary Clinton was extremely careless in 
handling classified information but that no reasonable prosecutor would 
bring a case against Secretary Clinton. FBI Director Comey made a 
prosecutorial decision that wasn't his to make; it was up to the 
Attorney General to make. That was Attorney General Lynch. Comey also 
released derogatory information about Secretary Clinton and then 
refused to show all of his work.
  The special counsel's report is at least equally problematic. The 
report lays out 200 pages of investigative product but leaves the 
charging decision hanging in Never Never Land. Nevertheless, the report 
asserts that if the special counsel team could have found the President 
did not commit obstruction, they would have said so. But, again, that 
is not what prosecutors do. That is a reversal of the innocent until 
proven guilty standard that is basic to American justice. If it really 
were a thorough investigation, it seems the inverse would be true as 
well. The inverse is that, after a thorough investigation, the special 
counsel did not have enough evidence to conclusively state obstruction 
actually occurred.
  During the Attorney General's May 1 testimony before the Senate 
Judiciary Committee, he noted that if the special counsel found facts 
sufficient to constitute obstruction, he would have stated that 
finding.
  Curiously, the special counsel spilled a lot of ink in his report to 
explain why he believed the President could be charged as a matter of 
legal theory. So why didn't he just make that decision or at least make 
a very clear recommendation to the Attorney General and stand behind 
his own theories?
  The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General asked Mueller 
whether he would have charged obstruction but for the Department's 
guidance on charging sitting Presidents. The special counsel said no, 
which means, if warranted, that there was no barrier for him to make 
that charge.
  In the absence of a decision from the special counsel, it was then up 
to the

[[Page S2630]]

Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, who appointed Mueller 
and supervised his work. The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney 
General reviewed all of the facts and evidence that the special counsel 
collected. The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General 
evaluated it under Mueller's own legal theories, even though they 
disagreed with some of those theories. After all of that, the Attorney 
General and the Deputy Attorney General determined that the evidence 
was not sufficient to charge.
  Oddly, the special counsel's report is probably the most notable for 
what it doesn't address at all.
  The special counsel's report does not address the genesis of the 
Russia investigation. It doesn't address whether the FBI used improper 
surveillance techniques on the Trump campaign or individuals associated 
with the Trump campaign. It doesn't address the credibility of the 
FBI's sources.
  It doesn't address whether the Steele dossier was a Russian 
disinformation campaign. Even one of the reporters at the publication 
that initially dumped the dossier into the public domain wants to know 
where it came from and what it means. The special counsel's report 
doesn't address whether Department of Justice officials turned a blind 
eye to potential misconduct. It also doesn't address whether the 
Department of Justice misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance 
Court when it applied for that court's decision against the Trump 
campaign.
  So now we know what reasonable people have long suspected--there was 
no collusion and no obstruction of the collusion investigation. Yet we 
still don't know how this so-called collusion investigation got started 
in the first place.
  In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey testified that he 
briefed President-elect Trump about these allegations in January 2017 
even though, according to his public testimony, Director Comey 
considered them to be, in his words, ``salacious and unverified.'' If, 
in fact, they were salacious and unverified in early 2017, then what 
were they months before that when Comey started the investigation? We 
know the allegations against Page were unverified when they were used 
by the FBI and the Justice Department to support a FISA application to 
spy--yes, spy--on an American citizen, an American citizen who, by the 
way, has never been charged with anything.
  In January of 2018, Senator Lindsey Graham and this Senator wrote to 
the Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director Christopher Wray about the 
allegations in the Steele dossier, about its author, and, more 
importantly, about its bankrollers. In that memo, we described 
inconsistencies between what Steele swore to a British court about his 
contacts with the media and what the Page FISA application represented 
to the FISA Court about those same contacts. The FISA application 
represented that Steele did not communicate with the media about his 
intelligence reports but that he told the British court he did.
  We noted in our memo that if Mr. Steele had lied to the FBI about his 
media contacts, it would bear on his credibility. That would be a huge 
problem because the FISA application and its renewals depended on 
taking Steele at his word. Remember, at that time, the Steele dossier 
was still ``salacious and unverified,'' and those were Comey's words. 
So it mattered a whole lot whether the FBI and the Department of 
Justice could trust Steele and his dossier.
  In our referral, Senator Graham and I also noted that Mr. Steele's 
contacts with the media likely affected, in our words, the 
``reliability of his information-gathering efforts'' in compiling the 
dossier. By the time the Department of Justice and the FBI filed the 
FISA application and even before the FBI officially opened the 
investigation, the Steele dossier was probably the worst kept secret in 
Washington, DC.
  The same can be said for the government's efforts to look for ties 
between the Trump campaign and Russia. All of these folks--the media, 
lawyers, lobbyists, campaign organizations, private research firms, FBI 
officials, the Department of Justice and Department of State officials, 
and even foreign intelligence agencies--reportedly had access to the 
dossier information or the dossier itself. An attorney for Clinton and 
the Democratic National Committee even passed on some aspects of this 
information directly to the FBI's general counsel before the FISA was 
issued.

  Basically, this piece of paper was, in some form or another, all over 
this town, and the more the dossier was shopped around, the more 
vulnerable it became to its manipulation.
  We also know that at least as early as the summer of 2016, foreign 
intelligence agencies were reportedly feeding information to the CIA 
about Trump campaign associates and that the FBI was using a source to 
seek information from individuals who were associated with the Trump 
campaign. At about that time, Fusion GPS had hired Steele on behalf of 
the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
  We need to know if leadership in the intelligence community and the 
FBI were already gathering intelligence on Trump associates when Fusion 
hired Steele. We need to know whether the Obama administration was 
looking so hard for connections that it figured the Steele dossier 
would justify efforts to continue its surveillance activities. Further, 
we need to know if the Russians knew our government was that hungry for 
information to the point they packed the dossier with disinformation 
just to sow chaos. If so, it looks like the Obama administration fell 
for it hook, line, and sinker, and it certainly seems like some in 
leadership may have ignored clear warning signs.
  Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr spoke with top FBI 
leadership about Steele's work the day the investigation opened, and 
after the FBI terminated Steele as a source, Ohr continued to feed 
Steele's work to the Bureau. At various times, Mr. Ohr made it clear to 
the FBI that the information from Steele could not be taken at face 
value because it was based on hearsay. Ohr noted that Steele had an 
anti-Trump agenda and that the whole operation was bankrolled by 
Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Of course, the Clinton 
campaign wasn't keen on the world's knowing it was footing the bill for 
the dossier. Its lawyers even lied to the media about this fact for 
more than a year. That is not my saying it. A New York Times reporter 
said that.
  So, by the time the FISA application was filed and every time it was 
renewed, FBI and Department of Justice leaders were very much aware of 
the political bias and the purpose of the unverified information that 
supposedly supported it, so much so that according to reported text 
messages between former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his 
staff, the FBI worked to create--these are their words--a ``robust 
explanation'' for ``any possible bias'' of the source ``in the 
package'' supporting the FISA application. It also seems from these 
text messages that the FBI was getting pushback from at least one 
individual at the Justice Department about seeking the FISA.
  In the end, the FISA application was presented to the court with 
there being no mention whatsoever of Clinton, the Democratic National 
Committee, or any mention of the source's political bias and with only 
mere speculation by the FBI that its primary source was not peddling 
his information far and wide. The FISA application was then granted by 
the court and was renewed three times. Let me say that again. The FISA 
application was granted and renewed three times.
  The FBI surveilled an American citizen for many months based on 
salacious and unverified information that had been gathered by a former 
foreign intelligence officer who was desperate to keep the President 
out of office. He was British Agent Steele. That former intelligence 
officer used Russian sources, including Russian Government sources, at 
the behest and with the funding of a rival political party and 
campaign.
  The Democrats and the mainstream media have been screaming at the top 
of their lungs about salacious, unverified allegations that this 
President stole an election by working with the Russians, but it is a 
sobering and verified fact that the Democrats actually paid for dirt 
from the Russians to damage their political opponents.
  So now, after the taxpayers have spent $30 million to work through 
this swirling cesspool of allegations, when

[[Page S2631]]

the Attorney General says he has concerns about certain aspects of this 
investigation, I agree with him. I don't know whether laws were broken 
or protocols were breached or rules were violated, but for decades, I 
have been doing oversight of the Federal Government, including of the 
Department of Justice and the FBI, and I think there is certainly 
enough there to be asking questions.
  For example, did the Obama administration improperly use the U.S. 
intelligence community to attempt to neutralize and denigrate a 
political opponent? Did the Obama administration fail to properly 
assert oversight of the Department of Justice and the FBI FISA process?
  These questions must be answered.
  It is fundamentally American to care not just about what laws the 
government enforces but also how the government enforces those laws.
  If the greatest enemy we see is the person on the other side of the 
political spectrum, then the foreign powers who seek to divide and 
weaken our Republic are going to succeed.
  Now, I have been trying to get to the bottom of all sides of this 
issue for years, and I have urged my Democratic colleagues to join me.
  I am encouraged that the Attorney General is taking a look, and I am 
encouraged that the independent Department of Justice inspector general 
has been looking at these issues as well. I have no idea what they are 
going to find.
  I know Mueller turned a blind eye to what they are investigating, 
however. The American people need answers--all the answers.
  It is not just this administration that has been dragged through the 
mud with wild collusion and obstruction theories. The American people 
have had to listen to those falsehoods now for years. Many in the media 
have been breathlessly flooding the airwaves with speculation and what-
ifs about the bogus Trump collusion narrative.
  Now that the report is out, some media figures are still struggling 
to come to terms with Mueller's findings and decisions. It is as if 
they are unhappy with the results or perhaps they are embarrassed that 
the world is learning that we have been sold a bunch of snake oil for 
the past 2 years and now they are finding out that the jig is up.
  I hope the mainstream media will pursue the origins of the Russian 
collusion investigation and do it with the same vigor as they have been 
pushing the collusion narrative for the last 2 years, and there ought 
to be some apologies from some of them. This would all go a long way to 
restoring their damaged credibility.
  So I am going to do whatever I can to make sure the people get these 
answers.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sullivan). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
cloture vote scheduled for 5:30 p.m. today commence.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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