[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 187 (Thursday, November 21, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H9162-H9165]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS FIT A PATH AND A CONTINUUM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized 
here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and to be recognized 
for 30 minutes here as the week closes out and we head back to our 
districts for Thanksgiving.
  The scenario that has been playing out here now for several weeks in 
this Congress has been a topic across the news, across the land, and 
certainly reverberates within the walls of this building and the halls 
of the outside buildings everywhere around this country.
  I speak, of course, of the attempt to impeach our President, 
President Donald Trump. The circumstances around this week and last 
week and the previous week are pretty fresh in our minds, but I would 
like to paint the scenario on how we got to this point and how the 
effort to impeach Donald Trump has evolved into the hearings that we 
are seeing now that are taking place before the Select Committee on 
Intelligence--finally out in the open--and the hearings and the 
deliberations that I think are likely to take place on the other side 
of this Thanksgiving divide.
  Madam Speaker, it all fits a path and a continuum, and it is 
something that one can trace back clear into as far back, I will say, 
as perhaps the fall of 2015.
  Being a Representative from Iowa, I have been involved in the 
Presidential selection process at the first-in-the-Nation caucus. We 
did an event on January 24, 2015, that effectively launched the 
Presidential campaign for the Nation on that day and brought in a dozen 
candidates that were eventually announced as candidates for President 
on the Republican side, and a number of other folks who we had speak 
that day who we thought might enter into the race.
  There was a short handful that were invited that didn't come to that 
event. But because of that, I found myself in the middle of this 
churning of the nomination process. I saw the policies and the issues 
that flowed from that debate, and I was in the middle of the debate 
myself intensively for nearly a year and a half.
  At that event that we did in Des Moines at the Hoyt Sherman Place--it 
is a theater that our future President Donald Trump spoke from the 
stage that day, as did a good number of others--as we watched this 
all unfold and they saw that Donald Trump was moving closer and closer 
to the nomination--we didn't know this at the time, but we know it 
now--there were powerful forces within the departments of government 
that were positioning things against whoever the Republican nominee 
would be, but certainly against Donald Trump as he became the nominee.

  We have seen the texts that came forth from Peter Strzok and from 
Lisa Page that talked about how it could never happen; that Donald 
Trump could never beat Hillary Clinton. But they had an insurance 
policy in the event that that outside long shot actually took place.
  Madam Speaker, I want people reminded of this because this insurance 
policy is being executed right now here in the House of Representatives 
in these impeachment hearings that are being conducted by Adam Schiff, 
the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.
  Now, a number of things happened that need to be investigated that 
were not investigated nearly as deeply as they should have been and 
that is, for example, the mishandling of classified information on 
Hillary Clinton's server, her using a private server that she had set 
up intentionally to avoid the secure server that one would have as a 
Secretary of State.
  The evidence shows that it is very likely, if not already confirmed, 
that Barack Obama communicated with Hillary Clinton through that server 
knowingly, and that he had an email address that was exclusive to him, 
that was certainly known by a number of people who he communicated with 
on the offline off channel, against-the-law effort to communicate 
outside the bounds of the government secure servers.
  That was going on and she, you know, she paid for BleachBit. She 
hired people to scrub those servers to get rid of the information. 
There were over 30,000 emails that were the property of the American 
people in the form of the Federal Government that were destroyed.
  We haven't found those, and she has not been held accountable for 
that. And the mishandling of that information was clear. It was a stark 
violation of Federal statute. In October of 2015, and again in April of 
2016, then-President Barack Obama said: Well, Hillary Clinton would 
never intend to jeopardize our national security.
  And when he spoke those words, he spoke those words into what became 
later on, effectively, law. Because the law doesn't require that there 
be any intent. Negligence, gross negligence, is the only requirement.
  She was clearly grossly negligent. She certainly intended to 
circumvent the secure servers that had been set up for that very 
purpose of protecting the classified information of all of those emails 
that we got down out of Anthony Weiner's laptop. There was reported to 
be 650,000. Some of them were classified emails that went up into that 
laptop of Anthony Weiner.

                              {time}  1400

  But she was never taken to account on that. There was an interview of 
Hillary Clinton that took place July 2, 2016. That interview had in it, 
by testimony of the then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and also James 
Comey, the director of the FBI, both testified that there were eight 
agents in that room that questioned Hillary Clinton. They disagreed on 
how many were from the Department of Justice and how many were from the 
FBI.
  Since the FBI is a division of the Department of Justice, I think 
that it is probably not as important an issue as this is: That we don't 
know their names. But I believe they were handpicked to bring about the 
result.
  The statement that was delivered 3 days later by James Comey on July 
5, that 15- to 17-minute long presentation that sounded like an 
indictment of Hillary Clinton until you got down to the last few 
sentences of it, was written clear back in May, and it had the words 
``gross negligence'' in it. And they changed those words from ``gross 
negligence,'' because that matched the statute that would have been a 
clear violation, to ``extreme carelessness'' as opposed to ``gross 
negligence.''
  And then James Comey said Hillary Clinton would never intend to, and 
you could not prove intent, so no serious prosecutor would prosecute 
because you couldn't prove that she intended to jeopardize our national 
security. But the statute doesn't require the intent. It was Barack 
Obama's words that

[[Page H9163]]

plugged intent into the effect of the language in the statute that I 
believe was clearly violated by Hillary Clinton.
  And furthermore, of the eight that were in that room, the number of 
investigators that questioned Hillary Clinton, and that is a number 
that is again agreed to by Loretta Lynch and by James Comey, those 
eight, we don't know who they are.
  I asked her under oath who was at the table. She said she didn't 
know. In fact, that she had never known. And I asked a previous 
attorney general that question: What are the odds that an attorney 
general under those circumstances, the highest-level investigation that 
the Department of Justice could ever conduct--aside from impeachment, 
by the way--was the investigation of Hillary Clinton's mishandling of 
the emails and the classified documents, what are the odds, I asked the 
former attorney general, that Loretta Lynch wouldn't know who was in 
that room questioning Hillary Clinton?
  That former attorney general didn't want to go on record, so he held 
his hand up. Zero is what he signaled with his fingers, in that 
fashion. It looks like an ``okay,'' for the Record.
  Well, of course, it wasn't okay to get that answer. And I never 
believed it. I don't believe it today. I believe I was lied to under 
oath. And when I asked James Comey the same question under oath as 
well, he gave me a similar answer. He didn't know.
  What are the odds James Comey didn't know who was in that room 
questioning Hillary Clinton?
  And then I asked the question of Peter Strzok under oath, and Peter 
Strzok gave me an honest answer. He said, ``I was.'' Well, we have seen 
him in most everything that was going on, and in fact, he was on Robert 
Mueller's investigative team as well until the text between himself and 
Lisa Page came out, and then there was no choice, he had to be removed 
from the Mueller team.
  Peter Strzok showed up everywhere that these kind of finaglings were 
going on, and I believe that he was the one that put the team together 
that questioned Hillary Clinton that brought about a result that he 
wanted, and not necessarily an objective one.
  So I would ask each one of them, I want to see--this is former 
Attorney General Loretta Lynch and James Comey, Peter Strzok and 
others, I want to see the videotape of the interview of Hillary Clinton 
that took place July 2, 2016.
  Sorry, there is no videotape.
  Then I want to hear the audiotape.
  Sorry, there is no audiotape.
  Then I want to read the transcripts.
  Sorry, there is no transcript.
  Well, they actually weren't sorry. We all know that, Madam Speaker. 
But there is no videotape of that interview, the highest-level 
interview that one could imagine at the time. There is no audiotape; 
there is no transcript.
  What exists?
  And their answer is, there is a 302 report. The 302 report is 
compiled from the notes of the investigators that were in the room. But 
we don't know who those investigators were, except for Peter Strzok. He 
said he was in the room, but he wouldn't tell me who the others were. 
And so some place out there, there are presumably eight sets of notes.
  Madam Speaker, seven other people were there that heard the testimony 
of Hillary Clinton, and they are all anonymous. And if we had them 
before this Congress and we were able to ask them questions under oath, 
I am going to guess that one or more of them are going to tell us the 
truth about what took place in the room that day.
  But nonetheless, they went through that process. James Comey stepped 
up and delivered a 15- to 17-minute statement to the press and to the 
public that resulted in no further action on the gross negligence, 
which is a violation of Federal statute, by Hillary Clinton.
  And, therefore, we moved on to the Presidential election. And 
further, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page--and I am going to suggest many 
others--set about trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming 
President of the United States. And they were pumping information into 
the press.
  We had the Steele dossier. And you know much of this narrative as it 
unfolded, but once we got to the election, and Donald Trump was elected 
President of the United States, he is President-elect on the first 
Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
  The following Sunday, in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel here in 
Washington, D.C., the highest level of Democrats in the country 
converged on that hotel starting Sunday afternoon, led by--according to 
a Politico article that I checked--led by George Soros, himself, in 
that hotel. His face is front and center on the article--in fact, 
several articles that are out there that tell about this gathering.

  So the gathering was scheduled to plan how they were going to 
utilize--and I use that word kind of cautiously, instead of what I 
would prefer--how they were going to utilize the new Presidency of 
Hillary Clinton. But, of course, they had to change their plans, Madam 
Speaker.
  So the plans instead were, how do we deny the ability of Donald Trump 
to govern this country? What shall we do? And out of that conference 
that was that following Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning, 
those days, they planned how they would resist this President, this 
duly-elected President under the Constitution of the United States with 
over 62 million votes cast for him--an electoral victory--over 300 
electoral votes, and they planned on how they were going to deny the 
will of the American people under the Constitution.
  And that plan started out with the resistance movement. And almost 
immediately, you saw protests in the cities across the country. And I 
know some of those protestors were paid to go protest, Madam Speaker. 
So the disruption in our society began, the resistance began.
  And what about the rest of the planning that likely took place 
there--and I use that word carefully, too, because a lot of this was 
never reported and never spoken to, but we know they planned the 
resistance movement. And you would see demonstrations in the street 
with big banners that said ``resist'' or ``resistance.''
  We saw also nearly a million women came to this city that protested 
the inauguration of Donald Trump, wearing those pink hats. And I 
wouldn't repeat into the Record what they named those hats, Madam 
Speaker, but I met hundreds of them. I argued with scores of them, as a 
matter of fact, at a setting over in one part of the city that night.
  Many of them were carrying obscene signs, obscene symbols, and they 
were there to resist the inauguration of the President and let the 
world know that they rejected President Donald Trump as a duly-elected 
President of the United States.
  And other things took place, I believe, in the Mandarin Oriental 
Hotel. And I believe that was when they accelerated a strategy to 
weaponize certain words in our English language and into the political-
speak here in the United States.
  ``Resist'' was one of those words that they used, and that connotes 
that you are a revolutionary group, that you are fighting against an 
illegitimate government, that word ``resist'' or ``resistance.'' And it 
foments friction within the streets, and it divides Americans, and it 
accentuated the differences between us.
  Instead of coming together after an election, like we want to do and 
need to do, instead, we are being divided strategically by the 
hierarchy of the Democratic party in a strategy that was put together 
in the Mandarin Hotel in this town.
  And then as this unfolded, other pieces of the strategy came 
together, but some of those things that I believe happened inside that 
hotel were the acceleration of the weaponization of words. And I can 
think of one that I know the data on from memory, and it was this: 
White nationalist.
  I looked this up in LexisNexis, because the question came up in front 
of me in kind of an unexpected way. And so we went back in LexisNexis, 
first, to see if I had ever used those terms. Never, from the year 2000 
all the way up until January of this year when the New York Times 
misquoted me as using it. But it was virtually unused from the year 
2000 all the way up until 2016.
  And that means 1 to 200 times a year that would show up in print 
somewhere in a blog, or maybe a scholarly report of some kind or 
another, the term

[[Page H9164]]

white nationalist. We didn't use those terms as Americans. We didn't 
write about them, we didn't speak them. It was outside the mind of 
anything that we were paying attention to collectively--1 to 200 times 
a year.
  So the graph is flat from 2000 up to 2016. And 2016, abruptly, it 
shoots up to 10,000 times a year--virtually unused until 2016, 10,000 
times. Many of that was in the latter part of the year, after the 
meeting in the Mandarin Hotel. And then the following year, 2017, that 
term white nationalist was used 30,000 times.
  And in 2018, it was still used up there at 20,000 times, Madam 
Speaker. That was one of the words they weaponized. They weaponized 
Nazi and fascism and white supremacy altogether, and they want to 
attack Western Civilization itself.
  There are other ways to divide America and to pit us against each 
other, but they were weaponizing terms.
  Other things, the insurance policy that I mentioned earlier. Well, 
what is that insurance policy? It is tying the President up with 
protests, lock up everything, delay the confirmations, so that he can't 
put his government in place. You saw that happen in the Senate over and 
over again, where they did everything they could do to slow down the 
confirmation of the President's appointees and not let the President 
have the team that he wanted to run this country, and to slow down the 
confirmation of judges in our judicial system as well.
  All of that was taking place. And that all fits within a strategy and 
a plan that I believe is rooted in that day, in that Sunday after the 
election, beginning there, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, 
after the election of Donald Trump.
  Furthermore, the resistance, the weaponization of language, the delay 
of confirmations, the obstruction of the ability of the President to 
deploy the people he wants within this government--and meanwhile, then 
there was a strategy that was implemented, initially, by James Comey, 
and also Robert Mueller. Both of them interviewed to be the continuing 
director of the FBI. And James Comey has admitted all of this under 
oath, and he has told the public this, and, I think, bragged about it. 
And that is, that when he had his meeting with President Trump, he went 
out and sat in his car, and he typed up the notes on what he 
remembered.
  He took those notes, by his own admission, to a professor at Columbia 
University, who is his friend, with directions for that professor to 
leak that information to the New York Times. By leaking the 
interpretation that was typed up by James Comey to the New York Times, 
they strategized that they could trigger a special counsel, especially, 
and that special counsel needed to be Robert Mueller. They pulled that 
all off with the cooperation of the second-in-command at the Department 
of Justice, Rod Rosenstein.
  And so as those recommendations unfolded, we had Mueller as special 
counsel, James Comey was fired by the President--he resisted that, of 
course. But the Mueller report then, as they dug through that and spent 
nearly $30 million, and they had their team of Never Trumpers to put on 
to investigate. And all the while, they were going to find the smoking 
gun.
  I am going to use the term ``the blue dress.'' That would be the 
reasons that they could impeach Donald Trump. They never found it.

                              {time}  1415

  For nearly 2 years of the Mueller investigation, Democrats in this 
town and across the country were just anxiously waiting for: ``When 
does this information come out that we can grab and say gotcha?''
  Madam Speaker, when do you investigate a crime without a crime? When 
you identify the person whom you want to find guilty, and then you 
scour everything you possibly can to try to come up with something that 
you can use to declare the man to be guilty enough that you can do what 
they already wanted to do, which is remove this President from office.
  If they can't remove him from office, then they want to render him 
ineffective so that they can push their agenda down on him. At the very 
least, they want to wound him in such a way that they can figure out 
how to beat him in the election.
  That is not speculation, Madam Speaker. That is out of the mouth of 
one of our Members who speaks on impeachment in this House almost every 
single day, that we have to impeach Donald Trump because we can't beat 
him in the election.
  The will of the people has already been inhibited and diminished 
because of the actions of this Congress and the actions of a complicit 
press, and here we sat with that all unfolding through the Mueller 
report. It finally came out with a big flop.
  If you are wondering how this all fits together, Madam Speaker, then 
think back that there were 4 to 5 weeks of kind of silence after the 
Mueller report flopped. There were some who tried to resurrect it again 
to try to find a morsel in it that they could grasp and embellish. They 
just couldn't get traction because there was nothing there.
  After those 4 to 5 weeks, then we end up with the whistleblower, the 
whistleblower who was not privy to this telephone conversation that 
took place on July 25, a whistleblower who I believe is a Democrat 
operative. The associations that are reported to me and many others say 
that he has been under the wing of, in the employment of, and in 
cooperation with many of the highest level people who are partisans on 
the Democratic side.
  This whistleblower is kind of interesting. He triggers an impeachment 
investigation with second-, third-, and fourth-hand information. He has 
no eyes-on, hands-on, or ears-on experience or experience of any kind. 
He writes a second-, third-, and fourth-hand whistleblower report. 
Actually, he didn't write it. A team of lawyers wrote this. He mailed 
it to the chair of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on 
August 12.
  We had Adam Schiff with this whistleblower report in his hands August 
12, and nothing happened for weeks because they were still planning 
their strategy. Adam Schiff said that he doesn't know who the 
whistleblower is. That is going to turn out to be one of the clearest 
examples of untruth that one has seen in this Congress. With a straight 
face, he looks into the camera and says: I don't know who the 
whistleblower is, and I haven't met with him.
  I think it will be corrected eventually in the Record.
  The whistleblower must come forward. But when he filed that 
whistleblower report that was written by the lawyers for him, and it is 
secondhand, thirdhand, fourth-hand, 100 percent hearsay information, 
when he filed that, it was filed with the inspector general in the 
intelligence community.
  The rules on accepting whistleblower reports require that it be 
firsthand information, not hearsay information. The inspector general 
changed the rules to be able to accept second-, third-, and fourth-hand 
hearsay information as a whistleblower complaint.
  How far do you have to go to have to change the rules on the spot in 
order for that complaint to even be considered?
  Now, the whistleblower becomes public in front of everybody for a day 
or 2 or 3.
  Even much of the social media, I believe, is complicit in this effort 
to get rid of Donald Trump. They take down any information that would 
identify this whistleblower.
  This is like the emperor has no clothes. He is known by thousands of 
people in this country. I would say tens of thousands of people, even, 
at a minimum. He is known by, I would say, at least half the Members on 
the Republican side, and I could speculate on the Democratic side.
  Half the Members on this side know who this whistleblower is, but we 
can't speak his name because now the emperor has no clothes. We are 
going to act like we don't know who he is.
  Somehow, his information is credible enough, even though it is 
hearsay, that you are putting America through all of this pain, this 
agony, and this trying to turn over another stone, and maybe there will 
be something underneath there that we can use to get rid of this 
President.
  They are trying to find the firsthand information that has been 
missing, so they bring Ambassador Sondland forward. Surely, he would 
have firsthand information. He testified that he understood that there 
was a quid pro quo.
  It turns out that his understanding was an assumption. It wasn't 
necessarily an experience, that he had anything that he could point to.

[[Page H9165]]

  But he testified just yesterday. I thought it was pretty interesting.
  The Republican attorney, Steve Castor, asked him this question: ``Why 
don't you tell us, what did the President say to you on September 9 
that you remember?''
  ``What did the President say?'' That would be firsthand information, 
to answer that question.
  Ambassador Sondland said: ``Well, words to the effect--I decided to 
ask the President the question in an open-ended fashion because there 
were so many different scenarios floating around as to what was going 
on with Ukraine. So rather than ask the President nine different 
questions: Is it this? Is it this? Is it that?''
  He is demonstrating how he might ask nine different questions. He 
said: ``I just said, what do you want from Ukraine?''
  This is exactly the quote that will now be in the transcript of his 
testimony yesterday. He said: ``I may have even used a four-letter 
word.'' That sounds like an honest statement, then.
  Sondland, the Ambassador, testified yesterday that the President's 
answer to that question, the question of what do you want from Ukraine 
was this: ``I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. I just want 
Zelensky to do the right thing, to do what he ran on.'' Then he 
finished up: ``Or words to that effect.''
  That makes it pretty clear that the President isn't asking for a quid 
pro quo.
  If there is some kind of suspicion on the part of disloyal 
bureaucrats who are of an opposite ideology from a duly elected 
President of the United States, who don't agree with his foreign 
policy, or who try to undermine his foreign policy and undermine the 
Presidency itself and the effect of the Presidency itself, that is what 
happens. They create these scenarios. They say that, surely, he must 
have wanted a quid pro quo.
  This is clear evidence that there was not one. He stated multiple 
times that he was never told by the President that there were 
preconditions for the aid to be released. He was never told that there 
were preconditions.
  I thank Congressman   Michael Turner for bringing this out yesterday 
in such a clear fashion when he asked Ambassador Sondland so directly 
that question. Then Representative Turner, to nail this down, said to 
Ambassador Sondland: ``After you testified, Chairman Schiff ran out and 
gave a press conference and said he gets to impeach the President of 
the United States because of your testimony.''
  The understanding and the implication was that there was a quid pro 
quo, is what Representative Turner is saying.
  He continues the question to Sondland: ``And if you pull up CNN 
today, right now, their banner says, `Sondland ties Trump to 
withholding aid.' Is that your testimony today, Ambassador Sondland, 
that you have evidence that Donald Trump tied the investigations to the 
aid? Because I don't think you are saying that.''
  Ambassador Sondland's response was: ``I have said repeatedly, 
Congressman, I was presuming. I also said that President Trump,'' but 
Turner cut him off and said: ``So no one told you, not just the 
President? Giuliani didn't tell you? Mulvaney didn't tell you? Nobody--
Pompeo didn't tell you? Nobody else on this planet told you that Donald 
Trump was tying aid to these investigations; is that correct?''
  Sondland said: ``I think I already testified--``
  Turner cut him off again and said: ``No, answer the question. Is it 
correct? No one on this planet told you that Donald Trump was tying 
this aid to the investigations? Because if your answer is yes, then the 
chairman is wrong, and the headline on CNN is wrong. No one on this 
planet told you that President Trump was tying aid to investigations, 
yes or no?''
  Ambassador Sondland answered ``yes,'' which means no one told him 
that there was any quid pro quo. It was all in his head, and America is 
all tied up in these knots over this kind of secondhand information 
that is distorted in the minds of the people who delivered it to us.
  This must be firsthand information, and it must be factual. America 
needs to be released from this. There is nothing here again. We are 
going into the third year of this Presidency, and still, they persist.
  Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you here. I 
wish you and everyone a very, very happy Thanksgiving. Let's come back 
happier than I happen to be today.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________