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.
“WEAPONIZATION OF LANGUAGE” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H174-H178 on Jan. 10, 2020.
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:
WEAPONIZATION OF LANGUAGE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) for 30 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.
I come to the floor today, Mr. Speaker, because this is the 1-year anniversary of the date that a disparaging misquote in The New York Times was posted, January 10 of 2019, this being January 10 of 2020.
I am hopeful that this new year we have, 2020, will bring about some clarity of vision on the part of my colleagues, the American people, and I don't know that I have as much hope for the press. But this day, a year ago today, I was misquoted by The New York Times. The Times alleged that I had used three terms and asked, why does that language become offensive?
Well, the truth is that it was a 56-minute telephone interview, a call on my cell phone. I didn't have a way to tape it. But I have a practice over the years, I have done interviews with any kind of media I can think of, and if I don't have a means to tape what I say to them, I make it a point not to repeat anything, say anything that I haven't already said to the press. That way, there is nothing new out there for them to take and manipulate it in the article.
{time} 1300
When that phone rang that morning on the 5th of January, 2019, if that is a Friday morning, about 8:35 in the morning, I took the call. I would have preferred to have done it in the office, but sometimes you need to get some work done and move on to other things, and that was part of the incentive.
The reporter for The New York Times told me that he had been assigned by his chief editor to write an article about how it is that the immigration policy that I have advocated for at least since the first days I came to this Congress and years before that, so sometime around 2000 or so, that that immigration policy of build the wall, end birthright citizenship, enforce the rule of law, end the sanctuary cities, and the list of other things that have been part of what I have championed along the way here in this Congress, he was assigned to write an article about how it was that our President Donald Trump had adopted my immigration positions and gotten elected on those immigration positions, and now the national debate was surrounding the very topics that I had talked about for so long.
So we embarked upon a 56-minute interview. He didn't have a tape, and I didn't have a tape. I know he didn't have a tape for a couple of reasons. One of them was that, on an occasion or two, he asked me to carefully repeat the statement I had made so that he could type it down and get it accurate. That told me that was one he is going to quote. It wasn't the one of controversy, however.
Then the second piece of it was that we asked him on the telephone the following week: Do you have a tape?
His answer was: Why do you want to know?
In that phone call, he would not answer the question as to whether he had a tape. We found out later on that he had admitted that there was no tape. So we asked for his notes. He wouldn't release his notes. We asked him for the question that he had posed to me, and he wouldn't even speculate as to what the question was that he had posed to me in this 56-minute interview.
He did assert that he can type as fast as anyone can talk, that he is highly trained on that and so skilled that the words would be perfect and so would the punctuation be perfect.
Now, I am here on the floor of this House of Representatives. We have some of the best stenographers in the world here. They get more practice in the House than anywhere else, and they talk slower in the Senate. I have asked them: About how fast can you type?
A lot of them are about 130 words a minute on a conventional typewriter, and when they get to what I call the magic keyboard here, Mr. Speaker, then those words may go up to as many as 260 words a minute.
Then I asked them: Can you keep up with me when I am on a roll?
They say: No. We are always glad when you pause and let us catch up.
These are the best there are anywhere. I can't believe that a reporter for The New York Times with a conventional and not a magic keyboard can outpace the people on this floor to keep up with these fast-talking people in the House of Representatives, the very best there are in the world. That is not his skill set anyway.
So when he asserts that he could type it up accurately with utter precision and the punctuation would be correct, even when I asked the best in the world what about the punctuation, if that comes out to be perfect, too, they will say: No, I have to go back and listen to the tape to make sure we get that part of it right. We get the words right, but the punctuation may be in question.
I have great respect for the skill sets here. I do not respect the response that he gave in defense because it is not believable that a reporter can be on a telephone on the other end typing at a speed with the kind of precision necessary to settle the kind of cases that we have here.
Nonetheless, when that story came out on the 10th of January, things blew up here in this Congress, and I immediately put out a statement that should have shut all that criticism down. I put it out with clarity. I clearly rejected more emphatically than anyone in this House of Representatives has, including the resolution that passed the following week, more clearly than anyone else has the idea of the odious ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy.
Those are ideologies that didn't exist in my environment anyplace that I was in all of my growing up, in my formative years, my adult years, and my time here in the Congress.
When our minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, asked for a meeting with me on the following Monday, it was his assertion that it has always meant the same thing. I said I don't know how we know, if it is language that has not been used or utilized. How do we know what it meant to people? You couldn't look up an ideology that is two words, not one, in this huge dictionary over here. You won't be able to look up ``white nationalism'' or ``white supremacy'' there because that is a phrase. It is an ideology that ties two words together with a meaning that perhaps could be different.
So in an interview with Dave Price of WHO-TV on October 20, 2018, he had asked me the question: What is a white nationalist?
I said it might have meant something different 1 or 2 or 3 years ago, but today it implies racist. I knew that because I have been paying attention to the weaponization of language. This is what the left has been doing. They have been calling people racist for 20, 25 years, and they have watched as Republicans--especially Southern conservative Republicans--curl up away from that kind of accusation because it shuts them down.
I recall the conversation that I related, actually, to The New York Times reporter in that 56-minute interview. In my answer to the question, whatever it was that he asked me: What had happened in February 2013?
That was an immigration meeting down the hallway over toward the Senate side where we had a discussion about immigration with four or five Senators, five or six House Members, and some nongovernment representatives who were also there at the table and around the table.
It was the first time that I had met Senator Ted Cruz. He had made a statement that we need to be very careful with the language we use, especially on immigration, because if we are not, if we use any language that is offensive, they will use it against us.
I listened to that, and I thought that I had better respond. I said: Well, Senator, I agree with what you said, but we also need to keep in mind that if we let them define that which is offensive, then whatever language is effective will be defined as offensive.
I waited for his answer, which was essentially a nod, which I took to mean an agreement with me, and I believe it was because it was certainly a logical statement, and it was objective.
I set this up this way, Mr. Speaker, so that when I lay out this case, it is going to be clearly understood by all who are paying attention. It says: I am just going to take the term ``white nationalist,'' that is what Kevin McCarthy was so concerned about and believing that it confirmed some kind of a hidden ideology in me that no one had been able to discover in personal contact with me that had been discovered by The New York Times reporter over the telephone. He argued that the response I gave, that it might have meant something different 1 or 2 or 3 years ago, exposed that I didn't know that it was a negative connotation that had to do with white nationalism. And somehow or another, he assigned another belief system to me, which is generally what the left does.
I asked for 24 hours to disprove this. He said you have 1 hour and walked out of the room--1 hour. Well, it takes a lot of digging. I just proved it clearly but not in an hour.
So what I have here, what I would like to show you, Mr. Speaker, is this: What did the term ``white nationalism'' mean in the year 2000, when it was virtually unused, or in any year prior to that, when it was also virtually unused? What did it mean in 2001, 2002, and 2003? All the way up, you can see that it was virtually unused, and it never even starts to move until 2016.
This is a LexisNexis search of the term ``white nationalism'' or
``white nationalist,'' derivatives of this term. LexisNexis, Mr. Speaker, goes into blogs, web postings, newspaper print, and magazine print. You name it, if it is in print out there, then LexisNexis is very likely to have it all. This is the only objective way you can quantify the utilization of this term.
``White nationalism'' is virtually unused all the way up until 2016, actually. There, it jumped up to 10,000 times a year. It was virtually unused, and all of a sudden, in 2016, there it goes to 10,000 times a year; in 2017, 30,000 times; and in 2018, it is still up there at 20,000 times.
How did it happen that a terminology that had been virtually unused all of a sudden becomes used multiple times, up to 30,000 times a year, when 1 to 200 times a year is this virtually unused definition down here?
How did it happen that this is the word that gets tagged on me? Is that an accident, Mr. Speaker? I don't think so. In fact, any objective person looking at the data couldn't come to that conclusion either.
This is the annual utilization: virtually unused up to 2016, then up to 10,000 times a year, and then up to 30,000 times the next year. It is still at 20,000 the following year.
This is a weaponized term created by the left to attack conservatives with. It is one of their weaponized terms. They have multiple weaponized terms now because they wore out the term ``racist'' and needed to make up new terms that they could be offended by.
How did this happen, that 2016 was the year that the term ``white nationalist'' was used 10,000 times in that year? I asked them to break this thing down, LexisNexis' utilization of ``white nationalist,'' month by month throughout the year 2016. That is the jump year down here.
Here is the data. From November and December, it is down here, used a little more, perhaps you could still call it virtually unused, but there is a little blip in August. Then it jumps up in November, and it is still up there in December.
What happened in 2016 that brought about the use of the term ``white nationalist'' as an almost always pejorative term? It is almost always used to attack conservatives. What happened? Well, there is the circumstance that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States on November 8, 2016.
When that happened, there was already a gathering for the hierarchy of the Democratic Party to gather together at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel here in Washington, D.C. Their agenda was to best plan how they were going to utilize what they expected would be a Hillary Clinton Presidency. They admitted that they had to change their agenda when they got the surprise of Donald Trump winning the election as opposed to Hillary. They did change their agenda at the Occidental Hotel.
By the way, it was led by George Soros. His face is on the front cover here of Politico's article that tells about this. There are several other articles, Mr. Speaker, but George Soros led on this.
There, they planned how they were going to deal with a Trump Presidency and how they were going to try to handcuff, tie down, refuse, and resist.
Mr. Speaker, if we remember what happened, that came into our verbiage also. I didn't run the LexisNexis numbers on this, but I am certain I am right. ``Resist,'' ``resistance movement'' would be also, probably, a little more used than ``white nationalist,'' but we might be able to define that as virtually unused until the conference at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel in Washington, D.C., that started on Sunday, November 13, the Sunday after Trump was elected President.
There, they planned how they were going to deal with the Trump Presidency and how they were going to handcuff him, tie him down, resist, resist, and resist. The resistance movement was born in this hotel by Democratic leadership led by George Soros and no doubt funded by George Soros. The executive director position that was managing over all this was a former Soros staff person.
They planned their resistance movement, and out of that also came some words to be weaponized: white nationalist, white supremacist, Nazi, and fascist.
That is what I was talking about in my interview with Trip Gabriel as what had happened to weaponize language and how it was being used against people. We should never forget that we have the left in this country in particular--and I hope it is to a lesser degree, and I believe it is, from the other side--that assigns a belief system to people and then attacks them for the belief system that they have assigned. They use the words that they have been assigned to use to assign to people for the belief system that they have assigned.
So what we have is virtually unused ``white nationalist'' here throughout all these years until we come to 2016. Then we have the events of November 13, 14, and 15, checking out on the morning of Wednesday the 16th of November. That was taking place at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel. Clearly, somebody said: We are going to start using
``white nationalist'' against conservatives. Get to it.
They were at it while they were in the hotel, and it showed up some 5,000 times in that little window of time there.
Now, if you wonder, well, maybe I am not right on the date, Mr. Speaker, I had them break down the month of November 2016. Here is the month of November. The 1st, 2nd, kind of virtually unused, under 100 times in any given day. Until you get to they checked in here, the 13th of November, and, zing, all the way we go up to here to the top and back, this peak right here represents the times that they were in that hotel, making the decision and activating the weaponization of a number of terms but certainly the term ``white nationalism.''
{time} 1315
So, they all knew what they were doing. They were in that hotel, and they knew what they were doing.
I am just not convinced that the people in the leadership on the Republican side knew what was being perpetrated against our ideology, Mr. Speaker. And it seemed as though a number of my own leadership decided that they were going to jump on the bandwagon, too, with no chance for self-defense.
I would reflect that, even if you go back through all of Christianity, if you go back through Judeo-Christianity, if you go back through Western civilization, if you go back through the foundation of American culture and civilization--you can go back to Jesus; you can go back to St. Paul--everybody accused had a right to face their accusers and had, also, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. I can find no exceptions in anybody's framework. That is the standard. That is the civilizational standard.
I have listened as our minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has aggressively and effectively, I believe--and I am glad he is doing it--
defended our President of the United States and said that he deserves due process and he deserves a fair process and that he is innocent until proven guilty. I agree with all of that.
But Kevin McCarthy doesn't seem to agree that should be in a manner that I would be treated. I believe that I deserve due process and I deserve innocent until proven guilty.
And I would point out that there is no evidence to make the case against me--no evidence, no real evidence. I have put out the fact-
check document. It is on my website. It went on in March of last year. It is about six pages. No one has poked a hole in any of that rationale.
And here is another ``no one,'' Mr. Speaker.
Even though Brett Kavanaugh had about six or seven or so accusers, and I believe Brett Kavanaugh was unjustly accused in every one of those cases, but at least he had an opportunity to face his accusers and at least one of them came forward to testify and could be examined by the panel of the Committee on the Judiciary that was there.
Brett Kavanaugh, I believe, was exonerated from those charges. He is now seated on the United States Supreme Court, and I believe that he will go on to be a stellar Justice on our United States Supreme Court. But he had a chance to face his accusers, and he had them.
In my case, Mr. Speaker, not only did I not have a chance to face my accusers, neither do I have the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. But on top of that, I don't have any accusers--not one. Of the tens of thousands of people that I have dealt with face to face in my years in public life--roughly, a quarter of a century in public life, and we have been in the construction business dealing with people clear back to 1975--there is not one individual who has come forward and said that I have treated them in any kind of disrespectful, disparaging, or racist way of any kind whatsoever.
I don't have an accuser to face, not one, unless it might be hearsay. And even the hearsay doesn't seem to be out there.
This is the analysis of the weaponization of language and the eager embracement of it by my own leadership who has denied me any due process.
So, here I am, the fourth Member of Congress in all of history to be removed from my committees--only the fourth, Mr. Speaker. And the other three, fairly modern history: James Traficant, who stood on this floor and said, ``Beam me up, Scotty.'' He was convicted of something like nine different Federal felonies and he ran for reelection from prison.
We lost a couple of Republicans in this Congress, one from Buffalo and one from California, either convicted or confessed to Federal felonies. I regret that. But that is three of four are Federal felons.
And then there is me. I am treated like a Federal felon by my own leadership in this House of Representatives because somebody called the hit from up the chain above them, and they decided that they needed to do that under the command of the individual or individuals that called that hit.
So only four people removed from all their committees in the history of this Congress, three are either convicted or confessed Federal felons, and there is me. And there is not even a rule that I violated, let alone a law, let alone a Federal violation, a felony, to be treated like a Federal felon by my own leadership for a made-up story that doesn't hold up, cannot hold up under the scrutiny of history, and it must be rectified.
So, on top of that, I have heard our esteemed minority leader say that there is no constitutional charge against Donald Trump for impeachment, that they are made-up charges on the part of the Democrats, and that it is either treason, bribery, high crimes, or misdemeanor, and the President has violated none of those.
And I agree with him. That is true. None of those reasons for impeachment of a President exists in the activities that have been examined here in this House of Representatives, even down in the secret bunker of Adam Schiff. They don't exist.
So they made up a couple of charges, and one of them was obstruction of Congress, and the other one was about putting our Nation at risk.
Well, that is a judgment call, and I think the President made the right judgment call on Soleimani; he has made a lot of right judgment calls up and down the line.
But because you disagree with the President is not a reason to impeach him. There is no statute, no law, no rule that the President is guilty of, or at least has been proven to be guilty of. There is no substantive information that supports that allegation.
They impeached the President of the United States in this House of Representatives on December 18 because they don't like Donald Trump. And then part of what they cooked up in the Mandarin Hotel on the following week after he was elected President in 2016, those are some of the reasons.
The biggest reason is they need a shield from prosecution in the investigations and prosecutions that are taking place now in the Department of Justice and the FBI looking into the weaponization of our Federal Government for political purposes, for going in and misrepresenting information to the FISA court, for perhaps duping a FISA judge or maybe having a FISA judge that should have been a little more alert. How many times did James Comey sign a FISA request when he knew the information was false? You can go on and on.
If that comes forward and indictments are brought forward on that, that is going to crush the other side. They need this impeachment as a shield, and that is the biggest reason why they decided to move forward.
But I believe the foundation was laid in that Mandarin Hotel on that weekend starting on Sunday, November 13, 2016, and concluding on Wednesday when they checked out that morning. I believe that is when much of the strategy was put together.
And I would go further, Mr. Speaker, and that is that we had the Mueller investigation that tied this country up for nearly 2 years. The strategy on that, I believe, was discussed in that hotel room. That is just too close to the pattern of things that flowed out of there that we do know of.
And we know from the own words of James Comey that he went in to interview the President, to brief the President on whether or not there was the existence of an investigation that the President was under; and, out of that, he typed up his notes and handed them over to a professor at Columbia University with the directions or understanding that they would be leaked to The New York Times, with the objective of the leakage of those notes that were written up by James Comey to bring about a special counsel to investigate Donald Trump for alleged nefarious activities in Russia and that the special counsel was to be Robert Mueller.
All of that was known before James Comey went in to brief Donald Trump. All that was known before to James Comey.
As that flowed out and Mueller is named as the special counsel, we went, then, through 2 years, and we had the investigators that went from 13 up to 18, built-in bias in most of them and perhaps all of them, and they came up empty. And that was about May 7 of last year.
Then they had to look for another reason to impeach this President. They thought the Mueller report was going to do it, and it didn't. They couldn't make the case. They tried. And afterwards, some of them tried again. They tried to resurrect it again and again. Finally, the house of cards on the Mueller investigation collapsed, and they had to come up with something new.
Well, then there is the phone call of July 25 of last year, which I have read through the transcript of that multiple times, Mr. Speaker. Never do I see anything in there that troubles me.
And I believe Professor Jonathan Turley, in his testimony before the House Committee on the Judiciary, when he said, to the effect that, if you had told George Washington that he could be impeached for a conversation he had, that his powdered wig would catch on fire. That is what we are dealing with.
So these very, very thin excuses for impeachment, but the calendar was turning pages over and they needed to get this done, so they took the thinnest of excuses and turned that into what was a show for the American people that I think will live in infamy throughout history.
In my case, Mr. Speaker, I have clearly proven that these allegations are false. There is no rule that I have violated. There is nothing that is pointed to. There is nothing in history that says that there is a pattern in this Congress that the freedom of speech of a Member of Congress, whether he is accurately quoted or not, can be disciplined by the will or whim of a leader in this House of Representatives.
Everyone in this country has to have the First Amendment right, freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and all of the rest of the rights that we have in the Bill of Rights.
But the chilling effect of the actions taken by the leader here of the minority in the House of Representatives chills the freedom of speech of everybody in here--at least on the Republican side--and everybody that is either running as a candidate in, potentially, a primary or aspires to run for office.
The most principled people we have in this country will not want to submit to censorship by a leader that may or may not have enjoyed their support to get elected to that leadership position.
This is a chilling, chilling effect, and the history of this is not going to go down very well as people examine what happened. There is much, much more to come out.
Mr. Speaker, as I watch the clock tick down, I make the point that I have introduced a resolution here, and I will have a number early next week, but it has just gone in in the last few hours. I have been waiting to drop this resolution. I am dropping it and introducing it on the anniversary of the misquote that got dropped on me 1 year ago today for The New York Times that allegedly launched this firestorm that has brought about these things that I have talked about.
This resolution makes the case clearly that The New York Times could not be right and that I could not be wrong, and the balance of this was people wanting it to be true and so they wrote it up.
So this disproves The New York Times quote; and, additionally, Mr. Speaker, I delivered that quote on the floor of the House of Representatives the following Tuesday in the fashion that I would have said it if I had actually said it.
In other words, I would never tie together white nationalism, white supremacy, and Western civilization. No, Mr. Speaker, I would never do that, because they don't fit at all together.
The pejorative terms were: Nazi, fascist, white nationalist, white supremacy. And I made the point there would be a distinct pause, and I would start from the beginning and say, But Western civilization, how did that language become pejorative? Why I did sit in classrooms while all of that time being taught about the merits of our civilization?
And this Congressional Record misquoted me exactly the same way that The New York Times did. This amendment fixes that.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________
