Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act--Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I will be joined by a series of my colleagues who are coming to the floor this afternoon to talk about the November 2018 elections coming up and the steps we need to take to make sure that the Russian influence effort that bedeviled our 2016 election is not replicated in the 2018 election.

I guess the first question to answer is, Is this a realistic prospect? Is this something we should concern ourselves with--that the Russians would come back again in 2018 and try to meddle in our elections?

Everyone in the Trump administration who has been asked about this, perhaps outside of the Oval Office itself, has said: Yes, absolutely. They are coming. The Director of the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, the head of the FBI, the Attorney General, the Department of Justice--there is no contest. There is no disagreement. There is no doubt, even among the President's senior national security and law enforcement team that they are coming back, that they are going to do this again. That leads us to the question of what we are doing about it.

It seems that the silence from the Oval Office on this subject is deafening. The White House doesn't ever want to talk about doing anything about this. To the extent that we get signals from tweets and things like that, they are usually nonfactual and highly politicized challenges to the basic facts that all of the President's senior Cabinet staff seem to agree with.

I don't know why they haven't sorted out why the President says one thing and all of his Cabinet officials say something else, but that is for them. What is for us is to review this in Congress, to do oversight, and to do what legislation might be necessary to raise our defenses to make sure that we can effectively counter what we have been warned is coming at us.

We have no proposal from the administration. One would think with something like this, where we have an election that has been attacked by a hostile foreign country--one would think that would be the kind of thing that would bring our country together and would get the President's attention. He swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and last I heard, the elections are a part of our Constitution. Yet there is nothing--crickets.

Where is the proposal? Where are the congressional hearings on our proposals? Where are the markups? Where are the bills? We are seeing an extraordinary lack of interest and initiative in something about which we have been very forcefully warned.

The failure at the White House is very profound. Over and over again, we have heard senior Trump officials say that they have not been instructed by the President to take this seriously. My senior colleague, Senator Jack Reed, asked Director Chris Wray of the FBI about whether the FBI had taken specific actions to confront and blunt Russian influence and disinformation activities. On February 13, in the Senate Intelligence Committee, he said, ``not as specifically directed by the President, no.''

To read the transcript more completely, Senator Reed asked:

So let me begin with Mr. Wray and say, has the President directed you and your agency to take specific actions to confront and blunt Russian influence activities that are ongoing?

Wray: We're taking a lot of specific efforts to blunt Russian . . .

Reed: . . . directed by the President?

Wray: Not--not as specifically directed by the President, no.

Similarly, 2 weeks later, February 27, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the NSA's Director, ADM Mike Rogers, said that he had not been granted the authority nor directed specifically by the President to take action to disrupt Russian election hacking operations.

Again, Senator Reed asked:

So, you would need, basically, to be directed by the President, through the Secretary of Defense, to get--

Rogers interrupts:

Yes, sir, as I--I mentioned that in my statement.

Reed: Have you been directed to do so, given the strategic threat that faces the United States and the significant consequences you recognize already?

Rogers: No, I have not.

There is a lot of room for improvement here. You can also add to this list the failures of activity at the State Department, which was allocated $120 million to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections to sow distrust in democracy. According to the March 4 story in the New York Times:

Not one of the 23 analysts working in the department's Global Engagement Center--which has been tasked with countering Moscow's disinformation campaign--speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.

So when Congress provides $120 million to the State Department to take steps to protect against Russian election interference, what we get back is that none of that money gets spent, and a hiring freeze prevents the people with the necessary qualifications from even coming in to do the job. That is not taking the problem seriously--not at the FBI, not at the NSA, and not at the State Department.

As far as I can tell, there actually is no formal executive branch interagency process that is designed to examine what the Russians did and put together legislative recommendations for Congress to follow up on. In national security matters, that is the President's role; that is the executive branch's role. We have the authority to make the laws, but because they are doing the day-to-day work, we count on the executive branch to put the proposals together for us. And again, there is nothing.

There is one thing that we did do. We wanted to send a strong signal to Vladimir Putin that there was a price to be paid for this kind of misbehavior--manipulating our elections. We voted, virtually unanimously, in this Chamber, 98 to 2. I don't know the numbers on the House side, but it was equally virtually unanimous on the House side.

It was 98 to 2 here in the Senate. We passed tough sanctions to hit Vladimir Putin where it hurts, which is right in the oligarchs. That is what he cares about, the oligarchs who support him, the oligarchs whose corrupt enterprises he has corruptly engaged with. That whole racketeering enterprise that runs the Russian Government is what the sanctions would go after.

Well, the administration has refused to implement them. The State Department has said that they are not needed. Not needed? We are hearing from all of the Trump administration's own senior executive agencies that they are going to come and do this again in 2018. How are they not needed if this is no deterrence for what they did in 2016? It would be one thing to say they are not needed if the evidence was: OK, they got the message. They are not going to do this again. We are fine in 2018.

But that is not what Trump's own Cabinet officials and national intelligence leaders are telling us. They are telling us that they are needed because they are coming at us again. So this added bit of deterrence would be very important.

When it came to something as simple as putting together the list of targeted oligarchs to put maximum pressure on President Putin, they didn't even put a list together on their own; they went to Forbes magazine and took the list out of a public magazine. That doesn't look like a serious or conscientious effort.

So right up and down the administration, you see failure to take this seriously traceable directly to the White House, and that is very, very regrettable.

The other thing that we don't know is what the White House has been up to with respect to Congress. There was a lot of talk early on about how we needed to have an independent committee to take a look at this, to be independent, to put together a package of reforms, observations, and recommendations, and we have had no support for doing that. What we were told was: Don't worry. Work through the committees.

Well, the committees aren't doing much, to tell you the truth. It is like the gavels are made out of foam rubber around here. We could do a lot better, and there is no independent commission.

It raises the question, what was the role of the White House? What was the role of the President in stopping an independent commission? How active were they in doing that? Those are questions that need answers, but obviously, if there aren't serious investigative processes going on in our committees, it is hard to get those answers.

Here is another question: What was the role of the White House in coordinating or colluding with the House Intelligence Committee--with Representative Nunez and/or his staff--in preparation for the so-called Nunez memo?

We have learned a lot about that memo since it came out. We have learned that it was essentially phony. It had a couple of basic accusations. One was that the FBI had misled the FISA Court. They were misled that one of the sources that supported the affidavit that got the FISA warrant for the surveillance of Carter Page--that one of those sources had been in touch with or had been funded by a political campaign; that this was a phony effort cooked up on behalf of the Clinton campaign and run before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Well, as it turns out, the FISA application stated specifically the FBI's speculation that the source, Steele, had been hired to ``find information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1's campaign''-- Trump's campaign. As somebody who has pursued affidavits for search warrants and for surveillance warrants before, I can tell you that it is common and standard FBI and Department of Justice practice to leave out unnecessary names. So the fact that Mrs. Clinton wasn't mentioned is perfectly consistent with longstanding Department practice.

The other thing that it omitted was that the Steele information was actually corroborating information for a lot of other information that had begun this investigation beforehand. So the theory that this all depended on this particular source and that this source had an undisclosed relationship with a political opponent was simply baloney. The fact is that that was disclosed in the warrant, and there were additional sources.

That leaves me with the question of why. Why would a legislative committee apparently deliberately put together a report that contained misleading or false statements but tried to create an erroneous or false impression about something that had taken place? Well, did the White House have any connections in that process? That is the question we are entitled answers to. If this was just a botched job by a partisan crew in a legislative committee, that is one set of problems. If this is the Congress of the United States taking its oversight authority and handing it over to the executive branch of government, handing it over to White House operatives when the White House itself is the subject of the inquiry, that is a very different problem. And we are owed an answer as to what the communications were between the White House, the Trump legal team, and the staff of the House Intelligence Committee that prepared the Nunez report.

I have been joined by the distinguished Senator from Connecticut, so I will leave my remarks there.

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