[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 171 (Thursday, October 1, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H5136-H5142]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     QUESTION OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE

  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I rise to raise a question of 
personal privilege.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair has been made aware of a valid 
basis for the gentleman's point of personal privilege.
  The gentleman from Iowa is recognized for 1 hour.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized here 
on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, and 
throughout the years I have had the privilege to serve Iowans and 
Americans here. This is a great deliberative body, although sometimes 
we miss the facts.
  And I know that there is a phrase that I heard back in a political 
era, which is, whenever you lose a vote, you can sometimes use this 
analysis:
  Nor is the people's judgment always true: the most can err as grossly 
as the few.
  And that has happened a number of times in my 18 years that I have 
served in this Congress. This is the 116th Congress, and if someone 
were to ask me, well, what was your favorite session of Congress, I 
don't have to worry about the 116th being on that list.

                              {time}  1300

  But I rise to focus on a specific circumstance here, and that is a 
misquote of me that was driven into just a national feeding frenzy. It 
was validated by this Congress, this misquote.
  And when I stood on the floor of this Congress and made a statement 
to describe what likely happened in an interview with The New York 
Times that took place in early January of 2019, I made the point on 
what that statement was, and the statement was regarding white 
nationalists, white supremacists. There always was a pause between 
those two odious ideologies and the term ``western civilization.''
  I advised Congress that there would be a distinct pause to 
demonstrate a new thought started rather than jamming those three 
ideologies together.
  Who would compare white nationalism and white supremacy, those odious 
ideologies, who would compare them to western civilization, the very 
foundation of American civilization, the foundation of the First World, 
and here, America, the flagship of western civilization today? There is 
no comparison and should never be equated between the two.
  Yet, I didn't tie that thought together, but the stenographers did.
  And I am not here to be a critic, because they have done terrific 
work for me over the years, and their skill set, and their 
professionalism are second to none. They are the best in the world, as 
far as I am concerned, but if they can make a mistake, so can The New 
York Times, which is my point.
  So in this narrative, Madam Speaker, I will take you back a little 
way. And I want the Congress to know what all has transpired here that 
brought us to the point of the feeding frenzy and the political lynch 
mob that was here that day on about January 12 or so, or January 13, 
and it was this: that during my election in the year 2018, November of 
2018, there was a national media focus on attacking me. That happens in 
other races, but I don't know that it ever happened as intensively as 
it did in my race.
  In any case, we came through that with a 3.4 percent victory, and I 
thought that was the end of it. I expected that I would come back. You 
know, even your political opposition needs a rest from time to time, 
and so after the election is when they take a deep breath, retool, and 
get ready for the legislative session.
  But I sat down with a political operative, who was one of the top 
political campaign managers at the presidential level in the Nation, 
and a successful one at that. He came in to give me a little bit of his 
advice, and as I am listening to that, he said: They are going to try 
again. They are going to try again to drive you out of office with a 
national media assault on you, and they are going to attack you with 
everything. They will throw everything at you. He didn't say but the 
kitchen sink, but I got the message.
  And when he first brought that up, Madam Speaker, I passed it off, 
because I didn't take it seriously. Nothing like that had ever happened 
before in the history of this country that I knew.
  And he brought it up a second time, and I passed it off again, 
because I didn't take it seriously. But the third time, he got my 
attention.
  And the third time he brought it up, he said: They are going to make 
another run at you.
  This was the day before Thanksgiving of 2018, by the way. He said: 
They are going to make another run at you, and they believe that they 
were--this meaning Democrats, yes, but also Republicans, establishment, 
the swamp creatures, the elitists, those folks, and also the media. 
They are going to make another run, because they believe that the 
midterm elections of 2018 were a bit distracting, they had other races 
to be concerned about, and so, therefore, they couldn't bring all their 
guns to bear on this Member of Congress from the Fourth District of 
Iowa.
  So he did have my attention by then. And as much as it didn't seem 
plausible, his advice to me was this: They have a messenger that they 
will send to the President, a messenger whom the President trusts and 
who has his ear, who is going to be directed to convince the President 
to send out a negative tweet on Congressman King, and that negative 
tweet will be the trigger that launches another media assault, all the 
broadsides that they can get on this Member of Congress. And he used 
these words: And they believe they can force you to resign.
  Now, that is a hard concept to get into your head when nothing like 
that had ever happened before and there was no substance for that to be 
based upon, but he did convince me.
  So I set about preempting this, at his advice, and I did, to the 
extent I could, preempted it at the White House. And I think history 
proves that that has been successful. President Trump has not taken a 
shot at me, even though there were many others who couldn't resist the 
press's temptation to take a cheap shot, but the President did not. So 
I take it that the effort to preempt it at the White House was at least 
partially successful.
  Yet, I couldn't get a meeting with the messenger until January 8, 
2019. So on January 8, I had that meeting with the person that was at 
least named as the potential messenger, and in that conversation, I was 
assured: I would never do that to you, Steve. Be assured that that 
won't happen.
  Well, I was fairly confident that those words were honest, and 
actually felt pretty happy about it when I walked out of that meeting. 
But I also suspected that the people that were

[[Page H5137]]

around that individual might find out about the meeting that I had just 
finished and might know that I understood the gambit that was going to 
be run against me. That was January 8.
  January 9, amazingly, I have a primary opponent that announced on 
Twitter at 11:23 a.m.--He might have announced earlier than that, 
except he was busy deleting all of his tweets for the previous 10 
years, and then once the tweets were deleted--He announced on Twitter 
that he was going to challenge me in a primary. He didn't have a 
website, didn't have a roll-out plan, didn't have a media plan, didn't 
have an interview set up. He just sent out a tweet.

  So that seems to me that he hadn't been planning that very long. I 
think he got a phone call the night before that morning that said: You 
are going to have to announce now. That was January 9.
  January 10, The New York Times story came out. And The New York Times 
story that has been the subject of this turmoil here on the floor of 
the House that had the whole Nation fixated on a few words, it actually 
turned out to be about 13 words.
  It is still pretty stunning to think how you can mobilize the United 
States Congress over whether or not there is a hyphen or a period where 
it ought to be.
  But here is what we have, Madam Speaker. We have to protect the 
Constitution of the United States, and the First Amendment of the 
Constitution is freedom of speech, religion, press, and peaceable 
assembly.
  And freedom of speech, whatever our speech is--I know that I was 
sitting in a meeting with some folks in Europe about 2 or 3 years ago, 
and they are prosecuting people for what they call hate speech and for 
asking a rhetorical question. I have a couple of friends over there 
that I happen to know that have been persecuted, prosecuted, and 
convicted for hate speech that was actually just a rhetorical question.
  I was making the case to them, I said: You need American-style 
constitutional protection for freedom of speech. You don't have freedom 
of speech here in Europe, and you are going to be a lot more robust 
society, you can address your problems and have open discussion, but 
you shut down any dialogue by hate speech prosecutions.
  And they said: We have more freedom of speech than you have in 
America.
  Now, that will bring a person up short, Madam Speaker. And so I 
asked: Why?
  And his answer was: In America you can start a corporation, you can 
be a CEO, you can write a check to an unfavored not-for-profit group--
or a profit group, excuse me--and once the public finds out about that, 
then they put that out all over the internet and they just--they named 
the people that had lost their companies because of a tweet or because 
of a donation to an unpreferred entity.
  And as they made their case, I realized they kind of stumped me a 
little bit. We have freedom of speech in the Constitution. But they 
said they don't lock people up for hate speech, they just prosecute 
them, convict them, turn them loose, and they generally learn their 
lesson. But here, we have watched since that time, since that time back 
in--this conversation took place in August 2018, freedom of speech has 
been diminished in this country incrementally. And it is a tragedy that 
we are going down that path.
  But here in this Congress, here is what happened: from the meeting 
that took place on January 8, the announcement of one primary opponent 
on January 9, The New York Times story on January 10, and after that, 
there was nothing I could have said or done that was going to change 
the inertia that was created.
  They actually carried out what they had given me the heads-up they 
were going to do. They actually brought all media broadsides against 
me. And it didn't matter what was fact and what was fiction. It 
mattered that they had mobilized all those forces because they thought 
that they could force me to resign.
  And for what purpose? I can give you a lot of reasons, Madam Speaker, 
but I think what is better to do at this point is to examine The New 
York Times.
  The New York Times interview took place on January 5 of 2019 on a 
phone call that I received from the reporter Trip Gabriel right about 
8:30 in the morning.
  I had advised him that he should go through my communications 
director, but I also had told him that I thought I would be open at 
about 8:30 until 10:30 that day.
  So he called me directly. And I had just gotten out of the shower to 
get ready to come down here and go to work. I didn't get a chance to 
check the email from my communications director first. That came in at 
7:48 a.m., and it said: Don't do the interview. It is a trap. I have 
been trying to shut this reporter down. I know he is coming at you with 
a trap. Don't do the interview.
  I didn't see that until much, much later. Had I seen that, there 
wouldn't have been an interview.
  But it was 56 minutes long. And there is no tape. And as far as I can 
determine, there aren't even any notes that are available to the 
public.
  And we have asked him: What was the question that you asked? What was 
the leading question? What was the context of the answer that I gave?
  And Kevin McCarthy is critical of me, because he says that he can 
remember every word that he has used in the last 6 months in an 
interview, and that includes also the punctuation, because that is the 
topic we were talking about.
  I don't think that is even humanly possible. I don't think anybody 
can do that.
  And Trip Gabriel says: Don't worry about whether I am accurate or 
not, because I can type as fast as anybody can talk.
  Well, I have asked our wonderful stenographers down here how fast 
they can type, and what I learned was at about 130 words on a 
conventional keyboard is just about the limit to be certified, but 
maybe 150 or 160 on the magic keyboard that is going right down there 
right now.
  And I say: Can you keep up with me when I am talking at a fast pace?
  And they say: No. I have to listen to the tape.
  But I respect the professionalism we have here. Anybody can make a 
mistake.
  And then I asked about the precision of punctuation when you are 
doing a transcript on the keyboards even that we have here, let alone 
the conventional one that Trip Gabriel was using. And they say: Well, 
we will get the words right if you talk at a pace that we can keep up, 
but we can't guarantee the punctuation.
  So there is a great big difference in whether-- there is a great big 
difference in whether the meaning of a phrase has got a hyphen in it or 
whether it has a comma in it.

  Trip Gabriel put in a comma, and he insists he is right. And I would 
ask, how could he know? How could he know whether he is right or not, 
because his memory is not any better than Kevin McCarthy, not as good 
as Kevin McCarthy says it is.
  So I want to go through this. So what happened shortly after that, 
this thing all hit, and on Monday early in the month of January, I had 
a meeting with our leader here, and it lasted about an hour. And it 
wasn't a happy meeting for either one of us, but he was determined, he 
was determined that I am wrong, The New York Times is right.
  And I don't know how our leader can defend President Trump against 
The New York Times and attack me for the opposite.
  If you just Google, lying New York Times, you get hundreds of hits on 
a Google of lying New York Times. Their credibility has been 
essentially destroyed.
  And this little piece, I would say this: 18 years in this Congress, 
45 years in the construction business, 6 years in the Iowa Senate, our 
family goes back three generations on the dirt that we are on right now 
where we live, and throughout all that time, The New York Times and 
others have sent reporters into my neighborhood to try to find somebody 
that has got something derogatory to say about me or some insult to my 
character, and they have failed every time; The New York Times, The 
Washington Post, Huffington Post, you can name all of them. It used to 
be The Weekly Standard, and they rightfully are defunct now because of 
their overreach and their political bias that they rolled out. But in

[[Page H5138]]

all that time, they have never found a single person.
  And no one has gone on record in this Congress in 18 years, serving 
on the Judiciary Committee for 16 of those years, the most polarized 
committee on the Hill and the most racially diverse committee on the 
Hill, and not one of those folks, and many of them trade in the race 
issue, has ever made a statement that I had been disrespectful or 
disparaging in any way whatsoever.

                              {time}  1315

  And so there is no substance. I have no accusers, no individual 
accusers that have stood up. But this whole mass of people in this 
place were accusers on that day in early January of 2019.
  So I am here to assert that--I am asking this Congress and this 
Congressional Record to correct the Record and to place a hyphen in the 
terms from that day where I said I was going to pause--I did pause; I 
have watched the videotape of it since then several times--that the 
language be: white nationalist, white supremacist, hyphen.
  That is a pause, and it is a new thought, and the new thought then 
became: Western civilization, now how did that language become 
offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our 
history and our civilization just to watch Western civilization become 
a derogatory term in political discourse today?
  The very statement itself refutes The New York Times' 
characterization. It refutes the characterization that was delivered at 
me by Kevin McCarthy and others. It refutes the characterization that 
was the presumption of this Congress. But the presumption of this 
Congress didn't look at the evidence. They didn't look at the facts. 
They just got swept up in the herd mentality and went ahead and did 
what they did.
  And by the way, the resolution that was brought, I believe, by Mr. 
Clyburn that day, the resolution was actually honest because it said: 
whereas Congressman King has been quoted as saying.
  And that was the qualifier, and then they put the quote in out of The 
New York Times. Well, I was quoted as saying that. That was an honest 
statement. It was a misquote. They didn't bother saying that. But I was 
misquoted in The New York Times, but the way it was printed in the 
resolution was accurate. And all the other whereases that rejected the 
odious ideologies were all accurate.
  My own rejection of it in the previous week was stronger than the 
resolution itself. I wish they had used my language. Mine was stronger, 
and mine was better, but I agreed with all the words that were in that. 
And I asked this body, vote ``yes'' on this resolution.
  I had, I will say, dozens of friends here that were prepared to come 
to this floor and vote against that resolution in order to guard my 
back, just on the principle that they knew I am not the person that 
that resolution implied that I am.
  But, instead, rather than divide our conference, rather than divide 
this Congress, rather than ask them to vote against a resolution that 
happened to be technically true, I asked them all, instead, vote for 
this resolution because it is technically true, and that is not the 
argument.
  Now, only one person voted against it; that was the gentleman from 
Illinois, Chicago.   Bobby Rush, former Black Panther, voted against 
the resolution because he thought I should have been sanctioned or 
censured even more.
  Well, aren't we supposed to look at evidence in this place? Do facts 
matter? Does reason matter? Or are we just caught up in the political 
inertia of what goes on, and we try to fit ourselves into the stream so 
that we don't stand out very much?
  So I have given you some of that, but none of the context of my quote 
was included in The New York Times story.
  We called up Trip Gabriel and said: What question did you ask me?
  He--first, I asked him: Do you have a tape? He would not even answer 
the question of whether he had a tape.
  Then we asked him: What question did you ask Congressman King that 
brought forth this answer that is only about just a handful of words, 
13 words altogether, and what is the context of that? What was the 
question? What was the answer? Did you feed those words to him, and did 
he repeat them back to you?
  And he wouldn't answer that question either. It took two phone calls 
to squeeze some out.
  But what we learned was he didn't expect that that would be the quote 
that would do it. That is almost an exact quote out of him. He didn't 
think that that would be the quote. He thought it would be something 
else in the article.
  So that indicates to me he knew it was a hit job when he did the 
interview, and that is also what Mark Steyn says. He says that is not a 
good faith interview request, and this is said just the day after this 
incident.
  And Mark Steyn went on to say--he said: He made a mistake,   Steve 
King. He agreed to give an interview on national immigration policy to 
The New York Times. That is not a good faith interview request. They 
are only asking you, and he should know this, they are only asking you 
to stitch you up, to talk to you for 3 hours and get you to use one 
phrase in there that they can lift out and kill you with.
  Well, I think Mark Steyn had that figured out, and I think he is 
really accurate. He went on to say: This guy,   Steve King, was 
trapped. Trapped. The words he said about when did that become 
controversial, he meant the phrase, Western civilization.
  How come Mark Steyn knows this the day after and this Congress can't 
understand this 2 years after?
  And he went on to say: He is not a white supremacist. He is not a 
white nationalist. It is all stupid talk.
  So you have just surrendered the phrase, Western civilization. I 
don't get that, said Mark Steyn. I don't see what is in it for 
conservatism in surrendering that phrase and accepting the left's view 
that the term, Western civilization, is beyond the pale.
  He also said that conservatives, Republicans, have trouble finding a 
hill that they believe is worth dying on. But when you sacrifice this 
issue and that issue and another issue, and you get to Western 
civilization and you sacrifice the hill of the very foundation of the 
First World, our country, and the founding of our country, the founding 
documents, the ideology that I would trace you all the way back to 
Moses and bring through the Greeks and the Romans in Western Europe and 
the rule of law and free enterprise capitalism and the industrial 
revolution and God-given liberty and natural law and the deep reading 
and understanding that was done by our Founders who shaped this 
country, who found America to be and shaped America to be a giant petri 
dish for God-given liberty.

  Think of what it was like. Here is this land, this huge Western 
Hemisphere that hadn't seen any aspect of what we consider to be modern 
life. And on this land, here came, at the dawn of the industrial 
revolution, the idea--it will be Adam Smith, he wrote ``Wealth of 
Nations'', published 1776, the same year the Declaration was published. 
And this petri dish, this giant petri dish of freedom and liberty and 
rule of law and unlimited natural resources--so we thought at the 
time--and the concept of manifest destiny and the wars that were fought 
to secure those things, all of that, all of that that is so rich in 
America's history and makes us the greatest Nation the world has seen, 
but we can't defend Western civilization?
  And I will say, 2 years ago, when this came down, people didn't 
understand what is happening. But today, Western civilization is under 
assault, and I have been 100 percent correct on this. I have been more 
correct on this than I thought I was going to be, Mr. Speaker.
  But I would just want to add that nobody in America ever sat in the 
class to learn about the merits of white nationalism or white 
supremacism, and the content of that quote makes it clear. All the 
contemporaneous evidence supports what I have been saying.
  In fact, all of the things that I have said since then, no one has 
found a hole in any of them. No one has said this is marginally untrue 
or untrue. No one has ever looked at the language that I have used and 
said that it isn't accurate.
  In fact, what I have done is I introduced a fact-check document, and 
that fact-check document was first published March 6, 2019. Kevin 
McCarthy

[[Page H5139]]

gave me 24 hours to prove a negative--24 hours. Well, he didn't 
actually. I asked for 24 hours. He gave me 1 hour.
  Now, philosophers have--and everywhere from philosophers to barflies 
have argued for centuries that it is impossible to prove a negative. 
Well, no, it is logically possible to prove a negative, and I did that. 
And I did it in a fact-check document filed in this Congress and 
published on my website February 3--excuse me--March 6 of 2019. And 
then some other facts came to bear, and I published a follow-up of 
that.
  I deleted nothing from this. I just added some more facts. And that 
was published February 3 of this year, 2020.
  So some of the things that I want people to think about is, I had 
done--we had done the LexisNexis search and asked it: Had   Steve King 
ever said white nationalist anywhere in history? We went back to the 
year 2000. That is about as far as we can trust the records, I think. 
And at no time, I had never, ever been quoted as ever even uttering the 
words that identify that odious ideology.
  And so when I was asked: What is a white nationalist by  Dave Price 
on a television station in Des Moines, Iowa, it caught me off guard 
because I hadn't been ever asked to define it before. I had never said 
the term before. In fact, I didn't use that term when I answered the 
question.
  But I did say it is a derogatory term. It might have meant something 
different 1, 2, or 3 years ago, but today it means racist. That was my 
definition off the cuff from a question that I didn't anticipate. Maybe 
it could have been a little more artful, but it is true, and it is true 
because the term has been weaponized and essentially unused.
  And so, we looked through the record of LexisNexis and said: Where is 
the first documented instance of where I ever used the phrase white 
nationalist? And that turns out to be in an interview that was done 
right before Christmas of 2018 with the Christian Science Monitor. And 
there, I was making the case that some of this language has been 
weaponized. And did I use the terms--I said, I used the terms--if I can 
find it here, I added a couple of other terms that were part of that, 
such as, well, racist is weaponized; Nazi is weaponized; fascist is 
weaponized; white nationalism is weaponized; and white supremacy is 
weaponized. Now they are trying to weaponize Western civilization. When 
that happens, our civilization will be on its way out the door.
  But I was clearly making a statement, defending Western civilization 
and rejecting the odious ideologies.
  So we looked it up, and I asked the question--just a minute. This, 
Mr. Speaker, is a chart of LexisNexis that charts the frequency of the 
utilization of the term, white nationalist or white nationalism, a 
derivative of that. So it goes back to the year 2000, and you can see 
all the way up till 2015, it is virtually unused. It wasn't in our 
American vernacular. No one could be expected to have the precise and 
perfect definition for that in their head from a--I will say--a quick 
response type of a question if we are not using it in our language.
  It wasn't in our political discourse. It may be in academia. That is 
probably where--one to 200 times a year is about what that is down on 
the bottom.
  And then you see that 2015, it picked up just a little bit. But 2016, 
it went from virtually unused to 10,000 times a year. And then, in 
2017, it went to 30,000 times a year. 2018, it is still up there at 
20,000 times a year.
  This term, white nationalism, was weaponized, and it was used against 
conservatives. They knew they had worn out the term racism, so they had 
to come up with some new terms, and that was one of them.
  Here is another example. This is the year. This is the year 2016. It 
was, I could say, almost virtually unused up until November of 2016. 
And what happened in November of 2016? Oh, Donald Trump was elected 
President wasn't he, on about November 8.

  And the following Sunday, about the 12th or 13th of November, the top 
people in the Democratic Party met at the Mandarin Hotel here in 
Washington, D.C. The articles that I read about it are articles that 
were written around their star person there, George Soros, who was in 
that hotel and presumably led some of the discussions that were there 
and contributed, likely, to the cause.
  And so from the moment that they went into that hotel, that Sunday, 
it doesn't really show very much utilization of it. But on the 
following day, Monday, it shoots off the charts. There is no question 
that this synchronizes almost exactly with the meeting in the Mandarin 
Hotel, which, I believe, strategically decided: We are going to launch 
white nationalism and white supremacy as weaponized terms, and we are 
going to use them against Republicans.
  So this is actually, Mr. Speaker, the picture of November itself and 
broken down day by day. And so you can see, the 11th, the 12th, here is 
the 13th. That was Monday. They called into the hotel. Thirteen is 
Sunday, excuse me. And so they were checking in.
  But on Monday, here we go. Tuesday, that is how they triggered the 
weaponization of language, and that is what I was describing in that 
interview, although I thought I was right because my guts were speaking 
to me. My instincts were speaking to me. I didn't have the data, but it 
is pretty clear that I was more right than I imagined that I would be.
  That is the circumstances that we are dealing with here, and the 
hyperactivity of a planned ambush of a Member of Congress in an effort 
to try to drive him out of office and force him to resign, based upon 
false stories and false allegations without substance.

                              {time}  1330

  So I will take you to this, Mr. Speaker. We went to Congressional 
Research Services, CRS, and asked them: Who has been removed from all 
of their committees presumably for disciplinary reasons? And what do 
you know about as far as you can go back in the search engine or into 
modern history?
  We found out that James Traficant was removed from all of his 
committees. He was subsequently convicted of a Federal felony and went 
to prison--several Federal felonies, as a matter of fact.
  Then we have had, I can think of two, three cases since that time, 
fairly contemporary. I don't want to say their names because I remain a 
person who--well, I regret what they were convicted of, but, 
nonetheless, it is this.
  There have been five Members of Congress who were removed from their 
committees for disciplinary reasons in all of modern history according 
to CRS. One of them is fairly recent down in Kansas. The other two, in 
addition to James Traficant, were subsequently convicted of Federal 
felonies. So the charges on the Kansas issue are Federal felonies.
  So here I stand, the sole person in 233 years of the American 
Republic who has been denied a full-throated representation of his 
750,000 constituents by an arbitrary decision of the leader of the 
Republican Party, who had no evidence except his faith that the 
dishonest reporter of The New York Times was more honest than a very 
honest Member of Congress standing before him.
  No one in this Congress has ever asserted that I misinformed them 
willfully. Maybe I made a couple of mistakes on data, and if I caught 
them, I went back and fixed it as quickly as I could. But that 
assertion has never been made. There has never been made of any 
personal disparagement, as I said earlier. All of that holds together.
  No one in this body has ever heard me utter even a swearword under my 
breath. Yet this is what happens to the freedom of speech and 
representation.
  I would add this. I had more votes for me in the previous election in 
November of 2018 than either the current leader of the Republican Party 
or the Conference chair, yet they have got a sanctimonious attitude 
about what is right and what is wrong.
  So I would assert, Mr. Speaker, that the Congressional Record did 
err. It is easy to determine that because there is a C-SPAN tape. We 
have a tape of one thing, and that was there is a distinct difference 
between the two odious ideologies and Western civilization. I made the 
point. I did the pause. It is natural for me to talk and think that 
way. It is not natural for me to advocate for something that I disagree 
with.
  Further, this fact-checked document makes it real clear that of all 
of the time that it has been out here, a year and a half or better, not 
a soul has

[[Page H5140]]

found anything false in it, anything mischaracterized, anything biased, 
or any hole in the logic that says that could not have happened with 
The New York Times. It is a false and erroneous misquote is the nicest 
way that I can put that.
  Mr. Speaker, I have gone through a number of these things that are 
the factual components of it, but here is another piece: How often was 
white nationalist used in this Congress? I said it was virtually unused 
for all those years on up until 2018. We went back through the 
Congressional Record and did a search, too. I will just read you the 
text of this fact-checked document, Mr. Speaker, to give you some of 
the flavor of it.
  It says: Another indicator of the recent weaponization of the phrase 
``white nationalism'' can be found in a study of the Congressional 
Record. According to the CRS, no Member of Congress has ever said, in 
their original words, the term ``white nationalist'' on the House floor 
prior to President Donald Trump being elected.
  That is out of a CRS report.
  So how could it be that, oh, that is attributed to me, and there is a 
thought process that is attributed to me?
  But it says that Kevin McCarthy's decision to remove King from all 
three of his committees for a misquote of The New York Times is 
unprecedented with no analogous case to mine. Apart from party 
switches/level of party support, King is only the fourth Member of 
Congress' history--that is this report prior to the Kansas incident I 
mentioned--according to the CRS to be stripped of all committee 
assignments, and he is the only one who was removed from committees for 
a reason that has no basis--no basis in history, in House or Conference 
rules or Federal law. Or, I will say, no basis in truth either.
  So one has to come to a conclusion here as to what actually happened.
  Mr. Speaker, you can believe the version of events that are relied 
upon by Kevin McCarthy to strip King of committee assignments, but if 
that is so, one must believe that an unreasonable but sensational 
interpretation for which no evidence exists is more likely to be 
accurate than a reasonable, noncontroversial interpretation which is 
internally supported by context clues and externally supported by data 
and other contemporaneous published accounts.
  One must also believe that The New York Times, which is a hostile, 
liberal paper, which has had other articles about me,   Steve King, 
written by the same author thoroughly debunked as completely bogus, set 
aside its animus in this particular case and wrote an objective article 
for the first time on me.
  This document that I am speaking from contains hyperlinks to source 
material. Parties interested in reviewing this can go to my website 
steveking.house.gov and pull one of these documents down.
  Mr. Speaker, another piece of this was Brit Hume, a legendary 
journalist and reporter. Brit Hume is publicly no fan of   Steve King. 
He read through an article that was written by Trip Gabriel just about 
on January 15 of 2019, and Trip Gabriel brought up a whole series of 
quotes that proves that I am a racist. Brit Hume read down through that 
and said that it is completely bogus. Most of the articles and most of 
the quotes don't have anything to do with race whatsoever, and none of 
the comments were racist. That is Brit Hume.

  Between Brit Hume, Mark Steyn, and multiple others who are objective, 
I think we get the idea of what happened here.
  Going home to spend time with my grandchildren is not what I regret, 
Mr. Speaker, but what I regret is the precedent that is established 
here that there is no place to appeal.
  I recall when I was first elected to the Iowa Senate, I had what 
turned out to be a future constituent who found himself in an 
administrative law judge position where the administrative law judges 
had ruled against him. It was a domestic issue. I knew that he was 
honest; I knew that he was the target; and I knew he was the victim of 
stack of lies. So I set about trying to get him an appeal so that his 
case could be heard.
  As I checked the fences, so to speak, as we say in Iowa, or perhaps 
Texas as well, as we checked the fences, it always will go under the 
next one, the next one, the next one. But once you went around, it was 
a corral, and there was no way for him. He is back appealing to the 
very person who ruled against him in the first place.
  So, Mr. Speaker, what you are really down to is you can go through 
some motions, but you have to ask the decider to change their mind. 
That is the only appeal. When you have got the pressure of a nation, 
the media pressure and the political politics that go on here, then 
they are not going to change their mind. There is too much narcissism 
involved for that.
  By the way, there is a significant amount of mendacity, while we are 
talking about personal characteristics, because Kevin McCarthy promised 
me that he would go to the Steering Committee and ask them to restore 
me to all of my committees. That happened April 19 of this year. I have 
the transcript of that phone call. Yet, when McCarthy was asked about 
that in a press conference, he denied it and made me out to be the 
liar. That is another piece that has got to be changed in the history 
of all of this.
  What I regret is, if there is a due process, then there needs to be a 
place where there can be an appeal. There needs to be a place to roll 
the facts out and there needs to be a way that you can put people who 
sit in judgment, who actually have to evaluate the facts and be 
subjected to criticism for their decision that they would make. None of 
that exists in this Congress. It may exist over on the other side of 
the aisle, but it doesn't exist on this side of the aisle.
  So I have my obligations here, and one of the obligations is to 
deliver the truth. I am confident everything I have said here today is 
objectively true. I have dug through this for a good, long period of 
time.
  After the primary election, I sat down on my deck out on the east 
side before the Sun came up in the morning and took my keyboard and 
began to type. After a few weeks, I had 60,000-some words, and that is 
a book. That will be in print real soon. The title of that is ``Walking 
Through the Fire.''
  I was able to call Andrew Breitbart, a close, personal friend. When 
he tragically passed away at age 43 several years ago, I was given the 
honor to give the eulogy for him at the national memorial here in 
Washington, D.C., for Andrew Breitbart, whose imprint is on our society 
to this day.
  Andrew would say to us: Walk towards the fire. Walk towards the fire. 
Their bullets aren't real. They just want to scare you. They want to 
shut you up. They don't like your ideology, so they will attack you 
personally, and they will call you a whole series of names.
  He was more eloquent about that than I.
  I started out the book that way, ``Walk towards the fire,'' but the 
title of my book is ``Walking Through the Fire'' because, once that 
fire was lit in front of me, I could have either turned and run or 
walked through it. I said: If you are going to do this to me, you are 
going to have to shoot me down in the middle of Main Street at high 
noon with everybody watching.
  That is pretty much what happened. They mounted that kind of effort 
and did everything they could to destroy my reputation.
  But the facts stand the same. I have no accusers. All of the logic of 
this fact-checked document supports what I have told you here today, 
Mr. Speaker, all of it. There is not a hole in it. No one has found a 
hole in it, even when it would behoove them to find a hole in it or 
several holes in it.
  I think that my reputation here among the people who know me is 
solid. But, also, I will have a shorter list of friends maintenance 
after this last experience over these 2 years.
  I don't regret going home. I don't regret spending more time with my 
grandchildren.
  I got a phone call from one of our county chairs here a month and a 
half or so ago. He said: I am calling to tell you that God is showing 
you how much He loves you because He is guaranteeing you more time. He 
is sending you home to spend more time with your grandchildren.
  That is as good a way to put that as you can.
  I have made good friends here in this place, but the list of them is 
shorter

[[Page H5141]]

than I thought it was. So I think it is very important that people 
coming into this Congress, the freshmen whom I have never gotten a 
chance to know over a 2-year period of time because, if they are seen 
talking to   Steve King, the leader might not give them the committee 
assignment that they want, I didn't get to know them. That is too bad. 
I am sure there are good people there. But that list is shorter than I 
thought it would be.
  We need more and deeper character in this Congress, and we need to 
tie back to facts and policy. What I have seen happen here in the time 
that I have been in this Congress is, when young Members come in, they 
come in pretty strong ideologically, for the most part. They want to 
make a difference, and they want to pass legislation. They are policy 
people, and they are ideological people.
  And I meet them and I like them and I like the spark that is in their 
eyes, but pretty quickly, sometimes there are even one or two or three, 
even on the first day, who decide: Mine is going to be a political 
equation. Over time, they give up on the policy. They give up on the 
ideology. They find out that their job is to either work for this team 
or work for this team over here. They slowly become a political 
barometer. And when an issue comes up in front of them and they have to 
make a decision, the question will be: How does this help me? If it 
doesn't help them, then that question is: How do I avoid dealing with 
this issue?

  I came here to correct the wrongs that I had seen in life and to fix 
the injustices. I didn't anticipate I would see them so starkly in 
front of me, but I have. So I wanted to come to the floor here today, 
Mr. Speaker, and let you know some of these things that I am thinking 
about. Hopefully, this body will learn from the experiences that we 
have all been part of here. The freshmen need to be thinking about this 
and have an independent voice.
  Mr. Speaker, I have said that one of the ways that you can have an 
independent voice here in this Congress--and perhaps the only way you 
can have an independent voice--is you have to have constituents who 
will support you; you have to have a fundraising network that is 
independent from the people who can take it away from you; and you have 
to have a national media voice so that the truth restrains the people 
who want to undercut you.
  There is a major component that I left out of my presentation here, 
Mr. Speaker, and that is I am a Member of Congress from Iowa. I am the 
dean of the Iowa congressional delegation.
  I have been engaged in the first-in-the-Nation Iowa caucus for a long 
time, and I am the only Member that I know of at this elected level who 
has ever made an endorsement of a Presidential candidate and taken all 
the heat from the other candidates that comes from that, but I think it 
is important to do that.
  I have had, along with just a handful of other people, an 
extraordinary opportunity to get to know these Presidential candidates 
one on one, 17 of them the last time. I brought 12 of them into a 
Freedom Summit down in Des Moines to launch the national Presidential 
race. I put 1,250 people in the seats and standing room only. They were 
rock-ribbed, principled, full-spectrum, constitutional Christian 
conservatives.

                              {time}  1345

  And when they heard something they liked, they stood, stomped their 
feet, and applauded and cheered.
  When they heard something they didn't like, they might look at their 
watch, boo, hiss, or walk away.
  They were sorting these candidates and batching up with what they 
believed in. The conservatives did well that day, but the moderates 
didn't do so well. And a couple of moderates didn't show up. So when I 
see that, when the moderates don't show up and the conservatives do 
show up, and--let's see, Walker got a big bounce out of that that day, 
Donald Trump got a big bounce, Ted Cruz got a big bounce, Ben Carson 
got a big bounce that day. They all spoke at the Freedom Summit. And 
that helped launch them into a very competitive Presidential campaign.
  I did everything I could to provide access to the candidates so that 
they could be in Iowa and meeting these caucus-goers and shaking hands 
and doing the things necessary to have a chance at the nomination. That 
functions really well. But what we did, we built the platform around 
that. And the platform for the Presidential candidates was actually 
built in Iowa. And then we put three or four of those candidates on 
that platform, once they come out of the Iowa Caucus, and we send them 
off to New Hampshire. New Hampshire does pretty good, but sometimes 
they will pull a nail or two out. And then they will take that platform 
and send those candidates down to South Carolina and, thankfully, they 
put a lot of those nails back in.
  So by the time you are done with South Carolina, the platform for the 
nominees is settled. And that is the platform that makes it to the 
national convention. That is the platform that arrives in the Oval 
Office. That is the platform that exists there today.
  When I walk into the Oval Office, and I look around, I think, My 
gosh, we really did accomplish this. We accomplished the agenda on 
immigration, for example, and we accomplished the agenda to repeal 
ObamaCare. We didn't get it all done, but it is on there.
  I have in my pocket a picture of all the promises that Donald Trump 
made, there are a lot of checkmarks behind the ones that have been 
accomplished. Those promises, many of them were made in Iowa at the 
launch of this.
  And that is one of the things that has brought out the opposition, 
the establishment people in this country don't want conservatives to 
have a loud voice on who the nominees are going to be. But I say, the 
heart of the heartland is where the families are. It is where the small 
businesses are. Where we are the farthest away from the big businesses, 
we are insulated from that. So our ideology--Democrat and Republican--
is closer to the real people than you might find if you go someplace 
where there is an expensive media market.
  In launching Democrat and Republican candidates, we must have that 
hands-on where they have to meet people and get to know the American 
people. We want real candidates out there on that stage. And the folks 
that had the money--for example, Jeb Bush spent $139 million, and he 
got something like three or five delegates. He is not very happy with 
how that opportunity didn't exist for him in a way that it might have 
for a Ted Cruz or a Ben Carson or a Donald Trump or a Scott Walker. So 
they decided that they don't want to have that voice in northwest Iowa. 
And that is a big piece of this as well.
  Mr. Speaker, the forces behind this, the forces of the swamp that 
have mobilized themselves like never before and pulled off something 
that had never been accomplished before and done with--I will say a 
strategy and millions of dollars, and a network of media that was 
coordinated across this country is all part of this. It is all part of 
my book. I can't begin to express it all here in the time that I have, 
but I do appreciate the time that I have been allowed here on the floor 
of the House of Representatives.
  Mr. Speaker, I want you to know that I appreciate serving with you, a 
man of a happy attitude that expresses it across the aisles in a 
bipartisan way.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge this Congress to take a look at the C-SPAN tape, 
correct the Congressional Record, put the hyphen in where it belongs, 
and recognize that I have been right on this all along. No one has 
found a hole in anything that I have said. You can look through every 
word put out the last 2 years. Everything I have said stands up. It 
doesn't stand up with the New York Times. It doesn't stand up with 
Kevin McCarthy. It stands up when I say it.
  I make that point as I step aside here because it is a challenge. 
Show me where I am wrong. Show me where I have been--I should say--
where I haven't been factual. No one has been able to do that. They 
won't be able to do that. The fact-checked document stands on its own. 
It is completely logical, and it proves a negative, even though 
philosophers have long said that is not possible to do.
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized here to address you on the 
floor of the House of Representatives, and I yield back the balance of 
my time.

[[Page H5142]]

  

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