[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9009-9011]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1815
              FORMER FBI DIRECTOR COMEY'S SENATE TESTIMONY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is indeed an honor to come before and 
stand before the Speaker and stand on this floor where so much great 
debate has occurred over the decades, even back to 150 years ago.
  Now, I have been heard to say over the last few days a number of 
times that I thought the Comey testimony was ultimately the most 
overhyped event since Y2K, much ado about nothing, but one thing came 
through very, very, very clearly. I didn't watch the testimony. I was 
busy presiding over a hearing involving the Justice Department and 
grants to local communities and how that money is being spent, but I 
have gone back and been reviewing the testimony. The thing that strikes 
me most clearly is that our President, Donald J. Trump, is one of the 
most perceptive, intuitive leaders this country has ever had. He wasn't 
sure, apparently, if he could trust Comey.
  Now, we have heard from a lot of other people in the administration, 
some still there, some not. This issue about the President's concern 
for loyalty with Comey indicates our President's gut instinct was right 
on. He was dealing with an FBI Director who was such a political animal 
that he would listen to the Attorney General of the United States and 
instruct him to change his testimony to--I would submit, when you know 
it is an investigation that you are engaged in, looking at the emails 
and the potential criminality of Hillary Clinton, and your boss, the 
Attorney General, said: No, no, no--obviously it is an investigation--
call it a matter.
  Nobody calls the FBI investigations matters. So he has no problem 
changing his statement from the truth to political manipulation to 
cover for Hillary Clinton and to immediately do what his boss tells him 
to do: Lie about it. You know it is an investigation and I know it is 
an investigation, but we need you to lie about it. Just call it a 
matter.
  I have dealt with some of the finest people I have known in my life 
that happened to work for the FBI at the time we were working together. 
I worked with them, and I have never, ever in any Federal court setting 
or Federal investigation setting heard any FBI agent in charge--field 
agent, leader in the FBI, the Justice Department--call an investigation 
a matter. But Mr. Comey is such a political animal that he was willing 
to salute not the flag, but Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch and 
change what he knew to be the truth so that his answer was more 
misleading.
  So it is really interesting. Comey used the word, or said that Trump 
used the word, hoped that he would let it go.
  Let's visit the Constitution briefly here. The Constitution does not 
mention an Attorney General. The Constitution does not mention the 
Federal Bureau of Investigation and does not mention a Federal Bureau 
of Investigation Director. It mentions Congress, it mentions the 
courts, and it mentions the executive branch, the President. It doesn't 
mention FBI Director, Attorney General. It is the President, under our 
Constitution, who is charged with seeing to the prosecution or the 
failure to prosecute as he believes is appropriate.
  So, of course, somebody had to have been committing crimes in the 
Fast and Furious project, whatever you want to call it. I am not sure 
what it was. It sure appeared to be a criminal enterprise with people 
involved from DOJ conspiring to make sure that weapons got into the 
hands of criminals, which, in and of itself, was a crime.
  We also know that by the Department of Justice's representatives 
getting involved during the Obama administration as part of this Fast 
and Furious effort, they called it, guns got into the hands of 
criminals, and Brian Terry was killed, a Federal agent doing his job. 
There is no indication that if the Department of Justice had not forced 
those guns to be sold and to get into the hands of criminals that Brian 
Terry would not be dead.
  If the Department of Justice had not forced this issue, forced guns 
into criminals' hands, we may very well have been hearing Brian Terry 
testify a number of times instead of pointing back toward his murder at 
the hands of criminals who our Department of Justice representatives 
under Eric Holder got guns to.
  It might have been good to have a special counsel in the Fast and 
Furious investigation--or, as Loretta Lynch and Mr. Comey liked to use 
to deceive people, matter, Fast and Furious matter--because the truth 
is they didn't do much of an investigation.
  We saw emails indicating that there was an effort to try to use 
getting those guns into the hands of criminals, drug cartels, as an 
excuse to take away law-abiding Americans' Second Amendment rights and 
continue to pursue that effort.
  We also know that the IRS had people who were working to prevent 
conservatives from having an effect in the 2012 election the way they 
did in 2010. As the movement was growing, the Obama administration used 
the IRS as a political weapon to disarm those who would bring together 
funds and try to defeat President Obama in a second term. That 
certainly deserved a special counsel since all we seemed to get in our 
investigations from Congress' angle was a coverup.
  It harkens us back to the Clinton administration when this tactic was 
discovered by people within the Clinton administration: Just cover 
things up. Just deny, obfuscate, and refuse to allow people to see the 
documentation. Destroy it after somebody dies. Get the records out of 
their office before anyone else has a chance to properly investigate 
what happened.
  Somebody is alleged to have killed themselves at Fort Marcy Park. 
Then as I heard from my friend Dan Burton, they were questioning the 
person that supposedly found the body out there: Well, that is not 
where it was. That is not where the gun was. Everything appears to be 
changed.
  Well, the Clinton administration discovered this wonderful tactic of 
obfuscating: just keep denying and denying the ability to get 
information and records, and if you do it long enough, you run out the 
clock and people don't get prosecuted.
  We have seen that occur for 8 years. There were very, very serious 
matters in which somebody committed crimes. We didn't get a special 
investigator. We didn't get a proper investigation. We got a stonewall 
protecting those who must have done wrong. I am hoping the current 
Attorney General will dig and people that are responsible for crimes 
will be held to account.
  But the fact is it is the President's obligation under the 
Constitution to

[[Page 9010]]

either pursue people or not pursue people. That is why, even though 
many of us were extremely upset that President Obama kept pardoning 
people who were convicted felons, and as much as it upset us that he, 
in a literal sense, not only obstructed justice, he destroyed it, 
unfortunately, the President has authority to demand people not be 
prosecuted.
  So we heard new priorities around the country when President Obama 
took office. He didn't want his Justice Department spending a lot of 
time on enforcing drug laws. It turns out they hardly ever prosecuted. 
Compared to other administrations, they hardly ever prosecuted criminal 
gun violations--far fewer than past administrations--because what they 
wanted to do was allow the gun crimes to continue to ratchet out of 
control and then use that to demand more gun control when they weren't 
even using the laws that were in effect. Instead of enforcing the laws 
in effect, they continued to demand more gun control.
  Just enforce what we had. Most all the crimes that were brought up 
during that period were crimes already without any other gun control 
laws needing to be passed and signed into law. Just enforce what we 
have.
  But that wasn't happening. Nobody stood up and said President Obama 
should be prosecuted for obstruction of justice, because as distasteful 
as it was to me and so many others, the President has a right to set 
priorities as to what his prosecutors will pursue and what will be left 
alone.
  So it is interesting on the Flynn matter. President Trump had every 
right to say: Look, I am giving a pardon, a pass, to this person and to 
that person. Let's move on. I hope you will find something else to do.
  Trump didn't even do that. President Trump said he hoped, an 
aspiration, but there was no obstruction of justice.
  How do we know that? Because we have found, through the testimony of 
former Director Comey, an incredibly innate ability to see everything 
through a political lens instead of a law-and-order lens. That is why 
he could have one Attorney General telling him, ``Change what you are 
going to say so it deceives the public,'' and that is not a problem, we 
don't do a memo about that, but another President indicates: He is 
concerned about my loyalty and he brings it up, so I better do memos so 
that I can take him down later because he doesn't trust me.

                              {time}  1830

  Well, for good reason. The loyalty was to Loretta Lynch, the loyalty 
was to Hillary Clinton, the loyalty was to Barack Obama.
  And Trump, what an incredible innate ability. He knew Comey was not a 
loyal, law-and-order man. He would twist the truth, as he was directed 
by someone else, but he would also twist an untruth through, hurting 
the current President.
  It appears President Donald J. Trump was exactly right in firing 
Comey. We didn't need to continue to have a politically astute diplomat 
wannabe running our FBI. We needed somebody that was law and order, no 
matter what.
  Alan Dershowitz is a staunch Democrat, but through the years and with 
the things I disagreed with him on, I know he is a smart man. Here are 
some of the things he tweeted out:
  ``Comey says he understood word `hope' to be a direction. If so, why 
didn't he tell the President that such a direction would be violation 
of DOJ rules?''
  Well, here, again, the fact is, if Director-at-the-time Comey 
believed there was any effort to obstruct justice, then he was 
committing a crime, a felony, by not reporting it.
  I was surprised that he went as far as he did today--because he did--
by pushing as hard as he did on this idea that saying ``hope'' might 
have been a direction. The more he pushed that, the more he exposed 
himself to prosecution for a felony because he didn't report it.
  But the truth is, even though he wrongly believed that there was 
something--a violation of law or obstruction--it wasn't. If he honestly 
believed that, he had to report it, and he didn't.
  Oh, yeah, he did a memo. I wonder if we would have ever seen that 
memo if he had not been fired. I can guarantee if he had not been 
fired, from what we have now learned today, you can count on the fact 
that he, as Director of the FBI, would make memos any time it might 
help him harm President Donald Trump, but he would continue not to do 
memos when somebody, a Democrat, told him to mislead the public.
  Alan Dershowitz said: If President commits independent crimes, for 
example, Nixon telling the staff to lie to the FBI, that is a crime.
  You can't tell somebody to commit a crime, even if you are President.
  Alan Dershowitz said: Paying dollars to silence witnesses is a crime.
  You can't commit a crime or tell somebody to commit a crime even 
though you are President. That is obstruction. You should be 
prosecuted.
  Mr. Dershowitz said: ``Comey confirmed my view that, under the 
Constitution, the President would have the authority to order FBI 
Director to stop investigating Flynn.''
  He would. Just as Barack Obama says: I pardon you, I am taking away 
the justice that has been done in your case. I am obstructing justice.
  In pardon after pardon, he obstructed justice. But when a President 
does it, as Obama did being President Obama, it was not a crime when he 
pardoned people.
  Now, if you have a President that has somebody rich, whether that is 
their name or just their monetary status, and they give you a bunch of 
their richness and you pardon them, then you may have sold part of your 
office, which could very well be a crime, and probably is.
  But in the case of President Obama, there is no indication anybody 
paid him to pardon people. If nobody paid him, he just did it because 
he thought it was a good idea to have people involved with drugs out on 
the street again, or people at Guantanamo Bay back killing Americans. 
If he thinks that is a good idea, then he can legally obstruct justice, 
which President Obama legally did time and time again.
  Alan Dershowitz also says, talking about Comey: ``He confirmed that 
the President can order anyone to be investigated or not be 
investigated.''
  Dershowitz also said: ``Comey stated the constitutional principle: 
President has authority to direct FBI to end a criminal investigation. 
Can also pardon anyone, ending investigation.''
  There is somebody on the internet that goes by the pseudonym ``Ace of 
Spades.'' This guy has a wicked wit.
  Ace of Spades sent out this tweet as if he is quoting Comey. These 
are Ace of Spades' words--an interpretation of the testimony today--he 
says, Comey: Loretta Lynch told me to lie and I didn't write that down, 
but I wrote down Trump's stuff because I was afraid he would lie.
  Wow. It has got the networks all stirred up that former FBI Director 
Comey came in today and actually exposed the disloyalty to the 
President of the United States, to the Constitution, to the things he 
swore to uphold and protect.
  Let's look at one other thing I hadn't heard anybody else mention. 
When you have an attorney as the FBI Director and he is talking to the 
President of the United States, there is a privilege involved there. 
Even the least modicum of loyalty and honor and integrity would cause 
someone who is taking an oath as an attorney, someone who has taken an 
oath as Director of the FBI, someone that knows their boss is the 
President and that all power is in the President for the executive 
branch and the FBI Director entirely gets his power from the President, 
it would be some smidgeon of honor to want to protect those private 
conversations.
  As far as we know, they weren't classified, but it is something 
called privilege, it is something called loyalty, and it is something 
called honor.
  The testimony we heard today was the former FBI Director saying: When 
it came to President Trump, I wasn't going to honor our privileged 
conversations. I wasn't going to honor the executive privilege. I 
wasn't going to honor the fact that my power as FBI Director and the 
authority to investigate someone or not investigate someone is derived 
entirely from the President of the

[[Page 9011]]

United States. I will honor a person that tells me to misrepresent the 
truth, but I am not going to honor someone who is concerned about 
fairness.
  Even though the FBI Director knows better than most anyone else there 
is no evidence of collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump, 
there is no evidence of collusion with anybody in the Trump 
administration at this time, yet there was no sense of loyalty there.
  Think of Shakespeare's words and the sarcasm of Marc Antony. Brutus 
says he is an honorable man. They are all honorable men. These are 
honorable people who told me to misrepresent the truth to the American 
people and to the press. These are people that love me because I leak 
things.
  I was hoping for one question that I should have contacted one of my 
Senator friends and told them to ask, because I would like to know the 
truth. I know that my Democratic friends were so furious, just livid at 
Comey when, just days before the election, he announces he is reopening 
the investigation.
  The rumor around here was that there were FBI agents who had been 
investigating and they knew that Hillary Clinton had violated the law 
all kinds of ways. Intent was not an issue. She had taken classified 
material into an unclassified computer and sent it to unclassified 
computers.
  Comey said: Clean bill of health. Everything is good.
  And they knew it wasn't good. So when they saw this was the rumor 
floating around, I would like to know the truth.
  You know some FBI agents had to have found Anthony Weiner's computer 
and found tens of thousands of emails that we were told had been 
destroyed. Oh, we can't get those tens of thousands of emails. They are 
gone. And then they found them. Not only were they not in a classified 
area, not in a SCIF, not in a classified connection, laptop, not even 
in a government employee's laptop. They were on the laptop of someone 
who had shown the worst judgment in the world.
  You want to talk about the potential for blackmailing--although, 
probably by this time, I don't know what you would have to come up with 
to blackmail him, because it is pretty well all out there. Nonetheless, 
all of these emails were found that were supposed to be gone. There is 
absolutely no question that some of them came to Hillary Clinton, were 
sent to an unclassified setting, and now, not only that, they are in 
the hands of Anthony Weiner, who has had his own criminal justice 
issues.
  The rumor continued that we had such honorable FBI agents that they 
said, in essence: Mr. Director, clearly, this is criminal material and 
evidence. If you don't announce you are reopening the investigation, we 
are going to resign, have a press conference, and show the world that 
you have been covering for Hillary Clinton the whole time.
  Now, that was the rumor. If that were true, and, under those type 
circumstances, Director Comey then rushes out just days before the 
election and said, I am reopening the investigation because we found 
these emails, then that would make sense. He certainly would want FBI 
agents to completely destroy any election chances just days before the 
election of Hillary Clinton.
  If Director Comey went out and said: I am reopening the 
investigation, even though Republicans were rejoicing and Democrats 
were livid, as I pointed out to someone back at the time in the media, 
I guess it could hurt Hillary Clinton.
  But if Director Comey comes out a day or two before the election and 
says there is nothing here, clean bill of health, Hillary Clinton is 
great, no problems, when we knew he didn't have time, nobody had time 
to adequately review the tens of thousands of emails, you could run a 
few algorithms. Real law enforcement means looking at the evidence line 
by line--I have known people who did it; I have done it in a civil 
setting--until you find the smoking gun. But you have got to go through 
the monotony of reviewing each of those.

                              {time}  1845

  They had no time to do that, and yet former Director Comey came out, 
clean bill of health. It could not have been discerned in that amount 
of time like that. So it appeared pretty clearly the reason he said we 
are reopening the case was so he could say we closed it, to eliminate 
any chance of even a non-FBI person who comes forward and says, you 
know, there are classified emails that ended up on Anthony Weiner's 
computer that came from Hillary Clinton, to Huma, and to Weiner. There 
were crimes here, and the FBI Director is covering for him. That would 
likely have brought down Hillary Clinton much worse than the defeat she 
suffered.
  So it is just interesting, but, Mr. Speaker, the irony with which 
former Director Comey's testimony drips this evening is that our 
President, Donald J. Trump, he has got good gut instincts. He had 
concerns that former Director Comey was disloyal, was manipulative, 
that he may be someone that the United States Government should not 
trust, and it turns out President Trump's gut instincts were exactly 
right.
  He committed no crime. That has become clear. And so now we expect we 
will see the media and my friends on the other side of the aisle quit 
talking about Russia--there is nothing there, there has been nothing 
there--unless we start looking at potential prosecution for taking 
millions and millions of dollars from owners of Uranium One, who gave 
those to the Clinton Foundation, which then again ended up benefiting 
the Clinton family, and Hillary Clinton then approves Russia getting 
around 25 percent of our uranium production, to the potential detriment 
and, possibly in future altercations, death of Americans at the hands 
of the uranium that Hillary Clinton profited from potentially mightily, 
even if it wasn't directly, and yet America suffered.
  Look, it is time to talk about real crimes, investigate real crimes, 
investigate racketeer influence of corrupt organizations that would pay 
for people to commit violence at Trump events. Now we are talking.
  America deserves better, and thank God we are going to have a new FBI 
Director. Former Director Comey did some good things while at the FBI, 
but, unfortunately, we saw the extent that politics tainted the 
Director today.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________