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“ISSUES OF THE DAY” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H5770-H5771 on July 12, 2019.
The Department is one of the oldest in the US, focused primarily on law enforcement and the federal prison system. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, detailed wasteful expenses such as $16 muffins at conferences and board meetings.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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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.
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.
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