July 12, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 117 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session

[Pages H5770-H5771]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1430
                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it has been an interesting day. It is 
amazing we voted on a National Defense Authorization Act. That is 
normally a bipartisan action here in the House. It is normally quite a 
compromise. But this NDAA didn't end up being that way because it had 
so many different leftist dreams inserted into it that had nothing to 
do with the national defense. It is rather a shame. It is something 
that has to be worked on. We have got to be able to defend ourselves 
and properly pay those who are doing so, or trying to do so.
  It was a sad day that we did not pass that with the same 
bipartisanship that we have had in the past. I hope that changes for 
the future. There are only a few areas like that where we have had 
bipartisanship in the past, and I hope we can get back to it.
  One area where there hasn't been a lot of bipartisanship at all has 
occurred in the area of the great tragedy, crisis, emergency now, that 
is occurring on our southern border. It is amazing because we have 
heard for months that there was a manufactured crisis, it wasn't really 
a crisis on our southern border, that President Trump was just making 
it up, that Republicans were just making it up. There was no crisis 
there. Nothing to see. We can just keep moving along because there is 
no problem on the southern border.
  Well, there was a crisis. There wasn't a disaster occurring there. 
And by virtue of the fact that people in other countries saw that the 
majority of the House of Representatives was sending them messages 
about what they were doing and saying here, that there was not going to 
be any wall, there was not going to be the kind of border security that 
we should have, and, in fact, more and more people seem to be 
advocating that we have no border at all.

[[Page H5771]]

  The fact is that if a nation has no borders, it is no longer a 
nation. And yet, I know there are those here who think America is 
horrible, that it is this horrendous, imperialistic hegemony, always 
trying to take advantage of others. They refuse to face the fact there 
has never been a more generous nation than the United States. If we 
were imperialistic, they would not be speaking German in Germany, or 
French in France, or Japanese in Japan. This is not an imperialist 
nation. We are not out to colonize the world.
  And it is amazing how some who would accuse us of that, they are 
doing what has become so common here in Washington, and that is 
projecting. If somebody does something inappropriate, harmful, or 
hateful, then they accuse their opponents of doing exactly what they 
did.
  We will be getting into some of that type of projecting as we 
continue in our Judiciary Committee in the next couple of weeks, 
continuing to take up the Mueller report.
  They know now, there is no question, the Clinton campaign paid a 
foreign agent to gather information, from what he has since admitted, 
who probably worked for Putin--could have very well worked for Putin, 
that is--and gave false information that was used and was called a 
dossier--of course, giving dossiers a bad name--that was used to try to 
stop a Presidential candidate. And, at the same time, it was used by a 
newly weaponized Department of Justice, FBI, and intelligence 
community, in at least part of it, some at the very top, to try to win 
an election. We hadn't had that before.
  Now, we have known for some time now that J. Edgar Hoover was at the 
FBI so long that he began to use the FBI, not as a political weapon to 
win for one party or another, but just as his weapon to be able to get 
what he wanted from presidents, regardless of their party.
  I recall seeing the FBI interview, retired, talking about Hoover 
sending them to watch the apartment of a woman with whom President 
Kennedy was supposedly having an affair, and they watched it be 
burglarized. They didn't report it or didn't file charges. In fact, 
they wanted to find out what exactly was stolen during the burglary.
  They never reported it because their job was to gather information 
for the head of the FBI. The head of the FBI could then use it to 
prevent a president from doing anything the FBI director didn't want 
him to do, which, as I understand it, gave rise to the term limits for 
an FBI director. I think that was a very good thing.
  I thought it was a bad thing when President Obama extended Robert 
Mueller's 10-year term by 2 years. He was a fiasco. He was a disaster. 
He ran off thousands and thousands of years of experience. And I can't 
help but think that if Mueller had not instituted a policy, personnel 
policy, that ran off thousands and thousands of years of experience, 
some of his best people around the country and the world, that there 
would not have been the atmosphere that existed with McCabe as acting 
FBI director. People like Strzok in charge of counterintelligence, Lisa 
Page, people who used the FBI as just a political tool, a weaponized 
political tool, and people in the DOJ who we are finding out more about 
all the time, whether it is Loretta Lynch and, before that, Eric 
Holder.
  But if Mueller had not run off so many of our best long-serving FBI 
agents, I still continue to believe there would have been people around 
when Strzok, McCabe, and others were trying to use the FBI as a 
political weapon. There would have been longer-serving people who would 
have said: You can't do this. This is not what the FBI is about.
  But Mueller wanted nothing but yes people around him: people who 
would salute him, figuratively speaking, and the flag and do exactly 
what he said without reservations. So he got much younger agents in 
charge all around the country and the world, people that would not be 
able to say: Sir, I know that seems like a good idea, but I was here 20 
years ago when we tried that, and it was a disaster. I would recommend 
looking back at the failure before, before you push us into this new 
type of activity.

  And, of course, he wouldn't listen to anybody when he wasted millions 
of dollars on computer and software programs. But that, to me, was not 
near the biggest problem as the damage he had done with the FBI.
  He came out with a report that is just abysmal. I mean, when I was an 
assistant district attorney, fresh out of law school, and I was asked 
to put something together about this case or that case, what I put 
together was a lot better than anything Mueller put together. That was 
a political document.
  And I know I have some Republican friends, media friends, who think 
the new Horowitz IG report is going to be just breathtaking. But the 
trouble is, he already had one report. As I told him in our hearing, he 
spent about 500 pages documenting the most outrageous and unbelievable 
bias and prejudice against a candidate, Donald Trump, and in favor of a 
candidate, Hillary Clinton. He documents just outrageous, blatant 
bigotry against a party, a candidate. And, as I told him at the 
hearing: I think you realize, as you gathered all of that devastating 
evidence of outrageous prejudice in the FBI and the DOJ, and you 
realize, whoops, Democrats got me here. This is not going the way my 
friends would want it to go, so perhaps I better throw them a bone, 
which he didn't just throw them a bone, he threw them the whole rib-eye 
and said: Even though we got 500 pages documented of the most 
ridiculous, outrageous prejudice and bias, and even though every 
investigation ended up with a conclusion that was totally consistent 
with all the bigotry and bias and prejudice, I find that there was no 
relationship between the outrageous prejudice and the conclusion to the 
cases coming out exactly consistent with the bias.
  It was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.
  So he showed us that he was not capable of giving us a proper 
conclusion in the first Horowitz inspector general report. So I would 
just encourage people, don't get your hopes up that he is going to man 
up and do the right thing, or woman up, whichever you prefer, in the 
next Horowitz IG report. I hope he does. I pray he does do the right 
thing. But that remains to be seen.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________