[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
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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
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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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