[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 181 (Wednesday, November 13, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H8820-H8822]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT TRUMP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Byrne) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. BYRNE. Madam Speaker, the House of Representatives has been the 
scene of serious chaos, not only today, but for weeks.
  Unfortunately for the American people, we have nothing to show for 
it. We have issued more subpoenas from this House than we have had 
bills that have actually been signed by the President.
  We haven't been working on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade 
agreement that President Trump worked so hard to negotiate. We haven't 
been working on funding the military or bipartisan legislation to lower 
the cost of prescription drugs. No, 100 percent of the energy of this 
place has been devoted to the impeachment of President Trump.
  There has been a lot of noise, a lot of rumors, and a lot of 
confusion about exactly what has happened and what is going on, where 
we are and how we got here. There is a reason for that.
  You see, Madam Speaker, by House rules, impeachment is under the 
jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary Committee has a 
great big hearing room just across the street. That is where an 
impeachment inquiry is supposed to take place. But we aren't holding 
hearings there because Speaker Pelosi doesn't want them there.
  Instead, the impeachment charade has been taking place in a small, 
restricted room, two floors underground, below this Chamber, deep in 
the bowels of the Capitol. That room is known as the SCIF. The SCIF is 
a very important room because it is where Members of Congress hear 
about our country's great secrets. You can't bring a cell phone in 
there. You can't bring a camera in there. Most importantly, the public 
can't go in there.
  Democrats made a big spectacle about holding their first public 
hearing today. They act as if they are making some great, virtuous 
action to bring forth transparency, as if they are operating with the 
utmost integrity. The truth is that today's hearing is little more than 
a public showcasing of witnesses they have already interrogated and 
vetted in that little room to ensure they will only say what the 
Democrats desire.
  You see, Madam Speaker, by conducting impeachment in that little 
room, Speaker Pelosi and Adam Schiff knew that the American people 
wouldn't know what was going on, what was being said.
  But right outside the SCIF, that tiny room, you will find dozens of 
cameras and news people. Here they are, you can see, talking to Adam 
Schiff.
  Adam Schiff and his staff have been feeding these reporters bits of 
information for weeks. For weeks, we have been flooded with reports of 
so-called explosive things that supposedly have been said in this 
small, secret room.
  Madam Speaker, there is a rule of the House that every Member of 
Congress has the right to at least watch a committee hearing. A couple 
of weeks ago, some of my colleagues and I decided that we wanted to 
know what was really going on in that small, little room. So, we 
entered the SCIF, that little room, simply to watch. Adam Schiff 
immediately stopped the proceedings, and he refused to proceed until we 
left.
  There is another rule of the House that says the records of 
committees are the property of the House, and every Member is entitled 
to review them. There is a reason for this rule. Those records don't 
belong to Adam Schiff. They don't belong to Speaker Pelosi. They don't 
belong to me. They belong to the American people.
  So, again, I went back to the SCIF, back to that little room. I 
showed them that House rule and informed them that I wanted only to 
read the transcripts from these secret proceedings. But Chairman 
Schiff's staff said no. They would not follow the rules of the House. 
They would not let me read them. They said: You will get them later, 
along with everybody else, when we say so.
  Finally, they started releasing the transcripts--in a way that fit 
their agenda. Madam Speaker, I have been reading these transcripts as 
they come out. I have also been reading what the mainstream media has 
to say about them. Would you believe it? The mainstream media is saying 
exactly what Adam Schiff wants them to say. Almost none of them are 
talking about the other side, about President Trump's defense.
  To make sure the American people have the facts, I felt compelled to 
come down to the floor tonight to talk about the things that, if you 
are not reading these thousands of pages of materials, you might have 
missed.
  There have now been about 3,000 pages of testimony released. Despite 
many different opinions of those pages, there is universal agreement 
that Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries on Earth. You see, 
Madam Speaker, Ukraine, like many former Soviet countries, is 
controlled by oligarchs. These guys have almost all the wealth, most of 
the industry, and pretty much all the political power.
  Corruption is so bad in Ukraine that many American businesspeople 
refuse to do business there because they don't want to deal with the 
notorious oligarchs.
  It has been the policy of Republican and Democrat Presidents, for 
nearly 30 years, that Ukraine must end corruption, must adopt the rule 
of law, and must take away power from the oligarchs. You have had 
Ukrainian Presidents come and go but, time and time again, things seem 
to stay the same.
  During the 2016 Presidential election, we know that senior members of 
the Ukrainian Government were very much on Secretary Clinton's side. 
Don't take my word for it. You can pull this article, which was written 
in the final days of President Obama's Presidency. You can look at it 
yourself.
  That is not some rightwing website. That is Politico. It might be a 
little hard to read, but here it says Ukrainian ``officials are 
scrambling to make amends with the President-elect''--President Trump--
``after quietly working to boost Clinton.'' The Ukrainian Government 
was boosting Secretary Clinton.
  Thanks to Adam Schiff's Star Chamber rules, we still have not gotten 
to hear the President's side of the story. But it should come as a 
surprise to no one, as some Democrats have pretended, that President 
Trump did not want to devote his valuable, limited

[[Page H8821]]

time by doing things like holding an Oval Office meeting with the 
President of Ukraine after facing stuff like this.

                              {time}  1830

  Of course, a President not offering a rare Oval Office meeting is not 
the same thing as not providing United States support. As most people 
know, Ukraine has been at war with Russia for about 5 years. Russia 
illegally invaded Ukraine and still has forces there today. President 
Obama rightly began to give nonlethal aid to Ukraine to help in that 
war. But President Obama would not sell weapons to Ukraine because he 
was scared that it would upset the Russians.
  It actually was, would you believe it, President Trump who began 
selling real weapons to Ukraine to help them actually bring the fight 
to the Russians. That decision has had an enormous positive effect on 
Ukraine. Even those testifying in Adam Schiff's hearings who don't like 
the President have praised President Trump for that.
  But, again, it appears that most of the issues that the Democrats are 
raising started with a few individuals in the administration trying to 
convince President Trump that we should forget Ukraine's past, embrace 
the new President of Ukraine, and put a serious amount of his time into 
that country. They began, in their own words, working to change 
President Trump's mind on Ukraine.
  For weeks, we have been going back and forth about what these 
individuals may or may not have been doing. We have a mound of 
bureaucratic gossip. We have been calling it hearsay, but it is gossip 
about what was going on, who was doing what.
  We have a lot of conflicting testimony, speculation, and, yes, 
hearsay--gossip--but the Democrats have provided zero, and I mean no, 
direct evidence showing President Trump ordered some kind of quid pro 
quo. In fact, they quit talking about quid pro quo because they don't 
have any evidence of it.
  With all of this testimony, with all of these rumors, it is easy to 
forget that this all goes back to the whistleblower. Of course, we know 
that the whistleblower also lacked firsthand knowledge of what he 
reportedly blew the whistle on.
  He was, according to the inspector general, a partisan individual. So 
a partisan individual who has no firsthand knowledge filed a 
whistleblower complaint and that is what we are dealing with.
  The whistleblower made allegations that President Trump made demands 
on President Zelensky in a phone call that occurred in the White House 
on July 25, but very few people in the media have reported that 
President Zelensky has publicly, clearly, and repeatedly denied any 
demands were made on him.
  They also have not reported that the Justice Department, the Criminal 
Division of the Justice Department, reviewed this allegation and 
declined to pursue a criminal investigation. They found no crime.
  Nevertheless, President Trump took the extraordinary step of 
releasing the transcript of this supposedly extraordinary call. You can 
read the entire transcript online. I hope the American people will do 
so because they won't find one demand in there. Not one. Read the 
transcript.
  Madam Speaker, the other issue that has been swirling downstairs in 
that little room is this hold that was placed on security assistance to 
Ukraine and apparently some other countries as well.
  We know that somewhere around July 10, the Office of Management and 
Budget placed a hold on certain foreign aid going to Ukraine. That is 
not a cancellation of funds. That is a process allowing the funds to be 
reviewed.
  Importantly, Madam Speaker, that hold was placed before the phone 
call that President Trump had with President Zelensky, the call that 
the whistleblower raised.
  But, Madam Speaker, something interesting in the transcript was that 
neither President Trump nor President Zelensky said one word about the 
hold on that call. One would think that if President Trump were trying 
to use the aid for extortion, he would have at least mentioned it. One 
would have also figured that President Zelensky would have mentioned 
the issue himself, given how important this aid was to his country.
  The truth is, the reason President Zelensky did not mention the funds 
was because he did not know the funds were on hold and President Trump 
never told him.
  Madam Speaker, this would be a very strange quid pro quo where 
President Trump did not tell President Zelensky and President Zelensky 
did not know that the funds were on hold.
  In fact, it appears that the Ukrainians first found out about the 
hold when it was reported in the press on August 29, over a month after 
the phone call; never mind that the funds were released 11 or 12 days 
later at the latest, unconditionally.
  But let's talk about that hold. Many of the witnesses have speculated 
about why OMB placed a hold on the aid. But when pressed, in all those 
thousands of pages, they have all said some version of: I don't know 
why the aid was placed on hold, or I think it was for this reason, but 
I don't really know.
  Let's just look at the facts. It seems that most everybody has 
somehow forgotten that President Trump ran a campaign on deep 
skepticism of foreign aid. He asked some tough questions that the 
American people appreciated. Are we getting our fair share? Are the 
Europeans freeloading off of us? Should we be taking a second look at 
this?
  So we have a new President, a new parliament in Ukraine. Is it really 
that surprising that an administration run by President Trump would 
say: Let's take another look at this before we send another $250 
million out the door. I think the American people would find that 
pretty reasonable.
  Again, Madam Speaker, we have a lot of bureaucratic gossip here, a 
lot of people standing around the water cooler somewhere in the White 
House; a lot of speculation. But not one person has testified they had 
any direct knowledge that President Trump ordered the aid be held in 
exchange for some kind of political favor. Not one person.
  In fact, the only witness who had any form of serious contact with 
President Trump, Ambassador Sondland, testified that he called 
President Trump and asked him what was going on with this aid.

  Almost nobody has reported it, but here is a direct quote from that 
exchange. In this exchange, Sondland talks about one of the Democrat 
witnesses raising the rumor of quid pro quo with him.
  So Sondland called the President, and here you see the President 
directly told him: ``There is no quid pro quo. No quid pro quo.'' That 
is the evidence that is being introduced today and before today.
  On top of that, we have Vice President Pence meeting with President 
Zelensky on September 1, and about 3 weeks later, you have President 
Trump, seen right here in this picture, you have President Trump with 
President Zelensky.
  So, Madam Speaker, in closing, let's review. We have got a total sham 
process, a real Star Chamber. The Star Chamber, by the way, it actually 
was something that grew up in the 17th century in Great Britain, so 
that the king, in order to squash his political opponents, could have a 
closed hearing, have his own rules, and then do whatever he needed to 
take the people who were dissidents and squash them. That is the Star 
Chamber that Adam Schiff has been running.
  We have no evidence that President Trump ordered any kind of quid pro 
quo. None. No evidence. And the Democrats have stopped talking about 
quid pro quo because it isn't working for them. Because they don't have 
the facts.
  The call transcripts show no demand. President Zelensky says there 
was no demand. And no evidence shows President Trump ordered a demand.
  The Ukrainians got the aid money within days of even finding out it 
was on hold. And, finally, Madam Speaker, they got the high-level 
meeting, not only with the President of the United States, but also 
with the Vice President that they wanted.
  But here we are, Madam Speaker, so many important issues falling by 
the wayside with nothing getting done for the American people.
  We are going to run out of money to run the government in about a 
week and we have done nothing about it.
  The Constitution makes clear that impeachment is an acceptable 
redress

[[Page H8822]]

only for, let me quote it: ``treason, bribery, or other high crimes and 
misdemeanors.'' Nothing less.
  I think my friends on the other side, unfortunately, they get up here 
in Washington, and they forget that although they may not like this 
President, he was chosen by the American people as the leader of this 
country.
  I am sorry, Madam Speaker, they must do much better than offering the 
American people some hearsay and bureaucratic gossip if they want to 
take this President down.
  The truth is this about removing the President: They know that the 
votes in the Senate aren't there for that. The Senate is not going to 
remove President Trump from office. It is not happening.
  This is about satisfying the Democrat's desire to play to their 
resistance base, the people who said the day after the election in 2016 
that they wanted to impeach Donald Trump.
  The whistleblower's lawyer wrote that he wanted a coup in January of 
2017.
  This is also about trying to build up a case for defeating President 
Trump in the 2020 election. The impeachment process is not supposed to 
be used for that. We have campaigns for that. We raise money to do 
that. We don't use this body for that.
  This entire process from its very inception has been a hypocritical, 
shameful exercise in partisan political opportunism. There is no 
substance here. None of President Trump's actions even approach 
anything remotely near impeachable conduct.
  But Democrats have made a critical error in orchestrating their 
scheme. If you watched what happened today, most of it was boring, and 
the reason it was boring is because there is no there there.
  The Democrats have misunderstood and underestimated the resolve of 
the American people that elected this President. The facts are on the 
President's side, and we will rise to the occasion and fight back 
against this radical scheme to remove President Trump.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________