We Must Protect the Sovereignty of Our Nation

Floor Speech

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Colorado because I have all of the same questions and all of the same concerns, and so it is very appropriate that we are coming together to ask what are they afraid of, what are they hiding, because there are a lot of red flags.

Last night, Mr. Perlmutter, I was at the Washington Press Club event, which is a fun event to celebrate the free press. The best joke of the night--and there is a lot of humorous material. The best joke of the night was when someone said, for a guy that claims he doesn't drink, President Trump sure loves a lot of White Russians. That brought the house down.

Unfortunately, though, it is not really funny because, when you have got a President who won't impose the sanctions that we authorize him to impose, who won't direct his State Department to spend the funds to protect our election system that we authorize and appropriate, when you have all of these other problems, it is not clear that he is able to do his job without fear or favor, and that is a big problem for our democracy and for the interests of our country.

If Congress were doing its job right now, we would be asking the hard questions to bring forward the transparency that the people need, to give this country the assurance that their government officials, including their President, can perform their job without fear or favor. But, unfortunately, this body is not doing a very good job of asking those hard questions, so that is, in part, why we are here trying to raise some of these issues.

One of the very important questions that I think we have to ask involves the ties between the NRA, yes, the National Rifle Association, and this Trump Russia scandal. Specifically, we need to know whether Russia worked through the NRA to illegally move funds in support of the Trump campaign.

Here is what we do know. We know that McClatchy and others have reported that the FBI is actually investigating whether Aleksandr Torshin, deputy governor of Russia's central bank and NRA's main liaison in Russia, used the NRA to funnel millions of dollars to support Donald Trump's candidacy in 2016.

We know that in 2016 Donald Trump, Jr., had dinner with Torshin, who is a close ally of Vladimir Putin--also someone accused of money laundering--and they had that dinner at the NRA convention.

We know that the NRA spent tens of millions of dollars on the 2016 elections, including $30 million to support Donald Trump. That is three times what the NRA spent to support Mitt Romney when he was the Republican nominee just 4 years prior.

So we need to think about and ask this question: Where did all that money come from? We have asked the NRA. The NRA won't tell us.

Now, we know that in testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, there are indications that Russians made a very concerted effort to work through the NRA, and that is why Senator Ron Wyden has asked the Treasury Department--again, because the NRA won't answer these questions, but he has asked the Treasury Department for more information about suspicious Russian funding of the NRA.

So just to recap a few of these things that we need to be asking about: We know how close President Trump is to the NRA. We know how close the Russian banker Alex Torshin is to the NRA. We know how close the NRA is becoming, closer and closer, to Russia.

In fact, I have a piece here that explains how, in 2015, a series of top NRA officials--including one of their top donors, past presidents, a delegation that included Donald Trump's high-profile surrogate, Sheriff David Clarke--all went on a so-called fact-finding mission involving gun rights in Russia.

Now, there aren't a lot of gun rights in Russia. Russia has very restrictive gun laws, and there is no serious effort in the country of Russia to change that. But, nevertheless, apparently this group felt they needed to go to Russia for this fact-finding trip to cozy up with some of these same folks that we are talking about. So that is one of the things we know and we need to ask questions about.

We know that the NRA spent this huge cache of money on the 2016 campaign to support Donald Trump, and we know that we have more questions that need to be answered. So we need to follow this money, and we need to find out, again, as you have asked here on the floor: What are they hiding? What are they afraid of?

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, Congressman Perlmutter is asking all the right questions, and it seems to me, in the short time we have been on the floor here, in some ways, we are asking harder questions than what we are seeing from the committees that should be conducting oversight and investigations if Congress were functioning and taking this issue as seriously as it should.

Those questions would include very disturbing reporting, just in the last few days in The New Yorker, that suggests that the Steele dossier may just be the tip of the iceberg; that, in fact, you have senior Russian officials who claim that they had something of a veto power over our choice for Secretary of State.

We should be looking into that right now in a very intense way, and the American people should know that we take those matters very seriously. But so much of this simply flies by these days with the constantly moving media cycle, and I think more and more people are beginning to wonder if Congress is interested in even asking hard questions or if we just have to sit back and either wait for Special Counsel Mueller to catch these folks in crimes or wait for the media. Thank God for the free press, but the media is unearthing far more information than the oversight actions of this Congress, and that is disappointing.

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