Moment of Truth

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, finally, Scott Pruitt is gone.

After months of scandal, 19 separate investigations, countless ethical failures, abuses of his official office at taxpayer expense, finally, this corrupt, swamp creature who has been heading our Environmental Protection Agency announced his resignation last week.

As welcome as this news is for many of us, let's be clear: Scott Pruitt was far from the only creature in the toxic Trump swamp.

Another great example is our Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, who profited from short sales in a Russian-linked navigation company. He made those short sales only after learning that journalists with The New York Times were about to expose his conflicts of interest. And apparently, while serving as our Commerce Secretary, Ross was also partial owner of a Chinese company and a Cypriot bank that is a part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

These are scandals that, in any other previous time, would bring down a Cabinet Secretary, but in this swamp climate of the Trump administration, it is just another news cycle and is soon supplanted by the next outrage and the next scandal.

Let's also not forget our Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, who faces many of his own scandals. Our Secretary of the Interior, of course, oversees oil and gas development on public lands. In this case, the Secretary stands to personally benefit from a land deal with the chairman of Halliburton, a company that has literally billions of dollars of business on the line when Secretary Zinke makes decisions about where, and how, oil drilling will be permitted in this country.

That is just the tip of the iceberg with this administration. It is time for this Republican Congress to wake up and take these issues seriously. Conduct some real oversight and put a stop to this culture of corruption in the Trump administration.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source