Russian Interference Investigation

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Colorado for his leadership and convening these conversations. It was really helpful to hear from our friend from Missouri, who reminds us that this is really a big deal, this Russian meddling, and that we have to keep pushing to get answers as to why our President behaves so strangely when it comes to Russia, and we have to hold anyone who may have been part of that Russian interference fully accountable.

I will tell Congressman Perlmutter that constituents in my district, and I think a growing number of people around this country, are extremely concerned and growing more and more concerned about this dark cloud of corruption over the Trump administration; about the possibility of collusion between the Trump team and a foreign government to affect the 2016 election; about the obstruction of justice, the pattern of lying about even the most basic facts; and just based on what has already come out through the special counsel investigation and through the media and, to some extent, through congressional investigations, their level of concern is really growing.

This week, I want to focus on one aspect of these investigations that we have tried to push here in the House and in the Senate: the issue of privilege. I am not talking about the kind of privilege where a billionaire's son-in-law gets a job inside the White House, even though he has no foreign policy experience and can't get a security clearance. That is a different kind of privilege.

I want to talk about the issue of executive privilege. This is an idea that Presidential communications need to be kept out of the public eye, even when Congress or the courts issue subpoenas and request that information.

Presidents have always kind of tried to claim that this type of privilege is implied in the Constitution's separation of powers. It is an argument that a President might not get as candid and fulsome advice from his Cabinet and others if all of it was going to be publicly disclosed. So I can appreciate that. But the Trump administration has taken this notion of executive privilege to extreme and absurd lengths. I think we need to talk about that.

Just a little quick historical aside, though, on executive privilege. The concept and the limit of executive privilege has really only been tested at the Supreme Court in a pair of Watergate-related lawsuits in the 1970s. This came about when the special prosecutor sought access to President Nixon's secret Oval Office tapes.

In that case, the court rejected President Nixon's attempts to quash a judicial subpoena. The unanimous decision of that court was that the President had to hand over these tape-recorded conversations with his closest advisers about the Watergate break-in. Of course, we know that was the beginning of the end of the Nixon Presidency.

So back to the modern era.

Over the past year, we have seen numerous Trump officials, and even some who never worked in the White House, refuse to answer questions from Congress, asserting some variation of this executive privilege. In the now-defunct House Intelligence Committee investigation we have seen it. We have seen it in the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation.

I think we need to take a look at how this is being used or misused. We have seen witnesses, literally on a break from their testimony, take phone calls from the White House, where they get instructions about what questions they can answer and which ones they can't.

Essentially, President Trump has treated the executive privilege as if it is a gag order he can invoke on those around him. It is sort of like the hush money nondisclosure agreements that he has entered into with porn stars and playmates and all sorts of others to keep embarrassing or damaging information out of the public eye.

A few specific examples of this and why it doesn't hold up.

In June 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was testifying before the Senate committee about the firing of James Comey. He refused to answer certain questions, but he did choose to answer others that he thought were helpful. He claimed that he was protecting the right of President Trump to assert the executive privilege.

Well, first of all, Sessions can't selectively choose when to invoke the privilege and when not to. There is this thing called waiver, and you don't get to cherry-pick the stuff that you think helps you and then invoke the privilege for the stuff that doesn't.

But the second point is that the Attorney General even admitted that he does not have the power to claim executive privilege. He said: ``I am protecting the President's constitutional right by not giving it away before he has had a chance to weigh in.''

The President hasn't done that. In fact, the President has yet to assert the executive privilege, but he has had all of these other folks on a short leash, counting on them to assert the privilege.

So then we go to January of 2018. Steve Bannon was testifying in the House Intelligence Committee. He only agreed to answer 25 specific yes or no questions that had been drafted by the White House.

So, on a bipartisan basis, the committee issued a subpoena to force Bannon to answer these questions, but he continued to stonewall and the committee never followed through. Again, why Bannon's assertions of the privilege don't pencil out.

In the United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court made very clear that public extrajudicial disclosure of a privilege like the executive privilege is a waiver. So right off the bat you have the problem that Steve Bannon spilled his guts in ``Fire and Fury'' for the whole world to see. He has made public extrajudicial disclosures of all manner of communications involving the Presidency on all of these subjects. But he has also played this pick-and-choose game, much like Attorney General Sessions. Even if he had the privilege to assert for himself, which he doesn't, it just doesn't hold water.

Now, some of the oversight that Bannon has been ducking has to do with the transition period before Donald Trump was even President. Obviously, there is no executive privilege if you are not yet the executive. So that is another problem.

When he was asked whether he was being instructed by the President to invoke executive privilege, guess what? He refused to answer. Our friends in the House Intelligence Committee were in such a hurry to shut down their investigation that they did not move to hold him in contempt of Congress, and they never followed through on their subpoena.

Another example.

January 2018, Mr. Trump's former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, appeared before the House Intel Committee and surprise, surprise, he refused to answer all sorts of important questions. Since Mr. Lewandowski never served in the Federal Government, it would be pretty preposterous to assert executive privilege as a way to evade Congress' questions. But it is up to the majority in Congress to actually force him to answer these questions.

Again, Mr. Trump is onto, apparently, a winning strategy in this Congress. He instructs others not to answer questions, suggests they should assert the privilege, or some variation of it, and then counts on a compliant majority in this House and in the Senate to simply not follow through.

Something similar happened in February 2018. Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee and would not discuss anything from the inauguration forward. The committee declined to issue a subpoena, despite the request to do so from our ranking member, Adam Schiff.

So you may ask in these various situations: Why wouldn't President Trump himself simply assert the executive privilege?

I think one reason for that is we can safely say that it makes him look even more guilty. That is hard to do, based on the way he has conducted himself so defensively with such a seemingly guilty state of mind in his tweets and other public statements, but the assertion of the privilege would be a very clear signal that he is trying to impede legitimate investigations.

So he would rather have Bannon and Hicks and Lewandowski and Sessions stonewall for him, and then count on a compliant hyper-partisan Congress not to follow through. That is why we have so many unanswered questions and why it is so important that you continue to bring us together to talk about this to make sure the American people know that we are going to keep talking about it and we are going to keep asking what they are hiding and what they are afraid of.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, I will close on my end but with a bit of a question for my colleague:

We have talked about how big this is. I think ``sabotage'' is not too strong a word for what the Russians did in the 2016 election. I think anyone who was involved in a criminal conspiracy with them to pull that off, certainly there are criminal penalties, violations, possibly up to and including treason, that may apply. So we have to get to the bottom of this. We have to get to the truth.

And if Congress won't do its job because of partisan reasons and won't follow through and hold folks in contempt when they ignore subpoenas and when they refuse to answer questions, we can at least protect the special counsel investigation so that that lifelong Republican leading this investigation can get the truth out for the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I guess my question for Congressman Perlmutter is: Given how big this is--and we have never seen anything like this. We have never seen all of this evidence that a candidate for President--folks at the top of his campaign were involved in these illicit activities with a foreign power, this extensive sabotaging of our election, and all of the coverup and the obstruction and other problems that are coming to light. Given all of that, how will history judge those who refuse to let the special counsel get to the bottom of it all so we can all know the truth?

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source