Executive Session

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I have come here for the first time in what will be a weekly speech that I will give as long as we have somebody, in my opinion, who is improperly and unjustly being held in a Turkish prison.

As a matter of fact, this man, Pastor Andrew Brunson, has been in a Turkish prison for 565 days. He was arrested in October of 2016. He didn't even receive charges until about 2 months ago--so arrested, without charges--conspiracy to plot a coup attempt against President Erdogan and his regime in Turkey.

About a month ago--it was, maybe, about 2 months back, 3 months back--I heard from some people that Pastor Brunson was afraid that with his time in prison and the charges being levied against him, the American people were going to read the charges and forget about him and turn their backs. That is why I decided to travel to Turkey and meet with him in prison about a month ago. It was to let him know I had no intention of forgetting him and that I had every intention of making sure everybody understood what was going on with this case and why it should be a lesson to anybody who is thinking about traveling to Turkey today from the United States.

Before I start this, I have to talk a little bit about Turkey. It is a NATO ally. It is a country I led a delegation to when I was Speaker of the House in North Carolina. I spent almost 2 weeks there back about 6 years ago because I saw great opportunities for our State of North Carolina and the country of Turkey to build closer ties--closer economic ties, closer cultural ties. I saw real opportunities to strengthen the relationship with a very important NATO ally. Yet now I am beginning to doubt whether what I saw in Turkey--at least the Turkey I visited 6 years ago--is the Turkey we are confronted with today.

Pastor Brunson, a gentleman from Black Mountain, NC, was part of a church up there at Montreat, which was the same church, a Presbyterian church, that Rev. Billy Graham was a part of. The injustice I see displayed to him makes me wonder if the people from the State of Iowa or from the State of North Carolina should go to that country until we understand whether American citizens can be treated justly there.

He has spent 565 days in a Turkish prison. For about 15 months, he was in a cell that was designed for eight people. It had 21 people in it. The others had been charged with terrorism and conspiracy to plot a coup. Pastor Brunson has been in Turkey for 20 years. All he is guilty of is of being a Christian and trying to bring a Christian message to those who want to hear it. He has a church in Izmir. It is a very small church. You can only seat about 120 people in it. They open it up, and they let anybody walk in off the street to hear what they are saying. They work with the police department to make sure they are secure and that they understand what they are saying. There was no nefarious purpose here except to have done his job for 20 years as a missionary in Turkey.

I am going to come back to this slide in a minute.

It is also important to understand timing. The coup occurred in 2016. Pastor Brunson and his wife Norine had actually traveled back to the United States. They were having a visit with family in North Carolina. President Erdogan and the Erdogan regime were rounding up tens of thousands of people and putting them in prison, even somebody loosely associated with the coup, and many who were not were being arrested. Pastor Brunson was in North Carolina at the time, but he and Norine went back to Turkey at a time when people were being rounded up. When he got back, they rounded him up.

Why on Earth would any reasonable person go back if he had been involved with it and had seen what had been happening in Turkey? That is just one data point. Now let's cover a few more.

First off, I have to bring this up. I have to say, after I went and visited Turkey for about 48 hours about a month ago, I went back last week. I, actually, spent 12 hours in a Turkish courthouse and listened to the charges against Pastor Brunson. It was remarkable. It was a three-judge panel. Imagine that they are sitting up at the dais, and next to them--unlike in our courts, where you have the defense and the prosecutor sitting on equal terms--their prosecutor is sitting up at the dais and is actually looking like a fourth judge. In Turkey, you are, more or less, considered guilty until proven innocent. It truly was, in my opinion--look it up if you do not know what a kangaroo court is--a kangaroo court.

They have already decided they want to prosecute him, and they are trying to get some of the most specious, circumstantial arguments to convict him to 35 years. He is 50 years old. By the way, he has lost 50 pounds since he has been in prison. A sentence of 35 years is effectively a death sentence for the kinds of charges I will tell you a little bit about.

No. 1, it is very clear to me, after spending 12 hours in a courtroom, that the Turkish authorities believe that any religious organization is actually a part of a broader plot to undermine the Turkish Government and to promote terrorist activities. They actually view the Christian faiths, the Christian religions in the United States--the missionaries--as some sort of coordinated plot to undermine the country of Turkey. They view a missionary who risks life and limb to go into the Syrian countryside to help people who are trying to flee the carnage that is occurring in Syria--to give them food, water, and comfort--as being, in some way, someone who is perpetrating and being a coconspirator in a plot by the PKK, which is a terrorist organization that is focused on opposing Turkey. That is what missionaries are subjected to.

As a matter of fact, there was a part of the court proceedings during which they suggested the mere fact that Pastor Brunson, who is a Presbyterian, had Mormons enter his church--actually, it is just part of the services, and they are services that are wide open to anyone. Yet, because of the mere connection with the Mormons, who also do missionary work in Turkey and Syria, they were able to glue together, on a circumstantial basis, the idea that because they have actually talked to each other and the Mormons have also provided missions to the Kurdish region, they are a part of the PKK.

That is what we are talking about. That is why I am giving everyone a stern warning. If you are traveling to this country, I can't guarantee your safety based on the facts as they exist today. I am trying to get somebody out who is only guilty for actually being a Christian missionary in Turkey for 20 years.

I am not going to go into the details of this, but when you invest 12 hours in a courtroom, it is a really accelerated learning process. Let me give you an idea of some of the things they said because they observed this. We are not talking about any specific charge for something violent that occurred or something damaging that occurred. This is the level of evidence that was presented against Pastor Brunson.

There is a dish that is cooked over there. I don't know. I love Turkish food. I eat anything. Usually, when I go over there, I gain weight. It is good food. Well, there was this communication between the daughter and the father about a good meal they had had. They suggested that communication--because it was of food that is, apparently, enjoyed by the Kurds--was a reason to suspect that somehow they were conspirators in the PKK plot. So I tell somebody who is traveling to Turkey, be careful what you eat and be careful what you like and don't put it on Facebook because you, too, could find yourself in a Turkish prison.

That is the level of argument they are using against this man who has been in prison for 565 days. I am not making this up. You could not create a movie plot that would be more egregious in terms of the way they have treated this man for 565 days.

After I went to the Turkish prison, Pastor Brunson and I spent about an hour and a half together. To the Turkish prison officials' credit, they gave me more time than they normally would. At about 59 minutes, they get you out of there, but they told me I could spend the time I wanted to. The discussion with Pastor Brunson was really heart- wrenching. The reason it was heart-wrenching is he said: I just firmly believe that people are going to forget about me. I think Congress could read this 62-page bogus indictment and believe it is true.

I told Pastor Brunson that the only reason I was there was to look at him eye to eye and tell him Congress has his back. This is not going to go away until the Turkish people release Pastor Brunson. We did something here over the course of 2 weeks. I also told him, in that meeting, I was going to get Members of the Senate to sign on to a letter and was going to prove to him that the people in the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, agreed with my position that Pastor Brunson should be set free.

I know the Presiding Officer knows better than anybody that getting 66 Senators to sign on to a letter, if you spend 3 or 4 months doing it, is uncommon, but to get 66 Senators to come together and sign this letter in a couple of weeks is extraordinary. When they heard the argument, they knew they needed to be a part of the voice of the Senate. It is no coincidence that I wanted to get 60-plus votes. I wanted to send a very clear message that we are educating Members of the Senate, and we have the votes necessary to move forward with things I prefer not to do.

I prefer to be moving forward with legislation that strengthens the relationship with Turkey--our military alliances, our economic alliances--our broader relationship. Yet we also need to send a clear message that we will take other steps, if that is what is necessary, to get the attention of the Turkish administration and President Erdogan to do the right thing. I thank all my colleagues who signed the letter. Since we published it with 66, we have had others express interest, and I think that is very important.

Now what does President Erdogan say to that? He basically says that if we are willing to trade with someone here in this country who he believes was involved in the plot, then he will give Pastor Brunson back to us.

We have an extradition treaty with Turkey. If Turkey goes through the proper processes that can prove the person he wants in this country should be extradited because he is guilty of laws broken in Turkey, great. But I find it objectionable to compare that pastor who is here or that religious leader who is here with a pastor who spent 20 years in Turkey doing nothing but missionary work.

When I was in Turkey, someone asked me: What do you think about the prisoner exchange? I think what has been offered is absurd. But I promise you this: If you know of a Turkish person--a Turkish national in a U.S. prison who was held for 17 months without charges and then was convicted on circumstantial evidence for 5 years, 10 years, or 35 years, count me in on getting them released without even a concept of trade because that would be a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Let me tell you, there is not somebody in a U.S. prison because there is no way that anybody in the United States would have been held overnight in jail for the charges I saw demonstrated in that courthouse just a week ago. So President Erdogan possibly doesn't know what I now know, having sat through 12 hours of court. I have to believe he is a fair person, and I have to believe that he is hearing from people in his administration who are not telling him what they are trying to do to this man in their Turkish judicial system. I am here, and I will be here every week to ask President Erdogan to invest the time that I have invested to know it is a miscarriage of justice that is going to hurt our relationship with Turkey on every level, and I will go from someone who is a strong advocate of our Turkish alliance to someone who maybe has to think twice about where this relationship goes from here.

This is the beginning of what I hope is a very short time of my coming to this floor and layering in additional facts every week until Pastor Brunson is released.

Again, I warn anyone who is going to Turkey to pay attention to what I have just said. Pay attention to the fact that I may not, as a U.S. Senator and the Presiding Officer, as a U.S. Senator from Iowa--we may not be able to guarantee your safety under the current emergency orders in Turkey. You may actually just find a group of friendly people with whom you take a picture and you proudly put it on Facebook because you are reaching out to people, you are traveling to countries, and you are trying to build friendships and relationships. But there may be some Turkish bureaucrat who sees that picture and sees a few Kurds in it, and suddenly you become a conspirator. You spend 565 days in a Turkish prison, and you have your Senator coming over there to take you out. That is what is going on in Turkey right now.

Pastor Brunson represents just one of several people in Turkey for whom we have to fight. A NASA scientist has been convicted and sentenced to 7\1/2\ years; he has served 1\1/2\ years. He was guilty of doing nothing more than going to visit his family in Turkey at roughly the time they started the coup attempt. Now he is in prison--an American citizen, a dual citizen, a Turkish-American, a NASA scientist imprisoned, implicated as being a part of our intelligence agency. I am not making this up.

I have invested the time in Turkey to follow the facts. I wouldn't pursue this if all I had were briefings from the State Department or the staff. I invested the time to go there, look at the pastor eye to eye, look at the judges eye to eye, and look at the prison guards eye to eye, and I am convinced this is a risk to every single American. Every single one of you should put yourself in Pastor Brunson's place and go from here and make sure people know what is going on there.

Pastor Brunson needs to know he has the backing of the U.S. Senate. He will have the backing of the House. My colleague Mark Walker and the deputy whip Patrick McHenry are working on a similar letter in the House, and we will continue to show that we are in shape, and we are ready to run this marathon. Hopefully, they are going to sprint to a just decision on May 7. That is his next court date. But if he doesn't, you can expect me to be here, and each and every time I am going to add some other cases for why we really have to rethink our relationship with Turkey until justice is done.

Thank you.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. TILLIS. I further ask that following disposition of the Pompeo nomination, the Senate resume consideration of the Grenell nomination, with the time until 1:45 p.m. equally divided in the usual form; and that at 1:45 p.m., the Senate vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the nomination. I further ask that if cloture is invoked, all time be considered expired and the Senate vote on confirmation without intervening action or debate; and that with respect to both nominations, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source