[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 5] [House] [Pages 6134-6137] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]WAR ON CONSERVATIVES The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader. Mr. GOHMERT. It is amazing some of the efforts made to rewrite history and cast things in a light that doesn't exist. So as some people in the administration step up the continued trashing of conservatives in America--we have already seen the assault on conservative groups by the IRS, that does need a special prosecutor, clearly--the assault on people with whom some in the administration disagree, they can't answer questions, and so they make personal attacks. Then our Attorney General makes a speech yesterday in which, because he was busy helping, perhaps, terrorists or Marc Rich or things like that he didn't notice, because I am sure he wouldn't be untruthful or tell a lie, but he doesn't even know how bad it gets in Washington if you are a conservative, if you are George W. Bush, if you are John Ashcroft, if you are Alberto Gonzales. It got pretty brutal here, a lot worse than anything our current Attorney General has seen, and that is even without having to go back and recall the treatment that John Mitchell got. I would say, deservedly so, John Mitchell got the treatment he got. But for any Attorney General to be so ignorant of what has happened in very recent years of the maltreatment and malignment and basically slander of Republicans and a Republican President and Republican Attorneys General is a bit breathtaking. There is a Web site that is Boycott Liberalism. It has a lot of quotes from people. Senator Harry Reid said: President Bush is a liar. I don't recall anyone saying that at our hearings with our current Attorney General. The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said: Bush is an incompetent leader. In fact, he's not a leader. I don't recall anyone saying anything of that magnitude of our current Attorney General or President, not in any of our hearings. Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and U.S. Senator, said: We have a culture of corruption. We have cronyism. We have incompetence. This actually raises a question about pots and kettles calling each other names. Other quotes. John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator and Democratic Vice Presidential nominee: I would say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you've lost your mind. Senator Al Franken said: I think the President highjacked 9/11 and used it to go to war with Iraq in a way that was very divisive. The late Ted Kennedy, as Senator, said: No President in American history has done more damage to our country and our security than George W. Bush. Amazingly, I am not aware of any U.S. President in one party reaching out more to a Senator in the other party than did George W. Bush with Senator Ted Kennedy, and these are the kind of comments he got in response. Senator Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, said: I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country. We are just talking about there has never been an Attorney General or President treated as have been the current ones. Senator Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, said: There has never been an administration, I don't believe, in our history more intent on consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda. She also said: I have been absolutely amazed, even shocked, at the combination of arrogance and incompetence that marks this particular administration. We are just helping those who have short memories or maybe were busy helping terrorists or others get pardons and didn't notice these kind of statements being made. Former Senator and former Vice President Al Gore said: While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that, in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said: Bush is an incompetent leader. In fact, he is not a leader. He is a person who has no judgment, no experience, and no knowledge of the subjects that he has to decide upon. {time} 1315 Quotes go on and on, pages of quotes. But Democratic Senator from Washington, Patty Murray, said, ``He's''--talking about Osama Bin Laden--``been out in these countries for decades building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building daycare facilities, building health care facilities, and these people are extremely grateful. We haven't done that.'' Former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi said, ``I believe that the President's leadership and the actions taken in Iraq''--talking about President Bush--``demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment, and experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers.'' She also made this statement, former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, talking about President Bush: ``I believe that the President's leadership and the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment, experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers,'' basically the same thing again. But, there are some of us that could care less about someone's party or someone's race or someone's gender, someone's age. We don't care. We care about whether you are helping or hurting our country if you are in a position to do one or the other. I would also direct my friends who would care to do research and get the truth before they go accusing, ignorantly, someone who has the gall to question refusal to turn over documents that were provided by the Justice Department to terrorists, convicted terrorists. People who financed terrorism, which made them a part of the terrorist act, convicted of over 100 counts, they were given, their lawyers were given thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of documents. Lawyers were given 9,600 or so transcripts or summaries of transcripts. And Members of Congress are told, as I was in a letter this year in response to my years of trying to get these documents that the Justice Department provided to terrorists, I get a response, basically, saying, hey, here is a Web site, you can look up some exhibits that were admitted in evidence. And here is a public access Web site. I have been asking for 3 years, just give us the documents Justice gave to the terrorists. If somebody wants to try to make something of that, that is [[Page 6135]] their problem. But the Constitution provides that Congress has oversight because that is the only way we know what to fund and what not to fund. That is part of article I, section 8 of the Constitution. So, to be denied documents for 3 years, as I have been, with little coy, useless answers, and then allegations of ulterior motivations, when I want to protect America--and I travel around the world, and I hear moderate Muslim friends, leaders in other countries say, why are you not helping us against radical Islam anymore? You are helping the bad guys. I want to find out what the documentation was and is that the Justice Department has. And they know how to reduce it to disk and provide it to others. I am told they have done that to others in the Justice Department, so do that for Congress. At one point I was told, well, there are classification issues. You gave them to terrorists, your Department did, so it shouldn't be a real classification problem to give them to Members of Congress. So for those who wonder about the treatment of an Attorney General coming for an oversight hearing, we have already seen that the Justice Department repeatedly refused to provide the documentation of what happened in Fast and Furious. And if someone wants to talk about unprecedented treatment, let's look at the facts, just the little ones we know that haven't been covered up by this administration, that haven't been kept secreted by this administration. Thank God, one of the gun store owners who was being pressured by the Justice Department to sell to the people he knew he should not sell to, he recorded some of the conversations. If he had not, you can't help but believe they would have turned on him bigger than they did, because once they found out he had tapes of the conversations, they knew they couldn't completely blame him, because he was saying, in essence, I shouldn't be selling to these people. But he was coerced into selling. People were coerced into selling weapons to people that should not have had them, morally or legally, because the Justice Department wanted to get them to drug cartels in Mexico, where they did, and we know, we have heard that at least a couple of hundred or so Mexicans, each one of them a life worth saving, those lives were taken by guns that this Justice Department forced into the hands of criminals, people that should not have had them. So we would like to know more information about how this all came about. And it is not good enough to say, hey, the Bush Justice Department had a scheme where they had devices, they had guns that they were going to track, just like in drug sales, where you have a controlled sale so you can try to arrest the bad guys and, because of a problem, they got away from them. That is a different thing entirely, of intentionally letting guns get away to criminals who killed hundreds of Mexicans, and at least one American, Brian Terry, and perhaps more. It would be nice if we could get to the bottom of that. Wherever there are big problems in our government, we need to know what they are so we can defund them, or at least bring about accountability, just as my Democratic friends in the Senate repeatedly said, except not so kindly, about the Bush administration and John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. And there were some things I agreed with Senator Schumer on in the Gonzales Justice Department. It was outrageous that they allowed so many National Security Letters to go out without proper basis. I was outraged about that. In fact, if someone cares to check the Record, they can see the way I went after the Bush FBI Director, because I believed then and still believe he did some serious damage to the FBI during the Bush administration. The only difference is, I never heard him run out and give a speech whining about how he was mistreated as he came before me for questioning. He didn't do that. And he actually tried to take actions to correct the problems that I got all over him about. Another difference is, he was a Republican President's FBI Director. But I didn't care what his party was. I didn't care who he was. I thought he was hurting the FBI, and I sounded off. And I was shocked that I did not have more friends on the Democratic side of the aisle join me in going after the Republican-appointed FBI Director. And of course, once he held over and became the FBI Director for this administration, the other side of the aisle got even more kind in its questioning. But one of us--I certainly stayed consistent. But there are many problems in this Justice Department that are very clear. There is an article from 2011, August 26, by Christian Adams, a guy that should know. He was in the Justice Department and had a case ready for judgment against the New Black Panthers who were intimidating voters at a voting place, until the Holder political appointee stepped in and stopped it. Yes, they got one judgment, but basically of no effect. They can go intimidate others at other polling places, and there were no legal actions that were really pursued to provide any teeth. But Christian Adams has an article entitled ``The Politicized Hiring of Eric Holder's Compliance Section.'' He says every single new attorney hired has a history thick with left-wing activism. And then he goes through and talks about it in a very long article, very well-documented. My friend across the building, Ted Cruz, Senator Cruz, invoked Watergate in blasting DOJ's probe of the IRS scandal. This was March 20, this year, this article from The Blaze by Fred Lucas. Senator Cruz said the investigator is a partisan Democrat who has donated over $6,000 to President Obama and Democratic causes. Just as nobody would trust John Mitchell to investigate Richard Nixon, nobody should trust a partisan Obama donor to investigate the IRS' political targeting of President Obama's enemies. But he makes a good point. John Mitchell deserved the criticism he got, but no Attorney General since John Mitchell has the truthful history in their favor to stand up and say, no Attorney General has ever been treated worse than I have. You just have to go back to Alberto Gonzales. Again, I think he deserved some of the criticism he got, especially on the National Security Letter issue, and I am right there thinking it was a disaster, and it shouldn't have been allowed to happen, and that people needed to be held accountable, which is why I called the White House after it came to light that a report had been on the Attorney General's desk before he testified before the Senate that there were no known abuses of the National Security Letters. I told the White House, this is indefensible. This isn't right. We can't defend this. And I wish colleagues across the aisle, when they found similar abuses, problems, fault, would not let party politics or other divisive issues stand in the way of doing what is right. There are transcripts of Senators going after Attorney General Gonzales, Attorney General Ashcroft, or even going back to John Mitchell. This Attorney General, compared to them, doesn't have a lot to complain about. And one thing is interesting. You know, when I was a freshman, the Bush administration was in power. We had a lot of trouble getting documents from the Bush administration. The difference between that one and this one: they would eventually get us the documents. The difference here is they have been there 5 years and they still will not produce documents that should be of critical concern to every American. {time} 1330 Some would say, look, there is no other issue than and concern for America when, in May of 2013, as this article points out from Breitbart: On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee about the recent scandals plaguing the Obama administration. Unfortunately, the committee and America did not learn very much because Holder apparently does not know much about what happens in Washington, D.C. [[Page 6136]] The AP claims the Department of Justice violated their constitutional rights when they obtained 2 months of phone records of reporters. When asked about the scandal, Holder claimed ignorance and that he was not part of the decisionmaking process. He did defend the effort to subvert the press, saying the DOJ wanted to find who leaked information to the AP about a CIA operation in Yemen to stop an airliner bombing plot around the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death. On Tuesday, Holder recused himself from the investigation into the AP scandal and told the committee it was because he had the leaked information. He could not give the exact date he recused himself, and he never put it in writing. It took quite awhile for him to receive confirmation it was Deputy Attorney General James Cole who signed the subpoena for the AP phone records. There are all kinds of reasons to be concerned about what is going on. There are plenty of stories out there. Oh, gee, how about the speech that my friend across the aisle, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, gave where, as reported here from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mr. Ellison said, talking about comparing September 11: It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the communists for it, and it put the leader of that country-- Hitler--in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I am not saying September 11 was a U.S. plan or anything like that because, you know, that's how they put you in the nutball box or dismiss you. But he went on, basically comparing September 11 to Hitler's Reichstag fire, which was set and then blamed on the communists. From CNN, a report on this, Keith Oppenheimer had stated: Well, first of all, Wolf, some of the themes that Keith Ellison is talking about are themes that he has been sounding off for a while. And then Oppenheimer said: The Minneapolis Star Tribune, quoting Ellison at the forum, is saying this about the Vice President: ``It is beneath his dignity in order for him to answer any question from the citizens of the United States. That is the very definition of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and dictatorship.'' In response to a question as to whether Ellison supports a new investigation of the causes of September 11, Ellison made a comparison to the Reichstag fire in Berlin that Adolf Hitler used to consolidate power. And then he quoted my friend across the aisle, with what I just mentioned. So anyway, there are all kinds of accusations. I thought both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush should have done more to defend themselves against the outlandish claims; but one thing George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush never did--no matter what race, creed, color, national religion, gender, age, whenever anybody attacked them--he never resorted to name-calling and, in fact, would often try to point out, actually, they have the right to their opinion. Nowadays, it is a different matter. If someone is concerned that your department or their department would provide discovery documents to convicted terrorists that they are refusing to provide to Congress, that is not an issue of anything other than just not doing what the law requires in the way of oversight. There is so much going on in this country that needs our attention, and one of them is the Department of Justice. Is it the Department of Justice? Is it the Department of ``just us''? There is an article from Red State by Candice Lanier, June 26, 2013, where she entitles the article, ``Sixteen Scandals: The Legacy of Eric Holder,'' and then she goes through and cites 16 reasons we should be very concerned about this Justice Department. One of them quotes Discover the Networks. She says: Holder also took a leadership role with the Student Afro- American Society, which at one point demanded that the school's abandoned ROTC office be renamed the ``Malcolm X Lounge''--``in honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis for nationhood.'' In 1970, Holder was a participant in a 5-day occupation of that office. And, according to some accounts, the occupiers were armed. In addition, Holder and SAAS also occupied the office of Henry Coleman, Dean of Freshmen, until their demands were met. It would appear the SAAS was an advocate of the Black Panthers because, in March 1970, the SAAS released a statement supporting the Black Panthers who were charged with plotting to blow up a police station, department stores, railroad tracks, and the New York Botanical Gardens. It references the discriminatory hiring practices in the Department of Justice. This article points out: In June 2008, Holder admitted to the American Constitution Society, an organization started as a liberal counterweight to the Federalist Society, that the Justice Department was ``going to be looking for people who share our values.'' Then it references Fort Hood and the fact that: Following the Fort Hood attack on November 5, 2009, not one of the postattack reports issued by the Department of Justice mentioned Nidal Hasan's Islamist ideology. It talks further about that, and then it talks about the AP surveillance, the way it went after the Associated Press and cowed them. Number four, the Department of Justice secretly targets Fox News reporter James Rosen. There were issues of credibility in comparing our Attorney General's testimony, saying he didn't know of anyone ever being prosecuted, in essence, and then his signing off on the pursuit of James Rosen. Five is the Marc Rich pardon and that Eric Holder played an important role in what was arguably the most infamous of President Clinton's 176 pardons. He was the billionaire financier and fugitive oil broker who illegally bought oil from Iran. Anyway, President Clinton signed the pardon, later crediting Holder's recommendation as one of the factors that had convinced him to issue the pardon. Number six was the Weather Underground pardon. Holder, as Deputy Attorney General, ``was the gatekeeper for presidential pardons.'' Two of the recipients of Holder's pardons were former Weather Underground members Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans. Number seven--and I am not reading off all the information about these--but seven was: Holder's DOJ threatens free speech. The American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee sponsored an event on June 4, called ``Public Disclosure in a Diverse Society.'' The main speakers for the event were DOJ official Bill Killian, who is the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and FBI Special Agent of the Knoxville Division, Kenneth Moore. What is troubling about the event is that Killian addressed how social media posts and documents deemed inflammatory toward Muslims can be considered a violation of civil rights laws. He went on and he quoted the law, talking about how anybody critical of Islam could be violating the law. He quotes the law: If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, territory, commonwealth, possession, or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both. Talk about a chilling effect. Number eight, hostility towards conservatives. At an American Constitution Society gathering in 2004, Holder made the following comments--and these are all quotes: Conservatives have been defenders of the status quo, afraid of the future, and content to allow to continue to exist all but the most blatant inequalities. Conservatives have ``made a mockery of the rule of law.'' Conservatives are ``breathtaking'' in their ``arrogance,'' which manifests itself in such things as ``attacks on abortion rights,'' ``energy policies that are as shortsighted as they are ineffective,'' and ``tax cuts that disproportionately favor those who are well off and perpetuate many of the inequities in our nation.'' The hallmarks of the ``conservative agenda'' include ``social division, mindless tax cutting, and a defense posture that does not really make us safer.'' Anyway, he has got quite a few quotes like that. But number nine, opposition to Second Amendment rights: In 2008, Eric Holder claimed that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual's right to keep and bear arms, but only applied to government militias. Number 10 was the treatment of terrorists as criminal defendants instead of enemy combatants, as the laws that were passed should have indicated. Number 11 was the Arizona immigration law, how he went after that and he had not even read it. Filed pleadings-- [[Page 6137]] his department filed pleadings, and he made statements about how bad the law was, and he had not even read it. I thought my friend from Texas, Ted Poe, a former judge, had asked one of the stupidest questions I had ever heard in our Judiciary Committee hearing when he asked: Had you read that law before you filed that suit? And the answer was no. I couldn't believe that no lawyer would file a suit declaring a law unconstitutional and he hadn't even read it. Twelve, New Black Panther intimidation. Thirteen, opposition to voter ID laws--and by the way, we have evidence--you have places where photo IDs have been required, and there was actually an increase in minority voting. Fourteen, Fast and Furious, that we can't get to the bottom of because they continue to secrete information about the department's involvement and what they did. Fifteen, purges references to radical Islam, and we know about the purging of FBI training documents so that we don't offend people that want to destroy our way of life and us. Sixteen, about the Islamic outreach, when I was grilling FBI Director Mueller about not even pursuing adequately the information about Tsarnaev being radicalized, I said: you didn't even go to the Muslim mosque in Boston to ask about their radicalization. He said: oh, yes, we did go to the mosque--and then muttered ``in the outreach program.'' They never went to talk to anybody that might know whether Tsarnaev had been radicalized. Then The New York Times has a story blaming the Russians. The Russians and our own intelligence community know anytime you give a heads-up to another country about information that may be helpful to them, you may end up giving away how intelligence is obtained. So it was wonderful that, twice, Russia gave us a heads-up, and instead, we go to the mosque that Tsarnaev attends, with our outreach program from the FBI, instead of to investigate how radicalized this young man had become and the damage and the death and mayhem he was about to cause. If someone wants to say there is another motive for being critical, well, they are living in their own little world. If somebody wants to bring up race, Mr. Speaker, for the record, let me just say, there is one African American I am still furious with. His name is Fred McClure. He was the president of the State of Texas Future Farmers of America. He was the student body president at Texas A&M University, where I attended. He was a good friend. I went to Baylor Law School before him. People say: wow, you really did well, you know, you won an award for a law review article, won best brief award, won moot court. Fred came in behind me and set the place on fire, figuratively speaking, with how well he did and the things he accomplished. {time} 1345 But he went to work for President George H. W. Bush, and in 1990, in December, I begged Fred to come back to east Texas where he grew up in San Augustine and that there were a lot of us that loved him and would get him elected to Congress so we could come back up here to Washington and set things right. And the thing I am still furious at Fred about is, if Fred had taken the encouragement to heart and come back and run for Congress, we could have gotten him elected. And if we had done that, I could have been about a normal life and not had to be here in Congress. With that, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________