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“THE CLINTON-GORE SECURITY GAP” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H5080-H5081 on June 23, 2000.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE CLINTON-GORE SECURITY GAP
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, the American people are viewing the Los Alamos tragedy, this latest tragedy of the losing of two hard drives in one of our most secure places in that nuclear weapons development institute, and having those hard drives lost for a long period of time, and it is still unclear exactly how long they have been lost, having them suddenly reappear behind a copy machine in a place that had been previously searched, and America debates what we should do with respect to this crisis; who should be fired, what reorganization should be made.
I think what we need to do now is to focus not just on this particular incident, but on four major occurrences that have taken place in the last 8 years that constitute in my estimation what I call the Clinton-Gore security gap.
Let me talk about the first of those things.
First, Dr. Wen Ho Lee was focused on in August of 1997 after we discovered that plans for the W-88 nuclear warhead had been stolen, and it appeared to be in the possession of the Communist Chinese. Dr. Wen Ho Lee, we focused on him and determined that he was a suspect in the theft of nuclear secrets. This was a very serious thing.
At that time, in August of 1997, the head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, met with the Clinton-Gore Department of Energy head, the Secretary of Energy, then Mr. Pena, and the head of the FBI said, essentially,
``This guy appears to be a spy of nuclear secrets. Right now he is sitting there with total access to America's most critical nuclear secrets. Get him out of there. Get him out of there.'' He said that in August of 1997.
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A few weeks earlier, he had met with Mr. Pena, Under Secretary of Energy, Elizabeth Moler, and according to Mr. Trulock, who was the head of security, told her the same thing, get this guy out of there, he may be a spy and may be accessing this very critical material. Seventeen months later, somebody looked around at Los Alamos, after the Cox Commission had started to investigate and said, hey, the suspected nuclear spy, is he still in the nuclear weapons vault with access to our most important secrets; and somebody else slapped their forehead and said, yes, I guess he is still there.
In the series of hearings that we had on this incident, there was lots of finger pointing. Elizabeth Moler said Mr. Trulock was supposed to fire him. Mr. Trulock said that she was very definitely told to get this guy out of there and that he told her how to go about doing it. And yet the Clinton-Gore administration allowed a suspected nuclear secrets spy to stay in place for 17 months after the head of the FBI personally met with the Secretary of Energy and said these are the circumstances, get him out of there.
Secondly, Mr. Speaker, we saw one of America's corporations, Loral Corporation, transfer missile technology to China in 1996. They allowed their scientists to engage with the Communist Chinese scientists and tell them what was wrong with their missiles, the Long March missile, because a lot of them were failing. Now, that is important, because that same Long March missile, besides carrying satellites, also carries nuclear warheads, some of which are aimed at American cities. And the Loral Corporation, in fact, according to the Cox Committee, did help Communist China make their missiles more reliable. A very serious thing.
Yet a few months after that, against the recommendation of his own Justice Department, and after he had received $600,000 in campaign contributions from Bernard Schwartz, who was the President and CEO of Loral, President Clinton gave them another waiver to launch yet another satellite in Communist China.
Also, Mr. Speaker, the Clinton-Gore administration allowed 191 supercomputers between 1987 and 1998 to go to Communist China. Now, that is dangerous because they can use those supercomputers in making and designing nuclear warheads in their nuclear weapons complex. So they have an obligation, the Clinton-Gore administration had an obligation, under the law that we have, to go over and check on those computers and make sure they are not being used in the nuclear weapons complex. They have that right. Of the 191 supercomputers that were transferred to China in that 1-year period, they only checked on one supercomputer to make sure it was not being used to design nuclear weapons.
And lastly, Mr. Speaker, we have this case where these hard drives were taken out of this vault, and it has now been testified to that the vault custodian, the person who is supposed to identify that very small group of people who are allowed to come in, that vault custodian would sometimes leave for 2-hour time periods. This is the Clinton-Gore security gap. We have to close it with a clean sweep.
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