Cloture Motion
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham) and the Senator from Utah (Mr. Lee).
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, some have taken yesterday's announcement by FBI Director Comey as vindicating Secretary Clinton for her use of a private, unsecured email server. But that would be exactly the wrong conclusion to draw. While the FBI did not recommend that the former Secretary of State be indicted, the concerns I have previously raised time and again have only been reaffirmed by the facts uncovered by Director Comey and the FBI's investigation.
It is now clear beyond a reasonable doubt that Secretary Clinton behaved with extreme carelessness in her handling of classified information and that she and her staff lied to the American people and, at the same time, put our Nation at risk.
First, Director Comey said unequivocally that Secretary Clinton and her team were ``extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.'' He went so far as to describe specific email chains that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level at the time they were sent and received--in other words, at the highest classification level in the intelligence community.
Remember, Secretary Clinton said that she never sent emails that contained classified information. Well, that proved to be false as well. The FBI Director made clear none of those emails should have been on an unclassified server--period--and that Secretary Clinton and her staff should have known better.
Director Comey noted that Secretary Clinton's actions were ``particularly concerning'' because these highly classified emails were housed on a server that didn't have full-time security staff like those at other departments and agencies of the Federal Government.
It is pretty clear that Secretary Clinton thought she could do anything she wanted, even if it meant sending classified information over her personal, unsecured home server. It should shock every American that America's top diplomat--someone who had access to our country's most sensitive information--acted with such carelessness in an above-the-law sort of manner.
Unfortunately, our threshold for being shocked at revelations like this has gotten unacceptably high. I saw a poll reported recently that 81 percent of the respondents in that poll believed Washington is corrupt. Public confidence is at an alltime low, and we ask ourselves how that could be. Well, unfortunately, it is the sort of activity we have seen coming from Secretary Clinton and her misrepresentations and--frankly, there is no way to sugarcoat it--her lies to the American people--lies that were revealed in plain contrast yesterday by Director Comey's announcement.
Secondly, we know the FBI found that Secretary Clinton behaved at odds with the story she has been telling the American people, as I said a moment ago. To be blunt, yesterday's announcement proved that she has not been telling the American people the truth for a long, long time now. When news of her private server first broke, Secretary Clinton said:
I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e- mail. There is no classified material.
Yesterday, Director Comey made clear that wasn't true--not by a long shot. In fact, he said more than 100 emails on her server were classified, and, as I mentioned, that includes some of the highest levels of classification. We are talking not just about some abstraction here. We are talking about people gaining intelligence-- some in highly dangerous circumstances--who have been exposed to our Nation's adversaries because of the recklessness or extreme carelessness of Secretary Clinton and her staff.
Another example: Secretary Clinton also maintained that she gave the State Department quick access to all of her work-related emails. Again, according to Director Comey, that wasn't true either. He said the FBI discovered several thousand work-related emails that Secretary Clinton didn't turn in to the State Department 2 years ago.
From the beginning, Secretary Clinton and her staff have done their dead-level best to play down her misconduct, even if that meant lying to the American people. To make matters even worse, Director Comey confirmed that Secretary Clinton's actions put our national security and those who are on the frontlines protecting our national security in jeopardy. The FBI Director said that hostile actors had access to the email accounts of those people with whom Secretary Clinton regularly communicated with from her personal account.
We know she used her personal email--in the words of the FBI Director--``extensively'' while outside of the continental United States, including in nations of our adversaries. The FBI's conclusion is that it is possible that hostile actors gained access to her personal email account, which, as I said a moment ago, included information classified at the highest levels recognized by our government.
My point is that this is not a trivial matter. Remember that several months ago, Secretary Gates--former Secretary of Defense and head of the CIA, serving both in the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations--said he thought the odds were pretty high that the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians had compromised Clinton's server-- again, all the time while she is conducting official business as Secretary of State for the U.S. Government.
It was also reported last fall that Russian-linked hackers tried to hack into Secretary Clinton's emails on at least five occasions. It is hard to know, much less estimate, the potential damage done to our Nation's security as a result of this extreme carelessness demonstrated by Secretary Clinton and her staff. In reality, it is impossible for us to know for sure. But what is clear is that Secretary Clinton acted recklessly and repeatedly lied to the American people, and I should point out that she didn't do so for any particularly good reason. None of the explanations Secretary Clinton has offered, convenience and the like, have held up to even the slightest scrutiny. Her intent was obvious, though. It was to avoid the accountability that she feared would come from public recognition of her official conduct. So she wanted to do it in secret, away from the prying eyes of government watchdogs and the American people.
The FBI may not have found evidence of criminal intent, but there is no doubt about her intent to evade the laws of the United States--not just criminal laws that Director Comey talked about but things like the Freedom of Information laws, which make sure the American people have access to the information that their government uses to make decisions on their behalf. These are important pieces of legislation that are designed to give the American people the opportunity to know what they have a right to know so they can hold their elected officials accountable.
In the end, this isn't just a case of some political novice who doesn't understand the risks involved or someone who doesn't really understand the protocols required of a high-level government employee. This is a case of someone who, as Director Comey pointed out, should have known better.
I know Secretary Clinton likes to talk about her long experience in politics as the spouse of a President of the United States when she served as First Lady, as a United States Senator, and then as Secretary of State. But all of this experience, as Director Comey said, should have taught her better than she apparently learned.
The bottom line is that Secretary Clinton actively sought out ways to hide her actions as much as possible, and in doing so, she put our country at risk. For a Secretary of State to conduct official business--including transmitting and receiving information that is classified at the highest levels known by our intelligence community-- on a private, unsecured server when sensitive national defense information would likely pass through is not just a lapse of judgment; it is a conscious decision to put the American people in harm's way.
As Director Comey noted, in similar circumstances, people who engage in what Secretary Clinton did are ``often subject to security or administrative sanctions''; that is, they are held accountable, if not criminally, in some other way. He said that obviously is not within the purview of the FBI. But he said that other people, even if they aren't indicted, will be subjected to security or administrative sanctions.
Secretary Clinton evidently will not be prosecuted criminally, but she should be held accountable. From the beginning, I have had concerns about what Secretary Clinton did and whether this investigation would be free of politics. However one feels about the latter, it is clear that Secretary Clinton's actions were egregious and that there is good reason why the American people simply don't trust her and why she should be held accountable.
In closing, I would just say that we know there was an extensive investigation conducted by the FBI, and we know that Director Comey said that no reasonable prosecutor would seek an indictment and prosecute Secretary Clinton for her actions. That being the case, I would join my colleagues--Senator Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and others--who have called for the public release of the FBI's investigation so we can know the whole story. That would also include the transcript from the 3\1/2\ hour interview that Secretary Clinton gave to the FBI, I believe just last Saturday. That way, the American people can have access to all the information.
What I suspect it would reveal--because it is a crime to lie to an FBI agent, I suspect Secretary Clinton, perhaps for the first time, in her interview with the FBI told the FBI the truth. If I were her lawyer, I certainly would advise her: No matter what happens, you had better tell the truth in that FBI interview because the coverup is something you can be indicted for as well.
So I suspect what happened is that, in that FBI interview, she did tell the FBI the truth. That is where Director Comey got so much of his information, which he then used to dismantle brick by brick the public narrative that Secretary Clinton has been spinning to the American people for the last couple of years.
If transparency and accountability are important, as Director Comey said yesterday, you would think that Secretary Clinton would want to put this behind her by also supporting the public release of this investigation, as well as the transcript of her interview with the FBI. I will be listening very carefully to see whether she joins us in making this request. But under the circumstances, where she no longer has any credible fear of indictment or prosecution, she owes to the public--and we owe to the public--that the entire evidence be presented to them in an open and transparent way. That is why the FBI should release this information, particularly the transcript of this interview she gave to FBI agents for 3\1/2\ hours at the FBI's headquarters downtown. Then, and only then, will the American people be able to render a well-informed and an adequate judgment on her actions taken as a whole because right now there appear to be nothing but good reasons why, in poll after poll after poll, people say they just don't trust her.
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