[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 104 (Thursday, June 4, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Page S2707]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Russia Investigation

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee 
held our first oversight hearing to learn more about the origins and 
evolution of the counterintelligence investigation known as Crossfire 
Hurricane, opened in July of 2016 against a Presidential candidate and 
his campaign team. I asked Rod Rosenstein, the former Deputy Attorney 
General, if he knew of a precedent for active FBI investigations 
against both nominees of the major political parties for Presidential 
campaign, and he said: No, there is no precedent.
  The FBI is not supposed to be involved in our elections and in our 
politics. Yet you recall what happened on July 5, 2016. Director James 
Comey held another unprecedented event--a press conference--at which he 
said that no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute Secretary Hillary 
Clinton for a crime but then proceeded to detail derogatory 
information--information that was not his to release but was supposed 
to be part of a confidential investigation.
  Under our system of justice, the FBI is supposed to investigate 
crime, and then the Department of Justice makes the charging 
decision. That is when things become public. Yet, when the FBI decides 
there is not enough evidence to support charging, it doesn't hold a 
press conference and disparage the character and reputation of the 
person it is investigating.

  I don't know whether Director Comey had an impact on the 2016 
election, but I do know what he did was wrong, and, yesterday, Deputy 
Attorney General Rosenstein confirmed his memo to then-Attorney General 
Jeff Sessions, which was then attached to Jeff Sessions' letter to the 
President, recommending that Director Comey be terminated as the FBI 
Director. The reason was not because he had made a mistake but because 
he had failed to see the error of his ways and was likely to repeat 
them again.
  The Deputy Attorney General is supposed to be the supervisor for the 
FBI, and while the chain of command is pretty clear in criminal cases, 
in this species of investigation known as counterintelligence, which is 
not primarily to investigate crimes but to investigate security threats 
to the United States, there was no chain of command. The FBI was 
running rogue under Director Comey, along with some of the things we 
have learned about with regard to Director McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa 
Page, and others.
  It is really important that we not only make sure we understand what 
happened--that it was unprecedented and negatively affected Hillary 
Clinton's campaign--but that it also negatively affected Donald Trump 
and his campaign, and this investigation continued long after he became 
President. It resulted in the appointment of a special counsel, who 
ended up with no evidence with which to charge the President with any 
crime.
  We can't have the FBI interfering with our elections. Yes, it needs 
to investigate counterintelligence threats to the United States, and it 
needs to investigate crimes, but it should not be a primary actor in 
that process, in the public process, by which we elect Presidents. It 
needs to stay in its particular lane and not become a partisan, in 
effect, affecting the outcome of Presidential elections, all of which 
is to say that the investigation the Committee on the Judiciary began 
yesterday is very, very important. One thing we must make sure of is 
that this never happens again, and the only way we can make sure it 
never happens again is to make clear what did happen and where the 
train went off the rails.
  The last 3\1/2\ years have been primarily occupied with this so-
called investigation into President Trump and his campaign, then the 
appointment of a special counsel, and 2 years of Director Mueller's 
investigation as special counsel. Then what followed that was 
impeachment. Think of all of the opportunity costs associated with 
that, the time we could have and should have spent on doing things 
which would have impacted the quality of life of the American people--
improving access to healthcare, creating economic opportunity, 
enhancing our national security. These are things we were not doing 
because we were preoccupied with these bogus investigations and the 
media leaks by the people who knew better.
  Adam Schiff and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence 
took a lot of sworn testimony during their ``investigation.'' Now that 
it has been declassified, we know that none of the witnesses--mainly 
Obama-era officials--knew of any evidence of coordination, cooperation, 
or collusion with Russian authorities--none of them. Yet Adam Schiff 
and others on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence had 
the temerity to go to the microphones and say there was rampant 
collusion, conspiracy, and collaboration--just bald-faced lies. Of 
course, the American people didn't know that. We didn't know that 
because those allegations were reported in the press, and they led into 
this narrative which has so dominated us over the last 3\1/2\ years, 
only to find there was no basis for it.
  Suffice it to say that the investigations that are being conducted by 
the Committee on the Judiciary and by the Committee on Homeland 
Security and Governmental Affairs, led by Chairman Johnson, I think, 
are very, very important. The facts will come out. We know that 
Attorney General Barr has deputized Mr. Durham, a U.S. attorney, to see 
whether there is evidence of chargeable crimes, because there needs to 
be accountability.