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 H9340-H9345 on Dec. 6, 2019.
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:
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. Madam Speaker, I have been reminded again this week in conversations with some friends across the aisle that there are some people in here with whom I have extremely different views. But I know them, they have got good hearts, and they want to do the right thing; we just disagree on what that is.
There was a lot said today in the debate over the Voting Rights Act change. Some have tried to say and have just been mistaken--I don't think they were intentionally trying to misrepresent anything--but what we voted on today was not a reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act has been in effect, and it is still in effect.
But going back to the previous reauthorization that came through the Judiciary Committee I am on, it became clear that between the Republican and Democrat leaders in Judiciary, there was an agreement, and they weren't going to allow changes to their agreement. I pointed out to both of them back at the time: You have a provision in here that is reauthorized that will punish States for sins committed by grandparents--in some cases great-grandparents--that happened decades before, in many cases decades before some were born who were there. This is not supposed to be a country where we intentionally punish the children and grandchildren of somebody who committed an offense.
It was wrongdoing in preventing people from voting, and the Voting Rights Act addressed that. But it was reauthorized more than once, continuing to punish the same States that have been found to be lacking, and the data we had at the previous reauthorization showed clearly there were places in some districts, in places like New York, Wisconsin, and California, where the voting disparity and racial disparity was worse than in the States that were still being punished.
I know some say: Well, it is not a punishment for the Federal Government to say you are not trustworthy and so you don't get to be in charge of your elections; we have to approve every single thing you do.
That is an extraordinary and basically unconstitutional action by the Federal Government that has been deemed to be constitutional, but only until such time as the States that were offending have corrected the situation.
I know there was one newspaper in my district that reported I was against the voting rights reauthorization. When I provided them a copy of my transcript from the reporters, the stenographers here, exactly as it was and they read what I actually said, instead of taking talking points from the left-wing alt-left media, the editor at the time--I know from things she had said, she apparently was a Democrat--but she was an honorable person, and they printed a correction and corrected what they had said.
I was in favor of the voting rights reauthorization, but not to continue to punish States that were not in violation and hadn't been for decades. So, in fact, my amendment would have required the punitive parts of the Voting Rights Act to apply to any State in the Union that was found to be in violation of the constitutional protections on voting.
I pointed out to the Republican leader at the time and the Democratic leader, John Conyers.
And actually, John Conyers was more open to making the change. He said: Well, you made a good point. Let me talk to some of our lawyers about it.
The Republican leader said: Absolutely not. We are not changing anything at all.
I said: But this is going to be struck down. There are some things we don't really know. This is one that is going to be struck down. Why risk the court just striking the whole thing down? If you allow my amendment, it will be constitutional, it won't any of it be struck down.
The Republican leader at the time said: Absolutely not.
Mr. Conyers came back to me later and said: I have talked to our lawyers, and they say you do make a good point, but since we have an agreement on it, it is just easier if we go forward, and if they strike something down, they strike it down.
The Supreme Court came back and did just what I said they would do. They struck down an unconstitutional part that I had tried to amend and make it constitutional.
But that is where we are. This today does not reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.
It is interesting hearing comments from folks across the aisle about why this is so important that we don't disenfranchise votes. If you look at what the activity is, and even saying: Oh, there are 17 million people who have been disenfranchised because they are no longer allowed to vote.
Despite what some who make comments online might say, I am not stupid. I have won awards at every school I have been in. But I know that traditionally dead people who vote, vote Democrat. That has just been the way it is. Republicans have had a very difficult time getting dead people to vote Republican.
William F. Buckley talked about an uncle he had had who voted Republican his whole life until the year after he died, and then he started voting Democrat. He said he wasn't kidding, and that it actually happened there in Texas. Sometimes we kid about it.
Lyndon Johnson, according to David Brinkley, told a story back in the sixties to reporters about how when he was running for Congress that he and his campaign manager were going through the cemetery writing down names of people they needed to have vote the next day, and they got to one tombstone and you couldn't read the name. There was moss and all this stuff on it. So the campaign manager said: Come on, Lyndon, let's go to the next tombstone. Johnson said: I grabbed him, and I told him, no, sir, this man has every bit a right to vote as anybody else in this cemetery. It was funny, and people laughed.
But people who knew about the discrepancies in Duval County and the Dukes of Duval and voting irregularities, the investigation, and the courthouse burning with the records, those kinds of things were what got reported, and Johnson was able to get a good joke out of it. But, nonetheless, it is still true. If you find somebody who is dead who has voted, normally they voted Democrat.
So I hope that my friends will understand. Some of the people they are talking about being disenfranchised by what Republicans want to do to fix election law, it will disenfranchise the dead who are continuing to vote. Their vote will not be allowed to count as it did when they were alive.
We also have had millions reported to have voted who were in this country illegally or voting more than once or were registered more than one place.
My friend, John Fund, used to be a writer with The Wall Street Journal. John had a fantastic book on voting fraud, and I have heard him say to me: Do you know that the biggest fraud about elections is the statement that there is no election fraud today?
So this Voting Rights Act amendment that was voted on by the House today is yet another effort for the Federal Government to ignore the Constitution and ignore the mandate that elections are to be controlled locally, and that is according to the 10th Amendment, not just reserved to the States and people it specifically talked about.
Exceptions have been made over the years that allow the Federal Government to have some say, and that was the case because of abuses and people who were prevented from voting. So I am surprised that we have colleagues here who don't want the dead people to be disenfranchised, whose names have been taken off rolls in areas where Republicans are trying to update the voting rolls. I understand my colleagues are not stupid either. They know that dead people vote more for Democrats than Republicans. So I get it, and why they would want to keep them voting. But it is something that needs to be done.
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The other vote we had today regarding Israeli-Palestinian two-nation peace, peace with two independent states, I couldn't vote for that. I pray for the peace of Israel, but I couldn't vote for that, a two-state solution being rammed down the throat of the one of the parties that doesn't want to totally destroy those who want to totally destroy them.
I mean, we send money over to the Palestinians still. One of the things that President Trump has been wanting to do--he agreed with me once when I pointed it out--we don't have to pay people to hate us. They will do it for free.
There is corruption in different places around the world, and especially, there has been in Ukraine. I was glad that President Trump was doing something about it. Obviously, President Obama didn't do anything about it, and we have a huge effort now from our friends across the aisle that want to stop the reform and the elimination of corruption in Ukraine that President Trump was trying to undertake.
Apparently, Ukraine has been quite helpful to our friends across the aisle. Obviously, in the last Presidential campaign, plenty of information indicates they were trying to help Hillary Clinton. That is why it was reported that after the election, they realized: Well, gee, since we were trying to help Hillary Clinton, maybe we better try to warm up to Donald Trump.
But when it comes to Israel, an effort to push through a two-state solution forcing Israel to sign an agreement or an effort to try to push them to sign an agreement with the Palestinians, while the Palestinians in response to each bilateral and unilateral effort that Israel has made to reach out with an olive branch, to try to bring about an effort at peace, they have been slapped down.
As a result of those efforts at peace, Israelis have died; places have been destroyed; and Israelis live in fear. All you have to do is go to southern Israel to find out, because they are coming every day these rockets get fired.
They are not that accurate on where they hit, so nobody can be sure they won't hit them, their homes. Their homes there have to have a safe place within there so that when the warning comes, which may only be seconds before the rocket hits, you have to grab your kids and head for the safe room and hope that you aren't killed.
I heard from one mother once when I was over there. The rockets were flying from the strip that Israel had unilaterally given as a show of peace, an effort to reach out unilaterally, asking nothing in return. I thought it was a huge mistake, but they did it. As a result, rockets fly every day.
But this lady was saying she had her little son in the car, and the warning sounded, the siren. She didn't have time to get her child to a safe place, so she laid on top of him in the car seat, put him down on the car seat and laid on top of him.
When the rockets hit far enough away that it was not a threat to them, and the rockets stopped temporarily, and she sat up, her son cried and said: Mama, if you are going to die, I don't want to keep living. Don't do that to me again. I want to be with you wherever you are.
This kind of stuff gets played out day-after-day in Israel because the Palestinians want to wipe them off the map. They don't want any Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and they make that very clear: We want to wipe them out.
They never agreed to back off that position. It is pretty clear that no matter what kind of agreement you have, when you are still teaching children in your schools, which received money from the United States, that Jews are vermin and rats and need to be wiped out--the same kind of things the Nazis were saying and printing, they print them, say them, teach them.
We are going to want to do them favors, send them more money while they use money themselves to teach that kind of hatred?
I was mentioning to my friend Lee Zeldin earlier today that if the Democrats who were pushing through this demand for a two-state solution were successful, then they could historically stand with Neville Chamberlain and say, as he did, that this two-state solution means peace in our time, when actually it would just be a precursor to the killing of millions of Jews.
We don't need a two-state solution where one of those states is still intent on wiping Israel off the map. It made no sense, and the people on this side of the aisle, most everybody, I think, voted against it, not that they were against peace in the Middle East.
We also heard yesterday--actually, Wednesday, yesterday, today--a lot made about a comment by President Trump when he was talking about whether he would fire Mr. Mueller, Robert Mueller, as special counsel. This article by Charlie Spiering, 6 December, points out what the President said: ``Look, Article II, I would be allowed to fire Robert Mueller. Assuming I did all of the things, I said I want to fire him. Number one, I didn't. He wasn't fired. Very importantly, but more importantly, Article II allows me to do whatever I want. Article II would allow me to fire him. I wasn't going to fire him. You know why? Because I watched Richard Nixon firing everybody, and that didn't work out too well.''
That is the context the President was talking about. Yes, he is exactly right. He had the authority to fire Robert Mueller. I encouraged him not to fire him, just appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Bob Mueller. Why in the world would he hire nothing but people who hated him?
He said: Could I do that?
I said: Yes.
The authority of the Attorney General to hire and fire a special prosecutor comes from the President. It is his power. He could do it if he wants to.
He is exactly right that Article II would allow him to fire Mueller, which he never did. So when the Speaker takes that quote, ``I can do whatever I want,'' when he is talking about whether or not he were to fire Robert Mueller and try to apply that to this is why we have to remove him from office, that is such a dangerous, dangerous direction to go.
It is why I was so saddened to hear that our Speaker wants to now move forward with Articles of Impeachment.
As Jonathan Turley testified before us Wednesday, this bar is so low. Historically speaking, when a governing document like our Constitution is degenerated to this point, you don't normally come back from that.
What you could expect historically, if my friends do as they say they are going to do, they are going to vote to impeach President Trump. He hasn't committed any crime. He has tweeted out some offensive tweets, but to have a bar this low and try to, for the first time in American history, remove a duly elected President, then any President, regardless of party, in the future can expect that when the opposition party controls the House, they will spend 2 to 4 years, however long the opposing party is in power, fighting impeachment. That is what this will do for the future.
I know some of our Democratic colleagues have seen before that they can attack Republicans. They can be unfair. They can encourage people to be unfair to Republicans.
Republicans will not want to treat others the way they got treated when it was so unfair. I can't help but wonder if people think: We can do this to them, and they won't do it to a Democratic President.
There are people who were often pointing out to me bases for President Obama to be impeached. Going back to Fast and Furious, all kinds of things that we should have been investigating. But at the time, we had a Speaker who didn't want to go to court and get court orders in order to get the documents that were demanded. So we had a show vote to hold in contempt, but it was meaningless unless we went to court and had it enforced by a court order, as Jonathan Turley was saying, is the right of the Congress or the President to do.
If the Congress or the President does that, it is not an impeachable offense for the Member of Congress or the President. It is a constitutional right. Once the court orders that it has to be produced or orders that it does not have to be produced, then if the President or the Congress says they are not going to abide by the court order, then that gets into an area that you may want to look at impeachment, but that is not what has happened here. But it is what the next couple weeks' actions may lead us to.
It is unfortunate that the President's comments were taken out of context in whether or not he had the power to fire Mueller. He was right that he did. Article II gives him that power. Then to say he thinks he can do anything he wants to do, well, no. If he thought he could do anything he wanted to do, if he was a monarch, then he would just say he is going to take all the money and shut down the Department of Education totally and divert all that money to securing our border, protecting American citizens, as he wants to do. He has made it very clear.
Instead, he can take only some money here that is, under the law, open enough that it could be used for the purpose of building a wall. Otherwise, he would have a wall all built by now.
But he knows he is not a monarch. So it is a pretty outrageous thing to say.
But when it comes to going to court, Daniel Huff, a smart lawyer who used to be at the Committee on the Judiciary here, had an article published in The Wall Street Journal. The Supreme Court last week blocked a House committee subpoena for 8 years' worth of President Trump's tax returns. The committee will press the matter in further litigation, but the logic that supports the subpoena undercuts House Democrats' effort to impeach Mr. Trump for asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.
In both cases, the use of official power to get dirt on a political rival is consistent with a broader, valid, official purpose, and that is to try to fight corruption. So Daniel Huff makes a great point in that editorial that he wrote.
What we were dealing with in the Committee on the Judiciary on Wednesday, if we are really going to examine a report--and I found out there is a hearing Monday morning at 9:00 a.m.
I asked who the witnesses are. Well, we don't know yet. What are we going to be taking up? Well, we don't know yet.
Well, you are trying to destroy the Presidency, remove a man out of office. Something so serious that the Founders would say this is something that rises to the level--it needs to be treasonous. It has to be really serious.
{time} 1400
Under the Constitution itself, it makes very clear you cannot convict someone of treason under this Constitution, Federal court, unless you have the direct testimony of two witnesses. All they had was hearsay on hearsay on hearsay.
They can't try President Trump for something like treason because they don't have two direct witnesses. So much of what they brought would never be allowed or admitted into court.
We deserve to hear from former members of the Obama administration who were holdovers. I know that Mr. McMaster made a comment that he didn't want to hear any more of his employees at the National Security Council ever mention the word ``holdover,'' that just because somebody was hired by the Obama administration and Trump hadn't gotten rid of them yet didn't mean they were holdovers, that they are government employees.
Well, no. They were holdovers, and he should have never been in the position he was. He spent his time trying to undermine the President the best he could.
As of March of this year, our own Speaker said impeachment must be compelling and overwhelmingly bipartisan. She is violating her own statement if she has this go forward next week.
In 1998, our own Judiciary Chairman Nadler said there must never be a narrowly voted impeachment supported by one of our major political parties and opposed by the other. Such would produce divisiveness in our politics and will call into question the very legitimacy of our political institutions.
You know what? Jerry Nadler was exactly right when he said that. If they go through with this in the next 2 weeks or in January--whenever--
it is going to do exactly what he said, which is what Professor Jonathan Turley said. It is going to produce even more divisiveness in this country and will call into question the very legitimacy of our political institutions.
It absolutely will. He was right back then. I don't know what has happened since 1998 when he was so acutely aware of the Constitution and the ramifications of actions like they are taking now, but this is where we are.
Some of us were encouraged to file impeachment on President Obama, and some were angry that I wouldn't file for impeachment of President Obama. But I cared so deeply about this country, and I knew that if we had impeachment proceedings on President Obama, no matter what he did, this country would be so divided that it would never recover. Of course, we became much more divided during those years.
Somebody asked me: When President Obama was in office, did you ever have any positive thoughts about him being President?
I said: When he was elected, I didn't vote for him, but I thought, you know what? He could end up being like Coach Williams was to us back where I grew up. Coach Williams was my favorite coach. He happened to be Black, and I loved the guy. He was such a great coach.
But he brought us all together as a team. We had a few good athletes, but most were like me. I was a quarterback and captain on the team at the time, and he brought us together. He treated everybody tough, but he treated everybody the same.
We came together as a team, and we had an extremely winning team. We didn't win every game. We nearly did. But he was a great coach.
I didn't mention to the reporter that I was quarterback, but I said that I hoped that President Obama would bring us together as a Nation the way Coach Williams did as a team. I didn't say what sport, what position I played.
So, the first story I see about my comment from some big liberal was how I said my high school basketball coach was my favorite coach. Apparently, if you are a liberal like that reporter was, you just assume, well, if he was a Black coach, it must have been basketball. I didn't say basketball or football. She just assumed it. I found that rather ironic.
One of my great joys last year: I was asked to come to speak to my old alma mater high school to try to fire them up before the game. Somebody told me Coach Williams was up in the press box, so I went up there. Arms flew open by both of us. He is just a good man, just a good man. He was a great coach, and I treasure the times I got to play with him.
But that hasn't happened here. The country got more divided.
But Sharyl Attkisson had a good account. This was November 25 and updated November 30. Some of the things she pointed out was Mueller, as anti-Trump as he, Weissmann, and all those folks were that he hired, Mueller testified there were instances of Russian social media support for Hillary Clinton as well. Try to find that in the mainstream media.
She also says, according to reporting by Politico, though, in January 2017--it is hard to find at Politico now because they, I am sure, deeply regret they ever reported this. But they reported back then efforts by Democrats and Ukraine to sabotage the Trump campaign in 2016 did impact the race, even though Trump won in the end.
She points out that in March 2016, Alexandra Chalupa reportedly met with top Ukrainian officials at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to tarnish the Trump campaign by exposing ties by Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort, and Russia, according to Politico.
Now, this is Alexandra Chalupa. She was a consultant with the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and previously worked under the Clinton administration. She acknowledged in 2017 that she worked as a consultant for the DNC during the 2016 campaign with the goal of publicly exposing Trump campaign aide Paul Manafort's links to pro-
Russian politicians in Ukraine. ``Chalupa admitted coordinating with the Ukrainian Embassy, and with Ukrainian and U.S. news reporters.''
But on August 8, 2016, that is when Peter Strzok wrote to Lisa Page that they would stop Trump from becoming President.
Ukraine had formed the National Anticorruption Bureau in 2014 as a condition to receive aid. Why? Because, nominally, the Obama administration wanted to say, as Congress was dictating back then, that we wanted to see some advances in anticorruption by Ukraine.
A recent poll indicated that, in the last year, 68 percent of those randomly chosen for the poll had bribed a government official. Sixty-
eight percent, that is just here recently.
But August 19, 2016, Manafort resigned as Trump campaign chairman. I think he was there only 3 months, something like that.
The same day, Ukrainian parliament member Serhiy Leshchenko, who was part of the Petro Poroshenko bloc, held a news conference to draw attention to Manafort and Trump's pro-Russia ties. The original link to a photograph of the news conference was recently removed.
``At the news conference in Ukraine, Leshchenko was said to be exposing `a firm run by U.S. businessman and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who reportedly directly orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine's ruling political party, attempting to sway the American public's opinion in favor of the country's pro-
Russian Government.' ''
Anyway, those were just some of the things that were going on that really need to be investigated.
One of the important results to some of those who appear to have been conspiring with Ukraine, Americans who appear to be conspiring with Ukraine to affect our U.S. election, gee, they did have an effect, but it wasn't enough to change the outcome of the 2016 election.
In 2018, Senator Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in the Senate, and Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee, asked Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray for various records, including forensic images of Chalupa's devices. They are seeking records also from the National Archives to obtain White House visitor logs regarding any meetings between Chalupa, Ukrainians, and Obama officials.
August 8, 2018, that is when Strzok wrote Page they would stop Trump. But that is 2016, so this has been going on for some time, and more information has come out.
Aaron Klein had a good article November 26 that a second Adam Schiff staffer linked to a Burisma-backed think tank--Burisma being the company that paid millions to people to be on their boards, including Hunter Biden. But this article is very interesting, that another staffer for Adam Schiff served as a fellow for the Atlantic Council think tank funded by and working in partnership with Burisma. Isn't that convenient?
But Sean Misko was close friends with a guy named Eric Ciaramella. In 2015, Sean Misko was a yearlong millennial fellow at the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council.
Thomas Eager, a staffer on Schiff's House Intel Committee staff, is currently a fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Congressional Fellowship, and that educates congressional staff on current events in the Eurasia region, which is obviously the take on issues that Burisma wants them to have or they wouldn't have funded this thing. Burisma cosigned a cooperative agreement with the council to specifically sponsor the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, where Eager served as a fellow.
But a trip to Ukraine in August organized by the Atlantic Council revealed that Eager and others had a meeting with Acting U.S. Ambassador Bill Taylor. That name should ring a bell. It may have been perfectly innocent, but nonetheless, Burisma has helped fund some things for some of Adam Schiff's staff.
Of course, it quotes Chairman Schiff on September 17 saying: ``We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to.'' Of course, it turns out his staff had talked with him, and, in fact, that is apparently the first people that were talked to about the conversation, for good reason.
Misko is listed as providing a small donation of up to $999 to that think tank in 2016 but also contributions from the Open Society network that George Soros had so much to do with.
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Another big donor, Perkins Coie, the law firm that was used to help the DNC and the Clinton campaign with hiring Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele and getting the Russian dossier hoax going.
But it is just amazing when you start seeing: Wait a minute. There was a lot going on between people in our government and the Ukrainian Government, corrupt people over there.
And then we find out Kerry Picket, October 11, reported: ``Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018, was hired in February, while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's staff in late August.''
That was the best information they had at the time.
But it points out that Abigail Grace, 36, ``was hired to help Schiff's committee investigate the Trump White House.'' But she had worked for the Trump White House as an Obama holdover. `` . . . Trump accused Schiff of `stealing people who work at the White House.' '' She had worked there 2016 to 2018 and briefly for the Center for a New American Security think tank, founded by two former senior Obama administration officials.
But Sean Misko, 37, ``worked in the Obama administration as a member of the Secretary of State's policy planning staff under Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, who became Hillary Clinton's top foreign policy official during her 2016 Presidential campaign. In 2015, Misko was the director for the Gulf States at the NSC, remaining there into the Trump administration's first year.
``A source familiar with Grace's work at the NSC told the Washington Examiner, `Abby Grace had access to executive privilege information, and she has a duty not to disclose that information. She is not authorized to reveal that information.'
``The same source said that Misko had not been trusted by Trump appointees. `There were a few times where documents had been signed off for final editing before they go to the National Security Advisor for signature'. . . . `And he actually went in and made changes after those changes were already finished.' So he basically tried to insert, without his boss' approval.'
`` `There were meetings in which he protested very heavily, and the next thing you know, there's an article in the paper about the contents of that meeting.'
``Misko often clashed with other NSC personnel at meetings, another source said. Both Grace and Misko were close to Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Trump's National Security Advisor''--unfortunately--``from February 2017 until May 2018.
``Misko was a CNAS fellow in 2014. Misko's name surfaced in the Hillary Clinton email controversy when he worked in the State Department during the Obama administration.
``In a December 1, 2009, email released by Judicial Watch, Clinton adviser Huma Abedin sent classified information regarding foreign military contributions to the Afghanistan war effort to her private email account. That email originated with Misko, who wrote to Sullivan that he initially `accidentally' sent it on the `high side'--which is secure--but was sending the email again.
``The intelligence committee did not respond to a request for comment.''
And then, updated information, December 3, Kerry Picket reports that, actually, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff hired a former National Security Council aide during the Obama and Trump administrations the day after the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky.
So it turns out, call on July 25, July 26 Sean Misko gets hired. Sean Misko, Abigail Grace, Eric Ciaramella, they had worked together at the National Security Council. In fact, Misko and Ciaramella, they were reported to be brother-like, or bro-like, that they were just always hanging around.
And then we find out that, after the phone call, apparently, Ciaramella goes over to the staff, and, based on what we know--it appears to me, my opinion--that he goes over there and says, wow, you know, all the work we did with Biden, with Ukraine, maybe they were saying maybe the work we did trying to set some things up to help the Clinton campaign, whatever it was, they were scared. Clearly, they were scared. And somebody comes up with the idea, why not use the whistleblower statute even though it really didn't apply.
And you know, some people say, oh, you guys, you know, you are all dead set on getting the whistleblower.
The whistleblower, as a whistleblower, whoever it is is irrelevant. But these three key people, including Misko and Grace, who worked together at the Obama administration and the Trump administration temporarily, at the National Security Council, that worked with Ukraine, worked with Biden, these people are at the heart of everything about this whole Ukrainian hoax.
Why are we having a Ukrainian hoax? Because all the other hoaxes were exposed, and maybe that is why we are rushing through this in record time, so that people don't find out more about how this all came about.
But we need to talk to Alexandra Chalupa. She met with people involved in this, including Ukrainians, Misko and Abigail Grace and Ciaramella.
Regardless, it doesn't matter who the whistleblower was. What matters is the information these people know about what went on with Ukraine's interference in our election--not the country officially, but the Ukrainian officials that interfered and what all went on. They are in it up to their eyeballs.
We need to be able to talk to these people, and these are the three people--well, four people that neither Adam Schiff nor Jerry Nadler are willing to produce.
Now, I made the request, provided it to our ranking member. Under H.R. 660, he has to provide it, and apparently there is somebody he had to talk to before he was willing to provide it. But at least I am making that request.
To be official, our ranking member has to hand it over. It needs to be done. We need to be able to talk to these people before they irreparably destroy the institutions, as Jerry Nadler said this kind of impeachment would. We need to talk to the people that got it all--that brought about the circumstances in dealing with Ukraine, Biden, Russia. We need to be able to question them about Ukraine, about Biden, about Russia and all these intermingling ties. It is critical. We have got to be able to have that.
And, of course, reference the same person in the Mueller report even, where he is in the Mueller report, is shown or is indicated to be the source of allegations that Russia told, or Putin told Trump to fire Mueller--or Comey.
In any event, this is all rather tragic, where partisan politics, just as Jerry Nadler predicted in 1998, is about to take a huge step toward finishing off this little experiment in self-government.
No government lasts forever. This one won't. But the actions that are being taken now have far-ranging consequences toward destroying the best hope for freedom the world has ever had.
People may hate this country, but you talk to people honestly around the world that have some freedom, like I did with three people from Australia. And I was kidding around. I had a few Members say: If we lose our freedom, we can all go to Australia.
None of them smiled, even.
One of them said: Do you not understand if you lose your freedom here in the United States, China will take us over before you could ever get there? You have got to be strong.
I heard that in Nigeria when I went to meet with mothers whose children had been kidnapped and were being raped daily, and officials there said: Well, you know, your Obama administration said if we want more help with Boko Haram we have got to adopt same-sex marriage and we have got to have abortions.
As one Catholic Bishop reported: Our religious beliefs are not for sale, not to the Obama administration, not to anybody.
So it is not uncommon, as we have been told, and some people want to deny, but there are good reasons to withhold aid. I don't think trying to force somebody to change their religious beliefs, like in Nigeria and Kenya and Togo, some of the places I talked with officials, but, nonetheless, there is nothing wrong with it if it is a legitimate purpose.
And what President Trump is trying to get to the bottom of, you know, it is a legitimate purpose: How do you stop corruption from foreign countries in our 2020 election if you are not allowed to figure out what they did in 2016? We need to be able to know that in order to stop it from happening again.
This is really serious stuff. And I appreciate the comments that so many who are participating on the other side of the aisle have made in talking about this impeachment.
Of course, we even heard that from Feldman, from Harvard. Oh, he was reluctant to bring up this impeachment. My gosh, the guy was all over Twitter over 2 years ago. He thought, gee, we may be able to impeach Trump for his tweet. We may be able to impeach him for this, that, and the other. This guy has been talking about it forever. He had no qualms about wanting to impeach Trump using any little thing possible, until he comes before our committee, and then he is reluctant.
And we have heard that from some other people: We are reluctant to pursue this impeachment. Well, you sure can't tell it the way you are moving forward like you have got a posse and are to hang somebody that you have just run into.
So let me just finish up by stating something I hope.
It was reported this week that, after the Intelligence Committee's Democratic staff had finished rolling up this ball of collusion and, supposedly, sending it to the Judiciary Committee, it was reported that the Speaker provided a cake, and it was decorated as a flag. There was a big drinking celebration.
So I hope that if the Judiciary Committee does what I really do hope and pray they don't, and that is move forward with impeachment on something Trump didn't even do wrong, that if they have another celebration for the Judiciary staff and people are drinking and eating cake and having a good time, I hope they will continue to do their drinking and celebration prayerfully, reluctantly, and soberly, as we have heard they are approaching all of this.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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