Page:CREC-2017-06-08.pdf/109

 June 8, 2017

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

VerDate Sep 11 2014

02:56 Jun 09, 2017

H4813

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — HOUSE

Jkt 069060

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 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

PO 00000

Frm 00109

Fmt 7634

Sfmt 0634

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. b 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

E:CRFMK08JN7.102

H08JNPT1