[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 13570-13573]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     THE INVESTIGATIONS OF CONGRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  There are a couple of issues that are certainly worth elaborating on 
today. One is codified in The Wall Street Journal article from 
September 11, yesterday, and 7:35 p.m. is when it's timed out. It's 
regarding IRS Supervisor Lois Lerner. The article is entitled ``Lois 
Lerner's Own Words.''
  The article reads:

       Congress' investigation into the IRS targeting of 
     conservatives has been continuing out of the Syria headlines, 
     and it's turning up news. Emails unearthed by the House Ways 
     and Means Committee between former director of Exempt 
     Organizations Lois Lerner and her staff raise doubts about 
     IRS claims that the targeting wasn't politically motivated 
     and that low-level employees in Cincinnati masterminded the 
     operation.
       In a February 2011 email, Ms. Lerner advised her staff, 
     including then Exempt Organizations technical manager Michael 
     Seto and then Rulings and Agreements director Holly Paz, that 
     a Tea Party matter is ``very dangerous'' and is something 
     ``counsel and Lerner adviser Judy Kindell need to be in on.'' 
     Ms. Lerner adds, ``Cincy should probably NOT have these 
     cases.''
       That's a different tune than the IRS sang in May when 
     former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller said the Agency's 
     overzealous enforcement was the work of two ``rogue'' 
     employees in Cincinnati. When the story broke, Ms. Lerner 
     suggested that her office had been unaware of the pattern of 
     targeting until she read about it in the newspaper. ``So it 
     was pretty much we started seeing information in the press 
     that raised questions for us, and we went back and took a 
     look,'' she said in May.

  Mr. Speaker, so no one misunderstands, it is a crime to give false 
information to Congress.
  The article goes on:

       Earlier this summer, IRS lawyer Carter Hull, who oversaw 
     the review of many Tea Party cases and questionnaires, 
     testified that his oversight began in April 2010. Tea Party 
     cases under review are ``being supervised by Chip Hull at 
     each step,'' Ms. Paz wrote to Ms. Lerner in a February 2011 
     email. ``He reviews info from TPs--or Tea Partys--
     correspondence to TPs, et cetera. No decisions are going out 
     of Cincy until we go all the way through the process with the 
     (c)(3) and (c)(4) cases here.''
       The emails also put the targeting in the context of the 
     media and congressional drumbeat over the impact of 
     conservative campaign spending on the 2012 elections. On July 
     10, 2012, then Lerner adviser Sharon Light emailed Ms. Lerner 
     a National Public Radio story on how outside money was making 
     it hard for Democrats to hold their Senate majority.

  It certainly appears that the IRS was weaponized for the political 
purpose of one party, which would, of course, be one of the worst 
nightmares for the Founders of this country. Of course, George 
Washington didn't even want us to have political parties--he warned of 
the danger there--and here we are, all this time later, with a group of 
Democratic operatives who are doing things with the IRS that Richard 
Nixon could have only dreamed of doing.
  This article from The Wall Street Journal goes on:

       The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had complained 
     to the Federal Election Commission that conservative groups 
     like Crossroads GPS and Americans

[[Page 13571]]

     for Prosperity should be treated as political committees 
     rather than 501(c)(4)s, which are tax-exempt social welfare 
     groups that do not have to disclose their donors. ``Perhaps 
     the FEC will save the day,'' Ms. Lerner wrote back later that 
     morning.

                              {time}  1315

  Having been a district judge presiding over criminal cases, that is 
what you would call, Mr. Speaker, a statement against interests by Ms. 
Lerner in a prior communication that directly contradicts what she said 
the motivation was. I think there are criminal implications here that 
need to be followed up.
  In any event, the article goes on:

       That response suggests Ms. Lerner's political leanings, and 
     it also raises questions about Ms. Lerner's intentions in a 
     separate email exchange she had when an FEC investigator 
     inquired about the status of the conservative group, the 
     American Future Fund. The FEC and IRS don't have the 
     authority to share that information under section 6103 of the 
     Internal Revenue Code. But the bigger question is: Why did 
     they want to? After the FEC inquiry, the American Future Fund 
     also got a questionnaire from the IRS.

  Again, that's from The Wall Street Journal dated last night.
  When one party in power in the executive branch can weaponize its 
Federal agencies against its political opponents, unless it is stopped, 
this little experiment in democracy will come to an end. It will bring 
about the very things that the Founders had hoped would not happen but 
were realistic enough to talk about them at some length about when and 
if we might move to one person being able to grasp control of the 
Federal Government.
  Of course, one of the things they used to try to keep that from 
happening was to give Congress the power of the purse, to give Congress 
oversight over the executive and judicial branches. When we've had 
Congress try to do oversight, whether it's over Fast and Furious, 
Benghazi, the IRS scandal, we've met with nothing but blinded 
opaqueness--not transparency--from this administration. They have 
obfuscated constantly, done everything they can to prevent Congress 
from getting the truth about what they have called even phony scandals.
  If they're so phony, why don't you get the transparency out here, Mr. 
Speaker? Let's get people out here with the truth and then we can see 
fully whether or not they're phony scandals. The more this drip, drip, 
drip of information comes out, the more it becomes clear as to why this 
administration has been hiding evidence and attempting to keep Congress 
from discovering things.
  I have personally been pushing for many months now to have a special 
prosecutor investigate the Internal Revenue Service situation with 
regard to targeting for political purposes. The reason is that there 
are statutes that pertain to the IRS that could make some of this 
conduct potential crimes for which people could go to prison.
  I am so proud that I became a friend of Chuck Colson before he 
passed. I think he is one of the great Christian luminaries of the 20th 
and 21st centuries. His becoming a Christian all came about after his 
arrogance and his willful disobedience of the law during the Nixon 
administration brought him to prison. He had possession of information 
from the FBI about someone. As I recall, that got him about 1\1/2\ 
years in prison. Yet, we have seen during the close of the Clinton 
years as President, one man having, at the White House, about 1,000 FBI 
files. If he had been held to the same standard as Chuck Colson, he 
would never have gotten out of prison, but nobody went to prison.
  We've seen, as time has gone on and abuses within the executive 
branch have not been dealt with properly, the abuses have continued and 
gotten worse. From reports I hear from conservative groups, whether Tea 
Party, pro-Israel, pro-marriage, as it's been known throughout the 
history of mankind as being between a man and a woman, groups that just 
wanted the Constitution followed are all coming under attack--not all 
of the groups have, but most of the groups that have have been these 
type of groups--from the IRS.
  Then I hear from others who are being hit by inquiries from the FEC, 
not about Democratic matters, but about contributions to the Republican 
candidates and party. Then we hear that the EPA and other Federal 
agencies are going after conservatives.
  It is unbelievable how powerful this government has gotten and how 
dramatically it can affect the outcome of an election. We must make 
sure that these kinds of abuses stop. We have the power of the purse to 
stop it, and we should. If the administration is not going to be 
forthcoming with information about the IRS, then it may be necessary to 
defund part of the executive branch until such time as they become 
truthful.
  The Department of Justice still has not been forthcoming on 
information that in our Judicial Committee we've been trying to get. We 
still haven't gotten answers to all of the matters that ended up 
resulting in the Attorney General of the United States being held in 
contempt for failing and refusing to answer.
  It would seem that in the Fast and Furious scandal, where this 
administration saw to it that 2,000 or so guns made their way into the 
hands of drug cartels in Mexico, resulting in the loss of hundreds of 
lives in Mexico and at least one or more here in the United States, 
that someone should be held to account. When no one is held to account, 
when there is no accountability, the abuses get worse. That's what 
we're hearing.
  You would have thought once the IRS scandal had been exposed that 
people would be more cautious about going after conservative groups for 
political purposes. Since no one has been held accountable yet, no 
budgets cut, the arrogance and the political maneuvering within Federal 
agencies seems to be growing much worse.
  I'm hoping that my friends on the other side of the aisle will 
understand that the pendulum swings back and forth. I cannot imagine a 
single of my Democratic friends across the aisle being nearly as 
composed as we've been on the Republican side of the aisle about the 
abuses if the shoe were on the other foot and those abuses were over 
Democratic groups that were trying to elect the next Democratic 
President. If they were, I should be helping the Democrats and I would 
help the Democrats, because there's no place for an administration that 
weaponizes for political purposes the agencies under its control. We've 
gone for over 200 years fighting and doing what we could to avoid that 
happening, yet here it's happening.
  It is a Federal agency that I want to go to next that's been involved 
in carrying out the will of this administration.
  Here's an article from yesterday from Breitbart, written by John 
Sexton. He says:

       It has been nearly a year since the attack which killed 
     four Americans in Benghazi. During that time, various minute-
     by-minute accounts of the attack have been published. In 
     addition, the administration's decisions to refuse additional 
     security requests and to revise its talking points after the 
     attack have been examined in detail.

  Mr. Speaker, before I go on, I would like to grab a couple of 
posters.
  I would have felt good in life having Ty Woods and Glen Doherty 
covering my back, just as they were trying to do for the survivors for 
our American Government workers at our consulate in our annex in 
Benghazi.
  These are the four people we've lost: Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, and 
our two former Navy seals, Ty Woods and Glen Doherty. They deserve the 
truth to come out.
  This article continues:

       But Benghazi may have been a case where most observers have 
     missed the forest for the trees. This is not an attempt to 
     add new information so much as it is to collate the 
     information that already exists from the most reputable 
     journalistic sources.
       To begin with, Benghazi was a CIA operation involving 
     weapons, one which had no cover beyond a small mission that 
     provided a diplomatic fig leaf for the effort. Officially, 
     the CIA was there to track and collect dangerous weapons left 
     over from the war that ousted Qadhafi. But the evidence 
     suggests that the CIA was also either tacitly or actively 
     involved in a multinational effort to ship those weapons to 
     Syrian rebels. Our covert effort in Benghazi, Libya, was 
     connected to our escalating involvement in Syria.
       The general outlines of this CIA effort have been reported. 
     One fact which has not been highlighted is that the U.N. arms 
     embargo of Libya, which the United States

[[Page 13572]]

     helped pass in 2011, makes shipping weapons in or out of the 
     country a violation of international law. Indeed, the way the 
     U.N. resolution is written, even knowingly allowing such 
     shipments to take place may be a violation of the agreement.

  I want to add parenthetically here that some of our concerns with 
having a world court and international tribunals that have jurisdiction 
over American citizens is that they may have laws that they decide to 
enforce that are against or outside what our United States Constitution 
allows. I would submit that American individuals, whether they're CIA 
agents or military, should be accountable to the United States and 
under the United States Constitution and not some world court. And it 
should be worth noting that as this administration pushed U.N. 
resolutions--I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is, but if 
individuals within this administration then violated the international 
law that they pushed to create, then they probably need to be careful 
when they're traveling in years after they leave the White House or the 
administration efforts because, who knows, you might get an indictment 
somewhere in one of these international tribunals that you violated the 
U.N. law you passed. You got guns into or out of Libya, you violated 
the law.
  People in this country need to understand that participating in the 
making of laws and that participating in the violation of laws have 
consequences.
  This article continues:

       In 2012, the Obama administration publicly claimed it was 
     working on diplomatic and humanitarian responses to the 
     situation in Syria. But behind the scenes, the United States 
     was aware that a network of arms shipments was being created 
     to support the rebels. This network involved shipping weapons 
     from Qatar and, later, Libya to Turkey where they could be 
     taken across the border and distributed to militia in Syria.
       In June of 2012, The New York Times reported that a 
     contingent of CIA agents were ``operating secretly'' in 
     Turkey to help vet which groups would receive these weapons. 
     But later reporting by the Times would indicate the CIA was 
     doing more than vetting.

                              {time}  1330

  The article goes on down and mentions that The Wall Street Journal 
reported at the time, this was back in June, that:

       The Central Intelligence Agency has begun moving weapons to 
     Jordan from a network of secret warehouses and plans to start 
     arming small groups of vetted Syrian rebels within a month, 
     expanding U.S. support of moderate forces battling President 
     Bashar al-Assad, according to diplomats and U.S. officials 
     briefed on the plans. To sum up, the CIA encouraged the 
     creation of a multinational arms pipeline, helped shop for 
     weapons to fill it, vetted the groups who would receive those 
     weapons in Syria and, since June of 2013, contributed U.S. 
     weapons to the mix. With that backdrop in place, we can now 
     return our attention to Libya.
       During the U.S. involvement in overthrowing Libyan dictator 
     Muammar Qadhafi during 2011, the Obama administration became 
     aware that shipments of weapons were making their way to 
     Qadhafi's troops, allowing them to resupply themselves and 
     pose a greater threat to civilians.

  I might add parenthetically that with Qadhafi, that Qadhafi was an 
ally of this administration and this country at the time, that this 
administration chose to destroy and help remove.
  The article says:

       So in February the U.S. and other allied nations including 
     the U.K. and France pushed for a package of international 
     sanctions which became U.N. Security Council Resolution 1970. 
     Resolution 1970 condemned the bombing of civilians, imposed 
     travel restrictions on Qadhafi and his inner circle, froze 
     assets and, importantly, banned any transfer of arms to or 
     from Libya. In addition, Resolution 917 requires member 
     states, upon discovery of such arms, to destroy them.
       A second resolution, number 1973, was passed a month later 
     in March 2011. It created a no-fly zone and reaffirmed that 
     member states were expected to help enforce the embargo by 
     inspecting any sea or air vessels believed to be shipping 
     weapons to or from Libya. If discovered, such weapons were to 
     be destroyed. But despite Resolution 1970, The New York Times 
     reported in April 2011 that shipments of arms were reaching 
     Libyan rebels from Qatar. Another in-depth story published in 
     December 2012 describes how the U.S. winked at these 
     shipments despite concerns that some weapons were falling 
     into the hands of extremists.

  Parenthetically, I might insert, duh.
  The article goes on:

       In fact, the nature of our military strategy in Libya made 
     partnering with Qatar necessary. The Obama administration 
     wanted to avoid getting immersed in a ground war, which 
     officials feared could lead the United States into another 
     quagmire in the Middle East. As a result, the White House 
     largely relied on Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, two 
     small Persian Gulf states and frequent allies of the United 
     States. After discussions among members of the National 
     Security Council, the Obama administration backed the arms 
     shipments from both countries, according to two former 
     administration officials briefed on the talks. ``The UAE was 
     asking for clearance to send U.S. weapons,'' said one former 
     official. ``We told them it's okay to ship other weapons.''
       But the American support for the arms shipments from Qatar 
     and the Emirates could not be completely hidden. NATO air and 
     sea forces around Libya had to be alerted not to interdict 
     the cargo planes and freighters transporting the arms into 
     Libya from Qatar and the Emirates, American officials said.

  Again, that would be a direct violation of the U.N. resolution that 
we helped pushed into international law.
  The article says:

       This pattern of winking at violation of the U.N. arms 
     embargo of Libya was repeated after Qadhafi's ouster. With 
     the war in Libya at an end and the one in Syria ramping up, 
     the direction of the arms pipeline simply reversed itself. 
     Whereas weapons had been coming into Libya from Qatar, they 
     now headed out of Libya back to Qatar and from there on to 
     either Mali or Syria by way of Turkey. A June 21, 2013 New 
     York Times story points out that local militias were 
     organizing these shipments--including flights this year from 
     Tripoli and Benghazi. But these shipments out of Libya are 
     said to have been taking place for a year, beginning several 
     months before the 9/11 attack in Benghazi--

that killed these four American patriots.
  To sum up, the U.S. approved and cleared a path for a pipeline of 
weapons into Libya during the revolution in 2011. That pipeline would 
eventually reverse course to provide the same spare weapons to rebel in 
Syria. Both efforts seem to violate the U.N. resolutions which the 
United States helped pass in early 2011. But late in 2011 the United 
States realized its revolution on the cheap in Libya had a worrisome 
downside. Thousands of dangerous anti-aircraft weapons were loose in 
Libya, attracting militants who might wish to use them to commit 
terrorist acts against civilian air traffic. Something had to be done.
  So the article goes on to talk about how we sent people into Libya to 
try to reclaim the weapons that we had helped provide, including 
surface-to-air missiles. The article says:

       A month later, just three days after the 
     9/11 attack in Benghazi, the Times of London reported that a 
     Libyan ship carrying 400 tons of weapons, including SAM-7 
     surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles, docked in Turkey. This 
     was the largest known shipment of weapons to Syria at the 
     time. The ship's captain, Omar Mousaeeb, was from Benghazi.

  The article goes on to make light of the allegation that this is a 
phony scandal. If it's so phony, why is there so much in the way of 
effort to keep Congress from knowing what really happened? Reports have 
been that we have CIA agents with direct knowledge of what happened 
during the death of our four patriots. They are being polygraphed every 
30 days to keep them quiet, and demanding to know if anyone has leaked 
any information to Congress or the media because this administration is 
doing absolutely everything they can to keep us from getting to the 
truth of what happened there.
  And I have been greatly encouraged this week, and in a trip to the 
Middle East, where, over the safety and the future of the United 
States, people in a bipartisan way were very concerned about our 
involvement in Syria, that we should not get involved in Syria, that it 
would be a huge mistake. Some say Members of Congress should never 
travel outside their district or Washington, D.C., but what I have 
seen, and especially from a trip to the Middle East last week, we're 
not getting the straight information from this administration. If we 
want to know what's really going on, where we are appropriating money, 
where we are making policy through our control of the purse strings--or 
lack of control--we've got to go to those areas and talk to the leaders 
involved. It's amazing what you find out. When leaders of allied 
countries tell us we don't understand you,

[[Page 13573]]

what you are doing. Do you not know you went to war in Afghanistan for 
the Muslim Brotherhood--against the Muslim Brotherhood? There you were 
fighting the Taliban, and then you go to Libya, and--well, first to 
Egypt. We have helped the Muslim Brotherhood in the wrong places, and 
it needs to stop in Syria as well.
  With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________