Russian Collusion

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, it was almost exactly 2 years ago, as Donald Trump closed in on the Republican nomination, that the Russians began weaponizing stolen emails it had acquired some time earlier.

This disclosure of stolen emails was only one vector of the Russian active measures campaign. At the same time, the Russians were engaged in a surreptitious social media campaign and a very overt use of their paid media platforms, like Sputnik and Russia Today, to influence the American electorate.

What was this about? Was this new and unprecedented intervention in our affairs merely about choosing one candidate over another in the American Presidential system? Or was there something broader within the Russian aims?

It is certainly true that the Russians had a preferred candidate in Donald Trump. Candidate Trump had talked disparagingly about NATO. He had talked about doing away with sanctions on Russia over its invasion of its neighbor. He had talked about making common cause with Russia in Syria, where our interests are not at all aligned. And most significant, he had talked about doing away with the penalties we had imposed for Russia's invasion of its neighbor, something we never thought would take place in the last century, the remaking of the map of Europe by dint of military force. That is something we thought we would never see in this century.

It is certainly true they had a preferred candidate in Donald Trump, for all those reasons. It is also true that they had a deep antipathy towards Hillary Clinton, someone who, when people gathered in massive numbers in Russia to protest fraudulent elections in 2011, spoke out on behalf of people's right to protest and assemble, something that the Kremlin felt was a direct threat to the regime.

But far more fundamental was the Russian object of sowing discord in the United States, of pitting one American against another, of playing along the fault lines in our society, of weakening the very fabric of our democracy.

It is very important to recognize that what the Russians did here, they did not do alone in the United States. Yes, it was new and unprecedented for us, but what the Russians did here, they have been doing for years elsewhere in Europe and around the world. It is an attack not only on our democracy, but on the very idea of liberal democracy. This attack takes place at a time in our lives where, when you look around the world, you must conclude objectively that the autocrats are on the rise in places like Poland and in Hungary and the rise of the far right parties in Germany, Austria, and France, with Erdogan in Turkey--Turkey is the now the leading jailer of journalists in the world--and in the Philippines with Duterte.

It cannot be said that an iron curtain is descending, but there is a rising tide of authoritarianism that threatens to submerge some of the great capitals around the globe. For those of us who had lived in the post-World War II generation, I think we were always under the assumption that our freedoms around the world were ever-increasing, that it was some immutable law of nature, that our freedom to express ourselves, to practice our faith, to associate with whom we would, was ever-increasing. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, the moral arc of the universe may be long, but it bends toward justice, only to find that today, it does not bend towards justice.

As much as the idea of America as the indispensable Nation has been given a bad name, we truly are indispensable. All around the world people look to us: people in prison who gathered in Tahrir Square wanting a better government; people in the Philippines, the victims of a campaign of mass extrajudicial killing; people in prison in Turkey for journalism.

People all over the world look to us. They are not going to look to Russia; they are not going to look to China; they are not going to look to Europe, with all of its problems; and increasingly they do not recognize what they see. They look to our White House and they do not recognize what they see. They see a President more comfortable with autocrats and dictators than they do with Democrats and democracy. This is a terrible tragedy for us. It is a bigger tragedy for the rest of the world.

In 1938, Winston Churchill published a series of speeches he gave on the rise of Nazism. In America, the book was titled, ``While England Slept.'' America is not sleeping, but one of its great parties is. As John Boehner said recently, the Republican Party is off taking a nap somewhere.

Wake up. Freedom-loving people all around the world are looking to us. Wake up. Our democracy is at risk at home, and the very idea of liberal democracy is at risk around the world. Wake up.

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