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 Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H7697-H7702 on Sept. 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:
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, there is a lot going on today, a lot going on this week. I wish I could say it was all good, but we spent until 10 p.m. the night before last working on bills that would find ways to take people's guns away and, unfortunately, not give them the kind of due process that we think the Constitution affords people.
During my days as, well, a prosecutor and as a felony judge, thousands of criminal cases went through my court. I don't remember anywhere a criminal defendant bought his gun at a sporting goods store, gun store, applied for a gun. That is not the way criminals work.
And so I didn't see anything in our hours and hours and hours of committee hearings trying to amend bad bills with good amendments that the majority didn't allow to be passed. We thought they might be joining us on some. They said they would look at some, but, basically, defeated every amendment.
Today, we met in the Judiciary Committee at 8 a.m. to take up a semi, sort of, kind of, a bit of an impeachment resolution. We had amendments that would have made a bad resolution a little better--still not good--
but we had a hard time figuring out, on the Republican side: What is this?
It sounds like--in Texas, we would say we're fixing to do something. A lot of times people say, ``I am fixing to do that,'' but it means it may get put off and I may not really be serious, because if I was really serious, I would do it right now.
But this resolution--and I have it here--it, in the first paragraph, talks about the committee making discovery requests. But the second paragraph is really the one that deals with allegations that would be an impeachable offense, or offenses--at least, it is supposed to.
And so it says: ``Whereas, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report released on April 18, 2019, found that the Russian Government interfered in the 2016 election in `sweeping and systematic fashion.'''
Okay. But the Mueller report made very, very clear, and those who investigated, I thought, made it very clear there was no collusion or, to use the legal term, conspiracy by anyone in the Trump campaign with the Russian Government--none. That part didn't happen.
Even though we have networks like CNN and MSNBC, and I don't know who all else, but for 2 or 3 years they have talked about the crimes of this President and their collusion with Russia.
Well, when people who have law degrees talked about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, that immediately sent up red flags with me because that is not--``collusion'' is not a legal term that is used in talking about crimes; it is conspiracy. And so it immediately begins to raise questions.
Are they really serious about some type of crime? Because if they were, they would use words that are used in criminal terminology.
But here, this is a completely deceptive allegation when it comes to President Trump because they take this initial allegation and say Mueller found that the Russians really were trying to interfere in our 2016 election.
Okay. But it didn't involve anybody in the Trump campaign. That was clear.
So they tried to brush over that and make it sound like, yeah, even though there was nobody, President Trump or the Trump campaign who were involved at all, but we are going to kind of word this, put it in the same sentence so that it kind of sounds like, yeah, President Trump was involved with Russia, because then it jumps into another gear.
It says, ``that there were at least 10 separate episodes of President Trump using his official powers to''--and here is the word--``thwart or attempt to thwart the special counsel's investigation.''
{time} 1315
And that is also very troubling language for those of us that have dealt with legal terminology in criminal cases. I don't know of anybody that has dealt with criminal cases. I didn't hear from anybody on the committee that has ever heard of a crime involving thwarting. We are familiar with obstruction of justice. But these are the kind of games you play with words when you know, yes, there is no evidence a crime was committed, but maybe if we use different terminology it will sound like some kind of bad crime was committed. And clearly, we are not going to be able to remove a President from office with the Senate understanding that even the Mueller report, even the Mueller special counsel team that had all these people that hated Donald Trump, they still couldn't find anything that would be indictable.
Now, some say, Well, but there was obstruction of justice. We even had one, I would say, incompetent law professor come before our committee and say she could guarantee that she could get a conviction and win on appeal. Well, I have tried enough cases in State and Federal court and in the Army that I know--and I have told people that were looking for lawyers in my days as a judge--I couldn't recommend a lawyer, but I would warn people--if you ever hear a lawyer who tries cases who says they can guarantee you a win in a trial, then that lawyer is either totally incompetent or is one of the biggest liars in the legal profession. I don't know which one this professor was. I got the impression she just really didn't know what she was talking about, because no one swears, Oh, yes, I can guarantee you, you know, I can win this case at trial and on appeal. That is not a good lawyer. That is somebody who doesn't know what they are talking about.
What we have found now after thousands and thousands of interviews, subpoenas, documents, millions of documents, there was no crime. And the reason there was no obstruction of justice by President Trump or anybody that was assisting him is because the President made very clear as soon as he heard about some collusion, conspiracy, whatever you want to call it with Russia to rig the election, he knew he never colluded. He knew that he never conspired, nor did anybody in his campaign conspire with Russia to affect the election. That never happened, and he knew it.
But he could see from what these 17 or so people on the special counsel's team were trying to do. They were trying to frame him. And this guy that was dishonored and was no longer respected by MI6 that he used to work for in England and there was information that he was discredited, not just his information, but he had been discredited, but that is who was hired by Fusion GPS, that was hired apparently by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to try to dredge up dirt on candidate Donald Trump so that they could rig the election against Donald Trump.
And we have gotten to the bottom of it, almost. We know that Christopher Steele is the one that didn't just collude, he conspired with people in Russia who he ultimately had to admit, yes, it is quite possible they could have been working for Vladimir Putin. So Christopher Steele, it appears most likely he was the one that was conspiring with people from Russia, sounds like Putin's agents, to try to destroy Donald Trump.
And there has been noise made about, oh, gee, you know, Russia really wanted Donald Trump to win. That is not the way Vladimir Putin thinks. He wants the old Soviet empire back. It really bugs me when educated people say, you know, he is such a complicated guy. No, he isn't. He is one of the most easily discernable people in the world. He wants the old empire back. He is a former KGB guy, and he will do whatever it takes to try to get it back. I don't think he cared so much who won the election. He wanted to divide America, and lo and behold, he was able to see the Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, the Clinton campaign, DNC, they were able to take all this information that were nothing but lies in the dossier--they have even given dossier a bad name--and divide America.
And at least one political party in America has been totally willing to be complicit to help divide America over a bunch of lies in a dossier that was created as political fodder when it became very clear very quickly to those who had paid for the dossier that it was not only not verifiable, the person that gathered the information didn't really know the people, the Russians that gave him the lies about Donald Trump, and that got taken before a FISA court to get a warrant to spy on a campaign; to wit, the Trump campaign. That is scary stuff; when one administration can use the powers of the office of President, the Intel community, the FBI, the Department of Justice, use all those powers to destroy another campaign. And as Newt Gingrich has pointed out, if Ms. Clinton had won, we would have never known how corrupted and weaponized the DOJ and FBI had become.
And I know there are some of my friends here in Congress on our side of the aisle that think Michael Horowitz is doing a good job, because look at all the evidence of wrongdoing, bias, all this that he has found. Well, if you look at the most recent report, just like the first one, in the first report Horowitz found--and he was a good Obama appointee as inspector general there at the Department of Justice, good Democrat, good appointee.
And so he does his digging, finds hundreds of pages of the most outrageous political bias--it's actually a personal hatred for Donald Trump and absolute love and affection for candidate Hillary Clinton--so much overwhelming bias, and every conclusion that these biased, prejudiced, bigoted investigators had was 100 percent consistent with all of their conclusions. That speaks for itself.
Now, if half of their conclusions had gone against their bias and prejudice, bigotry, then you would say, well, you know, maybe it really didn't affect the outcomes of their investigations. But when every conclusion is consistent with the bias and prejudice, even though it is clear, like in the case of the investigation into the Clinton emails, you had Strzok and Page examining emails, and they were making the calls on whether documents are classified, knowing full well if they said something was classified that Hillary Clinton was being set up legitimately to be indicted and convicted. So they wanted Hillary Clinton to win. They wanted to do whatever they could to stop Donald Trump from winning, and if he didn't win, as they said, they needed an insurance policy, you know, just in case he won.
And Horowitz did a grave injustice within the Justice Department, and he says there is no indication that all that bias had anything to do with the outcomes of the cases. That is just garbage. He is being disingenuous. He wasn't doing his job in his conclusions. And I know there were a lot of Republicans that said, Yes, okay, but, boy, when he investigated, when that report comes out on Comey, it is going to end up sending him to prison.
Well, Comey did leak information that he should not. He did keep documents that he was not permitted to keep. He secreted them, kept them after he had left government service. He is not allowed to do that. And the biggest thing about those and whether or not they were felonies that would put him in jail would be: Was this information classified and at what level?
And we find out, you know, on page one and two of the Horowitz IG report, the FBI investigated, and the FBI determined that this wasn't classified; the FBI this and that. And you have to wait 40 pages to see who he means by the FBI. Well, it turns out, the two most important people, because they had the most experience in analyzing documents to determine their classification level, it was a couple named Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. And he has the gall, Horowitz does, to even point out--to try to get more credibility to Strzok and Page's work on deciding whether Comey should go to prison, because they were classified at a high level. He said, Oh, but they had more experience, because they did all this work on the Clinton emails determining whether those were classified or not.
For heaven's sake, somebody needs to wake up. Michael Horowitz does not need to be doing the investigation. Maybe let him do the investigation, but he doesn't need to be doing the reports. In a lot of places people would say he doesn't know sic `em from come here when it comes to proper conclusions. It is outrageous.
And he justified not having them re-examined because time was of the essence 2 years ago in 2017, back before Strzok and Page were fired. But not to worry, because a guy named Bill Priestap was going to rubber stamp whatever Strzok and Page decided on classifications.
There was another unit chief. Didn't give us that name. That tells you something right there.
But Priestap was supposed to have the final decision, apparently rubber stamp whatever our experienced Strzok and Page decided when they knew full well if they classified things at a certain level that it meant Jim Comey was going to prison.
So they did Comey a favor. And so then Horowitz, he didn't want to have them rereviewed for proper classification away from the bias of Strzok and Page and Priestap that--you know, there were reports of him going to London trying to help out Steele's credibility.
So Horowitz said time was of the essence, so nobody reconsidered the classification that the bigoted bias and prejudice of Page and Strzok would not be determinative.
And I know that people, Republicans, many of them are saying, well, look, there is no question that McCabe lied, perjured, he should end up going to prison. But I am telling you as a history buff, a historian, if you would, it is true. History is often the best indicator of what someone will do in the future.
{time} 1330
The indications are that Obama's IG, Horowitz, will find some terrible things, but he will do it in such a way that he will give not only Comey, Strzok, and Page a get-out-of-jail-free pass, but he will do that with McCabe and with anybody else he is investigating, because that is his history. He knows which side his bread is buttered on and who is doing the buttering, who got him in the position he is in.
We end up now being told, well, this isn't a formal impeachment hearing, the investigation we started today in the Judiciary Committee. Then, toward the end of our hearing, we heard from two different Democrats who wanted to go on record to make it very, very clear that this was an impeachment hearing, an impeachment investigation.
That is what it is. It is not just a resolution for investigative procedures, as it says here on the resolution.
There was so much fraud involved in this case. I am not talking about from anybody with the Trump campaign. I am talking about a guy like James Comey who should have known better. He swore and apparently verified the application and affidavit information to go before the FISA court so he could get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, all while he was lying to the President about him not being under investigation and also trying to set the President up by doing little memos.
I hope and pray one of the things that comes out of all this Department of Justice, FBI, and intel abuse is a practice the FBI has had for years. It is section 302, where FBI agents, after they do an interview, they sit down and type up their own version of what they think or what they recall a witness said. Most of the ones I have seen over the years in my different roles in the justice system appear to be very accurate. But it is a problem when every other local and State law enforcement entity I am aware of, when they want credibility for a statement, they record it.
I saw it from juries in my court. ``Look, you are telling us this is what the defendant said. Why didn't you record it so we could see for ourselves, hear for ourselves, see the body language?''
That is why local governments all over the country have come up with billions of dollars altogether so that they can make sure that they get video and audio of someone being questioned, so there is no question what they say.
But not at the FBI. Oh, no. They will talk to a witness and then write out their own version of what is said. Thankfully, most of them do a great job, but it also allows unscrupulous FBI or DOJ officials, as now we have seen existed under the Obama Justice Department, it allows them to twist the FBI's or the DOJ's version of what a witness says and use that, as they have thousands and thousands of times, I don't know how many times, to convict people, saying, ``This is what he said because I wrote it down in my own notes after I did the interview.''
``Really? Well, let's see the video. Let's hear the audio.''
``Well, we don't do that at the FBI. We only write down our version of what is said because we really would rather you hear our version and not the defendant's version of what he said, because we get more credibility than any defendant.''
At least that used to be the way it was. But I hope one of the things that will come out of all of this is, in order for the FBI to get back the credibility they used to have as the greatest law enforcement agency in the world, they are going to need to start doing audio and video so that we can see what a witness said, hear what they said for ourselves, and so that juries can hear that and judges can see and hear that. But we don't have that here.
People like the biased Strzok and Page, who hated Trump and loved Hillary Clinton, when you talk about obstruction of justice, I don't know how you can be more obstructive than to get a subpoena for emails and then BleachBit, take all the stuff off so nobody can ever see and then beat up with hammers cellphones and whatever you need to, to destroy the evidence. That would seem to be a classic case of obstruction.
Fortunately, for people involved with Hillary Clinton, it was Strzok and Page on the job, so they didn't see anything, didn't hear anything that might resemble something that should be prosecuted.
But we end up today with this resolution that the majority passed without allowing any amendments, and they used this word ``thwart,'' that the President used his official powers to thwart or attempt to thwart. Nobody has ever been convicted of thwarting.
You just can imagine, say the Democrats got exactly what they wanted and were able to impeach or charge President Trump with thwarting an official investigation. It goes to the Senate. They get what they want, and President Trump is removed. Years down the road, they say, ``You used to be President. You were removed? What were you removed for?''
``Well, I was a thwarter, apparently. I have been branded a thwarter.''
Maybe we ought to put a ``T'' on their head so everybody knows: Here comes a thwarter.
The only thing he was thwarting, if at all, is massive injustice from the Justice Department. He knew he had not conspired with anybody in Russia, nor had anybody in his campaign.
The evidence has borne that out. Even Mueller, Weissman, the people who hated the President, had to come around to saying they couldn't find any evidence of them conspiring with Russia.
Nonetheless, we still have to go through this hearing today, and I am sure there will be other hearings.
The truth is, President Donald Trump never obstructed or thwarted justice. He knew that if there was true justice, this effort to frame him for colluding with the Russians would be found false and would be found to be a frame-up job. He wanted justice.
The DOJ could never convict someone of obstructing justice when all they did was what they could to ensure that an injustice did not occur. They were seeking justice to make sure there wasn't a successful frame-
up. That is not obstructing or thwarting justice. That is seeking justice. But there certainly were people inside the DOJ who were doing what they could to inflict an injustice on President Trump.
So here we go into this impeachment exercise that started today.
I think about those in England who would say, ``God save the Queen,''
``God save the King.'' God save this Republic.
We are in a lot of trouble when we have caught the Justice Department red-handed trying to impose a massive injustice, conspiring to do so, even having an Acting Attorney General who we found out from the emails this week--and some of us knew this because we knew from other information that Rosenstein, the Acting Attorney General, did not just once say sarcastically: I will wear a wire. I can get into the White House. I will wear a wire and record the President.
Then, they could try to remove him under the 25th Amendment for not being competent. They formulated a response to act like he was being sarcastic when everybody there knew he was not being sarcastic.
Apparently, from what I understood, the reason he brought that up is because others there in the meeting were mad at him. They said: You have been helping the President instead of helping us get the President. You wrote that memo that gave him a basis to fire Comey. Whose side are you on?
That is the kind of context where Rosenstein says: Look, I will wear a wire if you want.
He wanted to show that he was an Obama team player, a Sally Yates team player, a Loretta Lynch team player, that he was not a Trump team player: I will even wear a wire and go in.
That wasn't the only place he brought it up. He brought it up at another meeting, such that McCabe went back and told people: You know, Rosenstein brought it up again. He still says he is willing to wear a wire.
That is because Rosenstein was trying to convince them he was a good team player and would go set up and try to frame the President to help remove him from office.
That is not all that has gone on this week. We had the vote today. The House has voted to eliminate the tiny, little part of ANWR where Jimmy Carter said that drilling would be allowed.
Now, this is Jimmy Carter who says everybody is supposed to wear a cardigan and turn your temperature in winter way down, wear a sweater, you know, shiver a little bit. It is okay because we are going to save energy.
Even he said it is right that part of ANWR, that tiny, little part of that huge area, nothing is there, so it is not going to affect any wildlife, really, so that can be an area that can be drilled.
Since then, Democrats have done all they could to put it off-limits. Sometimes you see these pictures of all this wildlife, this beautiful, pristine area. Well, if that is what you see, that isn't the part of ANWR where drilling would be allowed.
We can get a little perspective on the size. There was another poster up here somewhere. It has a map of how big Alaska is, and then it has the size of ANWR. Then there is a red dot that you can't see more than a few feet away that is the tiny, little part, comparatively, where drilling would be allowed.
There are people here in this body who are absolutely wonderful people, friends on both sides of the aisle. Some of my Democratic friends, I know they would never lie to me. They are honest people. We just have disagreements on things.
One of the most honorable people I ever knew in this body was chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee back initially when Democrats took the majority in January 2007. He wanted socialized medicine. We disagreed on that. But I knew the man's heart. He wanted to help poor people.
{time} 1345
That is why he didn't want to pass the cap-and-trade bill, because he knew it would cause the price of energy to skyrocket. And he knew it was a tough blow to the Nation's poor, to our senior citizens on Medicare, but especially on Social Security, a fixed income. If you start skyrocketing the price of energy to those folks, it is devastating.
That is why John did not want to pass the cap-and-trade bill. He wanted to do everything he could to help poor people. That was his nature. He knew if you start doing this kind of stuff for the rich with energy prices--gasoline, electricity, propane, and those things going up--it is an inconvenience, but for those on a fixed income, it is absolutely devastating.
America, under the Trump administration, has been allowed to gather up more of our own blessed energy sources. The economy gets better. More people are working now than ever. Unemployment is the lowest it has ever been for minorities since they started recording those numbers. It is fantastic. Energy prices have come down low, and it has been stabilized because we are finding so much of our own energy and using it.
We disagree about a lot of things on both sides of the aisle. I don't know anybody who serves in this body on either side of the aisle who doesn't want a clean environment. But those who know our history of the world know that, if you have a struggling economy, the number one thing that suffers, besides the people, is the environment.
In China, that government, as big and totalitarian as it can be, they know if people get laid off and are not working, they could have another revolution, and they don't want that. They are more concerned about people being busy and working and having money than they are about the environment.
In India, they are scared to death of too many people not being able to work or have income.
We get all of this pollution from the other side of the world. I heard today that 85 percent, somebody said, of the pollution that we have in our atmosphere is coming from these other countries. When those countries' economies are struggling, there is more pollution. That is just the way it works, because you just can't help afford to clean up the environment like we are and have been in the United States.
We need a vibrant economy to continue to clean up our environment. We have lakes that were dead, now brimming with activity and with wildlife. These are good things. In Texas, it seems like our air gets cleaner every year.
I asked my staff to find a picture, as best they could, that would reflect what we are talking about in ANWR in that tiny--well, relatively speaking, tiny area of ANWR where drilling would be allowed. This is from Google Maps. This isn't actually the area, but it looks like most of the area where drilling would be allowed.
From time to time, there will be wildlife across this area, in the area where drilling would be allowed, but they can't stay because they can't live there in that area. There is just not enough to sustain life there.
As Jimmy Carter figured out, it is an ideal place to drill, and that is why they designated it for that. But we have been waiting over 40 years to use that as a place to even further reduce our cost of energy, which will also allow us to export energy, which means European countries don't have to be blackmailed or extorted by Russia.
There is one country that hopes the Democrats are very, very successful--well, of course, the OPEC nations. But Russia is probably the most hopeful that the Democrats are successful in preventing us from getting the energy that we have been blessed with in this area where you don't have caribou or things, wildlife, like you do in other parts of ANWR. They don't want us to drill because they know we will be able to get energy to Europe. And we won't blackmail Europe. We won't extort Europe the way that Putin often has, countries that he supplies natural gas to.
If we export that, we can help give more freedom to the world. We can bring down our own prices even further. Why wouldn't we do that?
This picture was near the proposed exploration area. It is from Google Maps. It is taken on Dalton Highway, just south of Prudhoe Bay. It is facing east towards the coastal area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So it is not right in the refuge, but it is a very fair representation of the coastal areas found within the refuge.
It is actually a more accurate depiction of the proposed exploration area than the images that we have been seeing around here about the mountains and rainbows and all the herds of animals. This is much more representative than any of those types of pictures.
I want to touch on one more thing about the Russians meddling in our election.
Sean Hannity had a great article 1\1/2\ years ago, February of 2018. In there, he quotes from President Obama. President Obama said: ``There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America's elections. There's no evidence that that has happened in the past or that there are instances in which that will happen this time.''
That was at the height of the 2016 election.
He goes on to say: ``And so I invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.''
President Trump did nothing. It turns out they knew that the Russians were trying to meddle in our election. So why wouldn't Obama try to stop the Russians from meddling in our election? He did nothing.
There is speculation that he knew Hillary Clinton was going to win, and he was afraid if they started admitting what they knew was true--
that Russia was trying to meddle in our elections--and then Hillary Clinton won, it might make her victory look suspect if they talked about the effort they knew Russia was engaged in to affect our election.
But the truth is that Putin wants to divide America as much as he can. Divide and conquer is what he hopes to do. And he has been successful.
The Russians that they had who gave their lives to Christopher Steele, the discredited former MI6 guy, that he provided to Fusion GPS that apparently the Clinton campaign and the DNC had hired, it has done what they wanted. It has done what Putin wanted. It has adversely affected the President of the United States. It has divided our country, and it has pitted family against family.
Someone once said that the last phase of a civil war involves guns, but we have been in a nonfirearm civil war for a while now. And this Mueller investigation--the whole Russia dossier, the lies in there about candidate, now President, Trump--the Russians, just like Putin wanted, have been successful in dividing this country.
As of yesterday, being 9/11, we can disagree, like John Dingell and I did, but I loved the guy. He was a brilliant, caring, honorable man of integrity. We have those on both sides of the aisle. You have some that you have got to be careful on both sides. But there are people on both sides of the aisle; and we can work together because they are honest, honorable people, and we can disagree when we need to.
I need to touch on, before we finish the week here, of course, we have seen in the news Afghanistan peace talks with the Taliban broke down. The Taliban continue to kill Americans, and they are going to continue to kill Americans. It is who they are. It is what they are.
In my trips to Afghanistan and other places, I made friends with some of those Muslims who were part Afghan, Muslims who were part of the Northern Alliance. It is no longer called the Northern Alliance. But these were Muslim friends of the United States. They just wanted their freedom. They are Muslims, but they did not want ruthless totalitarians like the Taliban running their country.
The enemy of our enemy were people we could work with. Unfortunately, our intelligence was not sophisticated enough, plugged in enough, so that a day or so before 9/11, when Ahmad Shah Massoud, sometimes called the Lion of Panjshir because he was such a hero--he was a great warrior, soldier; he was a great politician, beloved in Afghanistan. The Taliban wanted to kill him, but he had good security.
The Taliban, they may be crazy, they may be haters and want to kill all Americans, but they are not stupid at all. They knew that if the United States figured out that the 9/11 attack had originated in Afghanistan with al-Qaida and the Taliban, that the United States would come to Afghanistan, and we would look for an Afghan leader that the people would rally behind, who could lead the country to destroy the Taliban. And they knew that would most likely be the Lion of Panjshir, the hero of the Afghan victory over Russia, Ahmad Shah Massoud.
A day or so before 9/11--I think it was around 36 hours or so before--they had gotten Massoud to agree to an interview. His security people checked out the reporter, known reporter, the cameraman there, let him in, and, when they start the interview, the cameraman blows up the bomb in his camera and kills Massoud.
If our intelligence people had been on top of their game, they would have known something was about to happen. Something was about to happen for them to kill Massoud now, this national hero.
Ahmad Shah Massoud has a brother, Ahmad Zia Massoud, and I think of him as a friend. I hope he thinks the same way. He fought with and under his older brother. His brother used him as a diplomat, but he was one of many of the Northern Alliance.
The movie ``12 Strong'' shows General Dostum that we got after 9/11, getting around October, got other tribal groups to agree to fight with Dostum as the leader. Some of them weren't happy, but they agreed. And we provided air cover, and we provided weapons for them.
{time} 1400
We have 300 or so, as I have understood it, special ops, Special Forces, CIA, in there, and only our guys could call down bombs and direct them at specific targets.
Between the weapons we provided the Afghans, the bomb support from B-
52s 40,000 or so feet up, the Northern Alliance, our Afghan Muslim allies, they destroyed the organized Taliban, within--some say, maybe it was March, but February, March of 2002. Without a single American casualty, we defeated the Taliban.
Then I think it was a mistake. We were considered heroes. We came in. We helped get rid of the Taliban that a majority of Afghanistan did not want running the country. And then we came in and started what appeared to be occupying. And that probably could have been okay if we could have helped them get a new government going and then get out.
Condoleezza Rice, as I have heard from others, relied on recommendations to use a guy named Zalmay Khalilzad, a Pashtun. You can be Pashtun and not be Taliban. He is not Taliban. But you can't be Taliban and not be Pashtun, as I understand it.
And anyway, she relied heavily on him. I talked to a guy who said he was part of the inner circle, and the decision was: What kind of government are we going to give Afghanistan now that we have destroyed the Taliban? Unfortunately, that shouldn't have been our decision, but there were people who said, Look, this is a Tribal country and nothing would fit this area better than to have strong local and state or province governments, and then it is a Federalist society where the national government is kind of an umbrella, but the real power is in the provinces and the local government.
That is not what we did. The wrong people were listened to. And we pushed a constitution through that gives the power to the President, almost making him a dictator. The President is elected in Afghanistan, but then he appoints the governors. He appoints the mayors. He appoints the police chief. It just cut the local folks and the province folks out of governing themselves.
And as my friend Massoud said: You know, look, we know you are going to end up having to pull out some day, so please help us get an amendment to our constitution that allows each province to elect its own governor and allows each city and town to elect their own mayor. Let us pick our own police chiefs, not somebody that Karzai, and now Ghani who is President would pick, but let us pick our own leaders.
And the reasoning I thought was very sound. He said, when America leaves Afghanistan with this strong central government where the President has all power, all I have got to do is either knock off or corrupt the President, and they are right back in charge of Afghanistan.
The Taliban hate Americans, so they are going to come kill a bunch more once they take back over Afghanistan. And then you are going to have to come back and Americans die all over again for nothing.
If you will simply allow us to have that local provincial power so we elect our own leaders and not have them appointed from Kabul, then, yeah, maybe the Taliban gets one or two provinces, but the rest of us can rise up like we did before and defeat the Taliban again, and you don't have to have Americans die like you have for all of these years.
That made sense. But the only trouble is, the guy that helped get Afghanistan this ridiculous constitution that has created basically a totalitarian Presidency, that is who was negotiating with the Taliban. There are rumors that he wanted to be President of Afghanistan at one time himself, but regardless, this guy, he gave the Bush administration bad advice. He gave the Obama administration bad advice.
They were trying to cut a deal with the Taliban. The Taliban, you can cut a deal with them and then they are going to cut your throat the first chance they get.
It makes no sense. But we have people from the Bush administration through the Obama administration. Khalilzad is still being listened to, and he wanted to do this deal with the Pashtun brothers, the Taliban.
We don't need to be dealing with our enemies. We need to be dealing with our allies. And this was one of the great dangers, by rejecting those who lost family members, risked their own lives to help us take out the Taliban, eliminate the organized Taliban originally, without a single loss of American life, why wouldn't we want to put them in positions of power? They can get elected, if we just--I said to Massoud: What makes you think we could help you amend your constitution?
And he said: You are still paying for most of our government operations. If you threaten to pull out all of that money prematurely, yeah, we will change the constitution. But we need your help to do it, so you don't have to keep losing American lives here in Afghanistan.
It made so much sense. But, unfortunately, the deep state just continues to be deep and Khalilzad has been part of that from the beginning. He seemed like a nice guy when I met him in Iraq back in 2005. He seemed like a nice guy. He is just the wrong person to be listened to.
Americans have continued to be killed while he has been wanting to have peace talks with the Taliban, not with the northern or former Northern Alliance people who risked their lives and lost family members fighting with us and for us. Oh, no, we are not going to deal with them. We are going to leave them. And all of the former Northern Alliance, they know that when we leave and we cut a deal with the Taliban or leave things so that the Taliban can take right over again, they are all going to be killed.
Then there isn't going to be anybody in Afghanistan who will be able to stand up and fight against the Taliban. On top of that, even if there were, they wouldn't want to cut a deal with us, because they will have seen the way the Northern Alliance risked lives and lost lives to help us defeat the Taliban.
What do we do? Do we leave them high and dry? Do we allow the Taliban to come in and kill them when we go? No. No. We need to be talking to our friends who fought with us and got rid of all of the organized Taliban by February or March of 2002 before we became occupiers, more or less.
There needs to be a Federalist system there, and we need our friends, our allies who fought the Taliban and don't want them back in positions of authority. And I think President Ghani would be willing to do that, but, you know, deep state just keeps getting deeper. We need to negotiate with our friends, so they are in a position to help our enemies not get back in control to kill Americans again.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________
