The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“ISSUES OF THE DAY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H8136-H8141 on Oct. 24, 2017.
The State Department is responsibly for international relations with a budget of more than $50 billion. Tenure at the State Dept. is increasingly tenuous and it's seen as an extension of the President's will, ambitions and flaws.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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ISSUES OF THE DAY
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Dunn). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I do greatly appreciate my friend across the aisle. Mr. Garamendi made some good points. For example, the people speak, and we are thankful they do. And that is why, when the Democratic House Members and Democratic Senate Members voted to pass something known as ObamaCare--it is hard to call it the Affordable Care Act because it has come at the cost of some people's lives, their doctors, their insurance policies, their medicines they needed--but the American people did speak, and they said, ``Not again,'' and they put Democrats out of the majority as a result of that bill.
As I explained to some of my colleagues in the Republican Conference who were saying that the Speaker is the one who got us the majority back, I pointed out in conference, if you look at the polls, it is very clear. No one person got us the majority back in November 2010. The Democrats got the Republicans the majority back.
The polls back then showed that we were not trusted any more than we had been so much in the past, as they were, the voters were just upset with the Democrats passing a bill they didn't want, that the Democrats had not read, and didn't know what it said, and they were going to have to pass it to find out what was in it.
And they were lied to repeatedly. You can keep your insurance if you like it. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, and all those. Turns out they knew in advance--not all of the people here, but the people in the Obama administration who kept saying it, they knew they were lying because they knew people would not keep their insurance whether they liked it or not; they would not keep their doctors if they liked them as they may well not be in the network and probably wouldn't be in many networks.
So it is so true that the people speak, and thank goodness they do. And then they have returned, not only Republicans to majorities in the House, repeatedly, on the promise of repealing ObamaCare, but also gave the Senate the majority twice now on the promise to repeal ObamaCare and, unfortunately, the Senate has not delivered.
We passed a bill here in the House, it was after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a terrible bill at first that would have allowed premiums to continue to go up. Some say, yeah, but you should have voted for it; it would give the President some wind at his back.
But when the American people found out that premiums were going to continue to go up, their deductibles would continue to go up, the insurance companies would continue to get bailouts after record profit years, they were not going to be returning Republicans to the majority.
So it is still very critical that we keep our promises and we take a lesson from the actual planks of the platform that got our great President elected: number one, build a wall and secure the border; number two, repeal ObamaCare; number three, we would have tax reform. Those seem to be the three biggest promises that most all of us made on our side of the aisle.
The reason ObamaCare was not, at least the majority of it, repealed was because the Senate could not bring itself to act because there were some Senators who decided that, after winning their election, promising in the primary and general election that if you elect me, I will be the one who can get ObamaCare repealed, they decided to break that pledge, break that repeated promise.
So the thing I am grateful to the President--well, actually a number of things, but one is that he continues to say: We are not done. We are not through. We are going to repeal at least most of ObamaCare.
We have got to. People have got to have relief. They have got to. They cannot continue on like they are.
Obviously, we can see now, in hindsight, ObamaCare was designed to fail. Unfortunately, the insurance companies did not realize that when they signed on to ObamaCare, they were signing on to their death warrants; that the designers were counting on insurance companies to have people at the top who were so overwhelmed with greed they would not see the end coming as it came barreling toward them. They would be busy making record profits, getting bailouts, until the American people said we can't stand it anymore. The insurance companies had record profits and still got bailed out.
We never thought we would say this, but surely the government would be better than these greedy insurance companies; and that would be the end of the insurance companies.
And sure, some of the insurance executives would have taken their golden parachute and their millions after record profits and dropped out before the industry that made them rich ceased to exist, but that day is still coming if we don't act; and the American people would then be resolved to have much worse healthcare than the VA because the government would be the only game in town.
I know, from talking to one legislator in England, I was surprised. I thought everybody was mandated to be part of the government healthcare there. And it was true, but he said that his wife had had cancer, and, fortunately for them, they could afford to pay the private insurance above the ridiculously wasteful insurance the Britons have.
I remember looking at the numbers back in 2010, when we were debating ObamaCare, and seeing at that time that someone who was diagnosed with breast cancer at a similar time in the staging of cancer, breast cancer, as someone in the U.S., as someone in England, that the American had a 20 percent better chance of surviving than the British citizen under British healthcare did. That is terrifying to some of us. We don't want the kind of healthcare England has.
So if you have a wife and three daughters, like I do, the chances are much better that you will lose one of them if you have British-type healthcare.
I have one guy from Tyler, who lives in Tyler, was from Canada originally, said, his father was put on the list to have bypass surgery in Canada, and after 2 years of waiting, he died. It kind of sounds like the VA and the problems that have been experienced by some of our veterans.
But I would submit, if those who have laid down much of their lives for their country in our armed services are treated the way many of our veterans have been treated, then you can't expect that American citizens that have never offered to lay down their life for their country would be treated much better.
We need to get off the track we are on. We need to return healthcare back to the control of a patient and a doctor, and get the insurance companies and the government out from between the patient and the doctor. We can do that with the kind of thing the President has been talking about, health savings accounts.
Instead of paying $1,000 a month to an insurance company, put $800 or
$900 in a health savings account; start building this huge healthcare, health savings account. And sure, there will be some people who are chronically ill or chronically poor. Those who don't have to be chronically poor, that could work, as we found out when welfare reform took place in the mid-nineties by the first Republican majority in many decades; as they found out, statistics showed, and there is a graph I saw at a conference in Harvard, for the first time since welfare began, 1995, after the work requirement kicked in for welfare, up through 2005, single moms' income, when adjusted for inflation, for the first time since welfare began, had an increase--that was incredible--when the government encouraged individuals to reach their potential, instead of luring them away from their potential with welfare when they could have had a job, that people do a lot better.
It is terribly unfortunate, though, that the lessons learned in the mid-nineties, including getting to balanced budgets, over the objections of the Clinton administration. President Clinton didn't want balanced budgets, but, eventually, the Republican Congress forced him when they had enough to override his veto, so he signed them.
And now, all these years later, when people don't remember, President Clinton likes to take credit for having the first balanced budget in years. Well, the Republicans took him, figuratively, kicking and screaming and, obviously, now, he is proud that they did, though they don't get the credit for it.
Well, we need to encourage people to reach their potential--that is the job of government--not luring them away from their potential. We should be encouraging the best healthcare that could be had.
We don't need insurance companies managing all our healthcare. We don't need the government managing all our healthcare. We need individuals managing their own healthcare.
If somebody wants to volunteer and say, ``Here's all my income for the rest of my life. Government, you manage, tell me what I can have and not have in the way of surgeries or healthcare or medicine,'' well, we ought to make a place for them to do that. But for the rest of us who would rather make our own decisions about our healthcare, we could do that.
But one of the things, and I put it in the bill that I filed back in 2009--I was encouraged by former Speaker Newt Gingrich, and he said: You have got to put your ideas into a bill, get it scored.
CBO refused to score it for many months. Former Speaker Gingrich thought if I had gotten it scored, that it could have changed the debate on healthcare.
But CBO dutifully did the bidding of Speaker Pelosi, scored their bills, refused to score mine, and so we didn't have the score.
And let's face it. CBO, on ObamaCare scoring, their margin of error apparently is somewhere, plus or minus, 250 to 400 percent; so why should they score anything anyway? But that is another matter.
But if the health insurance companies and the government don't manage all our healthcare, who would do that? Well, we would do that. If somebody's chronically poor and cannot provide for themselves, we can help them. But for those who can, they should.
If you put that kind of money in a health savings account, where it can never be used for anything but healthcare, not like retirement, where you can pull it out and pay a 40 percent tax, leave it in there. It can only be used for healthcare.
Give the individual a debit card that is coded that will only pay for medical expenses, medicine, crutches, doctors' appointments. Then most people would have enough built up in their health savings account by the time they are 65 or 70, they not only would not want government participation in decisions about their healthcare, but they wouldn't need it, and we could make our own decisions, after consulting with physicians. That saves healthcare.
The last 100 years of healthcare, some medical historians say, have been the only 100 years in American history where people had a better chance of getting well after seeing a doctor than of getting worse.
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Even just over 200 years ago, the man without whom there would be no free America, George Washington, he was bled to death. The last bleeder was his very good friend, Dr. Craik, who had been with him through so many things. He thought he was helping him, and he was bleeding him to death, preventing him from getting well.
But here, 200 years later, doctors are actually curing disease, curing things we thought were incurable. We had the best healthcare that could ever been found at any time in history anywhere in the world, and we have done a great deal to destroy it since the passing of ObamaCare.
People have found out they lost their insurance. They are paying more than they ever dreamed they would pay. And, yes, there are some who are paying minimal amounts, and some are getting subsidies, but the President had to make up some law in order to pay out some of the things he did.
Because of all of the distraction with ObamaCare, perhaps that is why the Obama administration dropped the ball on following through regarding Russia's efforts to sidetrack American politics.
This article from John Solomon and Alison Spann, October 22, in The Hill: ``FBI Watched, Then Acted As Russian Spy Moved Closer to Hillary Clinton.''
It says: ``As Hillary Clinton was beginning her job as President Obama's chief diplomat, Federal agents observed as multiple arms of Vladimir Putin's machine unleashed an influence campaign designed to win access to the new Secretary of State, her husband, Bill Clinton, and members of their inner circle, according to interviews and once-
sealed FBI records.
``Some of the activities FBI agents gathered evidence about in 2009 and 2010 were covert and illegal.
``A female Russian spy posing as an American accountant, for instance, used a false identity to burrow her way into the employ of a major Democratic donor in hopes of gaining intelligence on Hillary Clinton's Department, records show. The spy was arrested and deported as she moved closer to getting inside State, agents said.
``Other activities were perfectly legal and sitting in plain view, such as when a subsidiary of Russia's state-controlled nuclear energy company hired a Washington firm to lobby the Obama administration. At the time it was hired, the firm was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in pro bono support to Bill Clinton's global charitable initiative, and it legally helped the Russian company secure Federal decisions that led to billions in new U.S. commercial nuclear business, records show.
``Agents were surprised by the timing and size of a $500,000 check that a Kremlin-linked bank provided Bill Clinton''--that is the former President, and although none of the mainstream media would ever say this, Democrat Bill Clinton--``with for a single speech in the summer of 2010. The payday came just weeks after Hillary Clinton helped arrange for American executives to travel to Moscow to support Putin's efforts to build his own country's version of Silicon Valley, agents said.
``There is no evidence in any of the public records that the FBI believed that the Clintons or anyone close to them did anything illegal.''
Yeah, that is pretty understandable that The Hill would say that and that the FBI would make sure those records were not available.
The article goes on. It says: ``But there's definitive evidence the Russians were seeking their influence with a specific eye on the State Department.
`` `There is not one shred of doubt from the evidence that we had that the Russians had set their sights on Hillary Clinton's circle, because she was the quarterback of the Obama-Russia reset strategy and the assumed successor to Obama as President,' said a source familiar with the FBI's evidence at the time. . . .''
``That source pointed to an October 2009 communication intercepted by the FBI in which Russian handlers instructed two of their spies specifically to gather nonpublic information on the State Department.
`` `Send more info on current international affairs vital for R., highlight U.S. approach,' part of the message to the spies read, using the country's first initial to refer to Russia. ` . . . Try to single out tidbits unknown publicly but revealed in private by sources closer to State Department, government, major think tanks.' ''
This isn't in the article, but that might also mean, if the State Department Secretary had a server through which classified information was sent and it is not very well protected, gee, grab all of the information from that server that you can. Shouldn't be hard to hack them. That had to have been part of the thinking of the Russians. They surely figured out that Secretary of State Clinton was using different sources for her emails.
The article goes on: ``The Clintons, by that time, had set up several new vehicles that included a multimillion-dollar speechmaking business, the family foundation, and a global charitable initiative, all of which proved attractive to the Russians as Hillary Clinton took over State.
`` `In the end, some of this just comes down to what it always does in Washington: donations, lobbying, contracts, and influence--even for Russia,' said Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence.
``Figliuzzi supervised the post-arrest declassification and release of records from a 10-year operation that unmasked a major Russian spy ring in 2010. It was one of the most important U.S. counterintelligence victories against Russia in history, and famous for nabbing the glamorous spy-turned-model Anna Chapman.
``While Chapman dominated the headlines surrounding that spy ring, another Russian woman posing as a mundane New Jersey accountant named Cynthia Murphy was closing in on accessing Secretary Clinton's Department, according to records and interviews.
``For most of the 10 years, the ring of Russian spies that included Chapman and Murphy acted as sleepers, spending a `great deal of time collecting information and passing it on' to their handlers inside Russia's SVR spy agency, FBI record state.''
Inserting parenthetically here, also, we now know, due to the great investigating work of Luke Rosiak with The Daily Caller, who apparently has done much more investigation into Imran Awan, the Awan family, and IT or computer workers, some of whom apparently didn't do any work but who were making the maximum amount of money that anybody can make working on the Hill for Congress, as I believe Luke testified or indicated in a prior meeting, he indicated that actually every time one of the Awan family added enough part-time work for Members of Congress with their computers, they would add another family member to start getting part-time until they built up to the $160,000 or so level.
But in any event, we now know that, apparently, Imran Awan copied dozens of Democratic Members of Congress' servers into one place so that all of those servers could easily be accessed by someone who did not have permission to access those Congress Members' computer systems and servers.
It is interesting that that was occurring for him as a Pakistani native. He became a citizen but, at the time he began working on Capitol Hill, was here by visa working for Members, Democratic Members of Congress.
But how interesting that the Russians were doing everything they could to get any information, not just classified, but any inside information, stuff like you would find in emails, for example. And now we are finding all of this out about the Awan brothers, and his wife and a couple of people, one of whom quit because he was doing too much of the work and not getting as much pay as the others.
But it is incredible that it was after President Obama left office we started hearing all of this screaming about how the Russians were trying to affect elections. And who knew about that? Well, Robert Mueller, former FBI Director knew all about it because he was the FBI as this stuff was being investigated. Wouldn't it be nice if he had said something about that previously?
But if he had talked about it previously, he might not--and I am sure, in fact, would not--have gotten an appointment to be special counsel to investigate potential ties by the U.S. Government with Russia, specifically, the Trump campaign, or the Trump support ring, those who were supporting Donald Trump as a candidate. Wow.
But then again, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein might have appointed Mueller, because it turns out he was involved in the investigation back then. Wouldn't it have been nice if Rosenstein or Mueller had had the moral fiber and the ethical fiber to say: ``You know what? The AG has recused himself, but, actually, I was involved in this stuff back under the Obama administration investigating all this, and I had developed opinions, made statements back in those days--
weren't public.''
And if Mueller had done the same thing: ``I was head of the FBI. We were investigating ties to Hillary Clinton, efforts to get in touch with and utilize the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton.''
Wouldn't it have been nice if that information had come from Robert Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein before Rosenstein appointed Mueller, because those two people would not even be involved at all, I don't believe, had we known the extent of their involvement in the investigation into Russia before, when they were with the Obama administration. But they didn't disclose that.
And I think it is a little insidious, myself, on the very day that James Comey testified on Capitol Hill that there were no known ties between President Trump and the Russians, the collusion that was talked about, there were no ties, no evidence of that, it was the same day it was leaked, apparently by Mueller or his staff, that now they were investigating obstruction by the Trump administration.
Now, why would that get leaked the very night that James Comey testified there were no known ties, no evidence of any collusion between President Trump and the Russians? Well, because if there was no evidence to support what Mueller had been appointed to investigate, then President Trump would have had every right and it would have made sense to say: ``Okay, Mr. Mueller, it sure would have been nice if you had disclosed the reasons that you should have been disqualified to accept this special counsel job. But even though you didn't, there is no reason for you to be special counsel because there is no evidence, according to this FBI Director, so we don't need you anymore.''
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But by Mueller or his clan leaking out that now we are investigating President Trump for obstruction of justice, that set him up in a position that President Trump could not afford to fire him, or else it would look like Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre before they had a chance to come after him. So, clearly, former FBI Director Mueller who, in my opinion, did more damage to the structure of the FBI than anyone since J. Edgar Hoover, ran off thousands of years of experience from the FBI and spent millions of dollars on programs that didn't work out. Apparently he got rid of a lot of people that would not say yes to him all the time. He also--let's give him credit--he did purge the FBI training materials of anything that offended radical Islamists.
I would submit there is a reason why when an FBI agent was finally sent out to talk to the older Tsarnaev brother after Russia had reported twice--actually doing America a favor--hey, this guy has been radicalized. Do they look at where he had been to see that he had been in areas that were very radical and what he was like?
No. They sent out an FBI agent to talk to him. According to Director Mueller, in essence, he indicated he was not a terrorist, so that was good enough for them. But they went the extra mile and asked his mother if he was a terrorist, and, in essence, she indicated he was a good boy and not a terrorist. That was good enough for the new Mueller FBI that had purged itself of the ability to know what a radical Islamist looked like.
When I asked about their going out to the mosque to investigate whether Tsarnaev had been radicalized, of course, again, they purged their training materials, they didn't know what to ask. They didn't know whether to ask if he had been memorizing verses of the Koran, what verses those were. Kim Jensen, who had a 700-page program to teach FBI agents about what to look for in radical Islamists, under Mueller, was ordered to destroy all of those. Fortunately, there was an extra copy. As I understand it, the FBI is now trying to teach some of the higher-
level agents exactly what a radical Islamist is. But if Mr. McMaster has his way, that won't last much longer.
But, nonetheless, Director Mueller, as head of the FBI, as one intelligence official told me, they were blinded of the ability to see the enemy--the enemy being radical Islamists who want to destroy our Nation, destroy our freedom, and kill us. They don't know what to look for, thanks to Director Mueller.
Of course, as the Washingtonian article pointed out in 2013, basically Mueller and Comey were joined at the hip, that if the world was on fire, Mueller would be the last one standing beside Comey, protecting him, with him, supporting him, whatever. Which, by the way, is another reason, if Mr. Mueller had been as ethical and moral as he should have been, he should have disclosed immediately: I can't accept this special counsel role because James Comey is a friend. He sees me as a mentor. We talked, including about his testimony he was going to give before Congress. We are just too close, and he is a central witness to all of this. I can't do it.
Unfortunately, Director Mueller did not take that position not feeling that he needed to do that, because, after all, it is a great job. It pays a lot of money. He can hire anybody he wants to and hire good Democratic supporters, as he has. For people who hate Republicans, this will be a great job. Apparently it is. He just basically makes up whatever he wants to investigate anytime he sees fit, and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein should have been disqualified and not been able to appoint special counsel had the Attorney General known what all he had been involved in previously. He certainly is not going to fire Mueller, as he should.
Going over to a different article, this is from National Review by Andrew McCarthy, October 21. Andrew McCarthy is the former prosecutor of The Blind Sheikh that masterminded the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 during Democrat Bill Clinton's Presidency.
Andrew McCarthy says: ``Not only the Clintons are implicated in a uranium deal with the Russians that compromised national security interests. Let's put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: the cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the amount it spent on those Facebook ads--the ones the media-
Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 Presidential election to Donald Trump. The Facebook-ad buy, which started in June 2015--before Donald Trump entered the race--was more leftwing agitprop, ads pushing hysteria on racism, immigration, guns, et cetera, than electioneering. The Clintons' own longtime political strategist Mark Penn estimates that just $6,500 went to actual electioneering. You read that right: $6,500. By contrast, the staggering $500,000 payday from a Kremlin-tied Russian bank for a single speech was part of a multimillion-dollar influence-peddling scheme to enrich the former President and his wife, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. At the time, Russia was plotting--successfully--to secure U.S. Government approval for its acquisition of Uranium One, and with it, tens of billions of dollars in U.S. uranium reserves.
``Here is the kicker: the Uranium One scandal is not only, or even principally, a Clinton scandal. It is an Obama administration scandal. The Clintons were just doing what the Clintons do: cashing in on their
`public service.' The Obama administration, with Secretary Clinton at the forefront but hardly alone, was knowingly compromising American national security interests. The administration green-lighted the transfer of control over one-fifth of American uranium mining capacity to Russia, a hostile regime--and specifically to Russia's state-controlled nuclear-energy conglomerate, Rosatom. Worse, at the time the administration approved the transfer, it knew that Rosatom's American subsidiary was engaged in a lucrative racketeering enterprise that had already committed felony extortion, fraud, and money-laundering offenses.''
It is not in the article, but it does raise the question: Gee, I wonder if the Obama administration or Director Mueller of the FBI, knowing all these things apparently, did anybody bother to tell Secretary Clinto about the situation and that the entity that they were being courted by was actually tied to felony extortion, fraud, and money-laundering offenses?
I thought the Obama administration was pretty close-knit. It seemed like they would have surely told Secretary of State Clinton who had access to classified information. We know because she put it on her server that wasn't classified.
But it looks like somebody would have told the Secretary of State: Hey, this outfit that is courting you has ties to the people paying your husband half a million dollars for one speech, paying $145 million or so to the Clinton Foundation, these folks are bad folks.
Surely somebody in the Obama administration would have told them. Well, we don't know, and, certainly, Director Muller is not going to investigate any inappropriate actions that he or James Comey or Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein took or didn't take.
The article goes on to say: ``The Obama administration also knew that congressional Republicans were trying to stop the transfer. Consequently, the Justice Department concealed what it knew.''
That being from congressional Republicans who were trying to stop the transfer.
In fact, ``the DOJ allowed the racketeering enterprise to continue compromising the American uranium industry rather than commencing a prosecution that would have scotched the transfer. Prosecutors waited 4 years before quietly pleading the case out for a song, in violation of Justice Department charging guidelines. Meanwhile, the administration stonewalled Congress, reportedly threatening an informant who wanted to go public.
``Obama's `reset,' to understand what happened here, we need to go back to the beginning. The first-tier military arsenal of Putin's Russia belies its status as a third-rate economic power. For well over a decade, the regime has thus sought to develop and exploit its capacity as a nuclear-energy producer. Naively viewing Russia as a
`strategic partner' rather than a malevolent competitor, the Bush administration made a nuclear-cooperation agreement with the Kremlin in May of 2008.
``That blunder, however, was tabled before Congress could consider it. That is because Russia, being Russia, invaded Georgia. In 2009, notwithstanding this aggression, which continues to this day with Russia's occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton signaled the new administration's determination to `reset' relations with Moscow. In this reset, renewed cooperation and commerce in nuclear energy would be central. There had been such cooperation and commerce since the Soviet Union imploded. In 1992, the administration of President George H. W. Bush agreed with the nascent Russian Federation that U.S. nuclear providers would be permitted to purchase uranium from Russia's disassembled nuclear warheads, after it had been down-blended from its highly enriched weapons-grade level.
``The Russian commercial agent responsible for the sale and transportation of this uranium to the U.S. is the Kremlin-controlled company `Tenex,' formally, JSC Techsnabexport. Tenex is a subsidiary of Rosatom. Tenex, and by extension, Rosatom, have an American arm called
`Tenam USA.' Tenam is based in Bethesda, Maryland. Around the time President Obama came to power, the Russian official in charge of Tenam was Vadim Mikerin. The Obama administration reportedly issued a visa for Mikerin in 2010, but a racketeering investigation led by the FBI determined that he was already operating here in 2009. The racketeering scheme as Tenam's general director, Mikerin was responsible for arranging and managing Rosatom/Tenex's contracts with American uranium purchasers.
``This gave him tremendous leverage over the U.S. companies. With the assistance of several confederates, Mikerin used this leverage to extort and defraud the U.S. contractors into paying inflated prices for uranium. They then laundered the proceeds through shell companies and secret bank accounts in Latvia, Cyprus, Switzerland, and the Seychelle Islands--though sometimes transactions were handled in cash, with the skim divided into envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash. The inflated payments served two purposes: they enriched Kremlin-
connected energy officials in the U.S. and in Russia to the tune of millions of dollars; and they compromised the American companies that paid the bribes, rendering players in U.S. nuclear energy--a sector critical to national security--vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow. But Mikerin had a problem.
``To further the Kremlin's push for nuclear-energy expansion, he had been seeking to retain a lobbyist--from whom he planned to extort kickbacks, just as he did with the U.S. energy companies. With the help of an associate connected to Russian organized-crime groups, Mikerin found his lobbyist. The man's name has not been disclosed, but we know he is now represented by Victoria Toensing, a well-respected Washington lawyer, formerly a Federal prosecutor and counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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``When Mikerin solicited him in 2009, the lobbyist was uncomfortable, worried that the proposal would land him on the wrong side of the law. So he contacted the FBI to reveal what he knew. From then on, the Bureau and Justice Department permitted him to participate in the Russian racketeering scheme as a `confidential source'--and he is thus known as `CS-1' in affidavits the government, years later, presented to Federal court in order to obtain search and arrest warrants. At the time this unidentified man became an informant, the FBI was led by Director Robert Mueller, who is now the special counsel investigating whether Trump colluded with Russia,'' which we keep hearing there is no evidence of.
``The investigation was centered in Maryland, Tenam's home base. There, the U.S. Attorney was Obama appointee Rod Rosenstein--now President Trump's Deputy Attorney General, and the man who appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate Trump.
``Because of CS-1, the FBI was able to understand and monitor the racketeering enterprise almost from the start. By mid-May 2010, it could already prove the scheme and three separate extortionate payments Mikerin had squeezed out of the informant.
``Equally important: According to reporting by John Solomon and Alison Spann in The Hill''--which we were just speaking about--``the informant learned through conversations with Mikerin and others that Russian nuclear officials were trying to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons.''
It goes on and on, Mr. Speaker, but it is clear this definitely needs investigation. It needs investigation as to the propriety of the actions of Robert Mueller, FBI Director. It needs investigation into the propriety of the actions by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
We need a special counsel. If the current Attorney General considers himself recused, there is only one person who has the power to make that appointment, and that is the President of the United States, from whom the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein derive their power to appoint special counsel.
The President needs to appoint somebody to investigate this mess, because I guess former Secretary Clinton knew with authority when she said the Russians were clearly trying to hack and to influence this election. Yes, they sure were.
It appears they were doing more to influence the Clintons and the Obama administration than they were even the American people: $500,000 to Bill Clinton himself and only $6,500 to the ads to try to affect the American people.
So this really does need to be investigated. I know Congress really hasn't gotten into it in any depth, but if Congress is to do that, it has got to take a page out of Judicial Watch's notebook, and that is you have got to be willing to go to court and demand people produce evidence, produce people.
We can't just continue to be obstructed the way we have allowed the IRS Director to do after he has obfuscated, lied to Congress, and I believe perjured himself, after Lois Lerner appears certainly to have committed crimes, to me, and we have let her get away with such apparent criminal activity.
But in the few minutes I have left, in addition to this scourge upon the United States that we find out was going on during the Obama administration, there is a tremendous irony that is playing out, and it is reflected in the article by J.E. Dyer, October 10.
The article is titled: ``NFL meltdown blows the dam on MSM's centralized media model.''
I thought about this. I did not realize, but Colin Kaepernick first began to kneel down after he apparently has also supported a group that wants to kill cops and thinks cops should be killed, the people who are protecting us and allowing us to continue safely in our way of life and our freedom.
He doesn't have that respect. He knelt. He had nothing but contempt for America's police and for those protecting America. He did not appreciate America, which was bringing him millions of dollars. Just contempt. Apparently, his belief is there is racism in America, though he was adopted by, as I understand it, a White family.
But he started this, and the American people didn't like it. After 9/
11 particularly, they realized: You know what? We owe so much to first responders and to law enforcement that have been willing to lay down their lives for us against enemies, foreign and domestic. And they continue, as police around the country, law enforcement, continue to be willing to lay down their lives for Americans and our way of life, our freedom. We appreciated that after 9/11.
After my 4 years in the Army, when we were sometimes ordered not to wear our uniform because of hatred for people in uniform after Vietnam, I didn't think we would ever come to a day when people would again appreciate our military. But that also came out in amazing ways after 9/11.
As evil and hateful as the actions were that day in an effort to kill as many innocent people as these radical Islamists could, we saw the good in Americans. We saw the good in first responders. We saw the good in our military. We saw men and women willing to evidence the greatest love, as Jesus said, willing to lay down their lives for their fellow Americans.
Yet, during the last administration, somehow the President normally took the wrong side. He spoke up before the evidence was in and often derided the wrong people. I just can't believe that our President for those last 8 years set us back so many years in race relations. It is incredible. I thought we were beyond that, but we got set back many years.
Huge numbers of Americans didn't appreciate the way the Obama administration set us back in race relations. For the first time, we had a President and First Lady who had not normally been proud as Americans. The First Lady said she was finally proud of America.
I have been proud of America all my life. I was not proud of the activities of some Americans. Americans have been a force for good in the world since it came into existence. This article points out that, actually, that started something, because then other NFL players, as we have heard, didn't even realize what Colin Kaepernick was actually kneeling for. It is interesting to hear their explanations. They are not sure. They just have contempt for something, so they kneel during the national anthem.
It has so affected many Americans that many of us are not watching the NFL like we used to. It used to be a priority. I was always glad to get home from church and turn on the NFL, maybe see the Dallas Cowboys. I haven't been doing that. It hasn't been a priority. Colin Kaepernick started that.
Now, as this article points out, the one thing that allowed the mainstream media to bundle all kinds of programming that they forced cable companies or dish companies to take was the NFL. It was the big breadwinner that forced cable companies and satellite companies to take programming they really didn't want. But if you wanted the NFL, you had to take what the networks were bundling.
Now that the NFL is not turning into the cash cow it once was, and viewership and attendance drops, and, therefore, advertising dollars are plummeting, it may just be that that act of taking a knee back when it first started ends up leading to the liberal mainstream media not force-feeding Americans liberal pablum that they have been able to do for years. Wouldn't that be an ironic result of one player taking a knee?
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair will remind Members to refrain from improper references to the President.
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