Cloture Motion
Floor Speech
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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, after almost 2 years, Special Counsel Mueller filed his report with the Attorney General. The Attorney General sent us a short letter that summarized the major findings of the report.
A summary is not going to cut it. The Attorney General's own letter discusses the vast extent of the special counsel's investigation. It mentions over 500 witness interviews, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 230 orders for communications records, almost 50 orders for pen registers, and actually 13 requests to foreign governments. This was an extraordinarily extensive investigation that yielded a rich collection of facts about Russia's attack on our democracy. The American people deserve to see the results so that they can judge the facts for themselves.
We know from court filings, news reports, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's own investigations that the Russians attempted to influence the Trump campaign in many ways. At least 17 individuals in the Trump orbit had over 100 publicly released contacts with Russian officials or intermediaries. Yet, with all of those 100 contacts during the midst of a campaign, somehow not one of those individuals--even those contacted with explicit offers of assistance from a hostile government--called the FBI to report those offers.
The Attorney General's four-page summary of this sprawling investigation--a summary that according to press reports may not even accurately reflect the Mueller report--focuses almost exclusively on the criminal portion of the Mueller probe and barely mentions the special counsel's counterintelligence investigation into these contacts.
The Senate Intelligence Committee--with the only bipartisan counterintelligence investigation still standing--has documented extensive efforts by the Russians to reach out to those around then- Candidate Trump. Here are a few examples:
We have documented in the public domain Candidate Trump's efforts to negotiate a business deal to build what was going to be called the largest building in all of Russia. He negotiated that deal throughout the whole primary process. According to his attorney Mr. Giuliani, it may have been negotiated all the way through the election. The deal itself may not have violated any laws. Yet, frankly, I think, if I were a Republican primary voter, I would have liked to have known that my potential Presidential candidate was still trying to do a deal with Vladimir Putin's government.
In our investigation, we also had exposed ongoing communications between the President's campaign chairman, Mr. Manafort, and Konstantin Kilimnik, who has ties with both Russian intelligence and oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
Our committee has made multiple criminal referrals to the special prosecutor based on what we have learned and witnesses' efforts to lie to us and to obstruct our investigation.
This is what a counterintelligence investigation is all about. We need to fully understand what the Russians were trying to do, and we need to be able to warn future campaigns and candidates about the lengths to which hostile governments will go and the new tools they will use to undermine our democracy. I believe we cannot make that full guidance to future campaigns without there being a full release of this report.
Some observers have said that the report cannot be released without its jeopardizing sources and methods. Let me be clear. As vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, no one is more sensitive to those concerns than am I, but the resolution that we have specifically states that the report should be released to the public in accordance with the law. Clearly, sources and methods would not be released under this standard, nor would grand jury information.
What we are talking about here is basic transparency. Let's make sure the full Mueller report is released to Congress, including the underlying documents and intelligence. Then let's make sure the American people see as much of this report as possible and as soon as possible. Let's do it in a bipartisan way to protect sources and methods. Unanimous Consent Request--H. Con. Res. Con. Res. 24, expressing the sense of Congress that the report of Special Counsel Mueller should be made available to the public and to Congress, and which is at the desk; further, that the concurrent resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
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Mr. WARNER. That conclusion was that Russia massively interfered in our elections. Russia did it in the form of hacking into personal information and releasing it subjectively, and Russia did it in terms of at least touching the electoral systems in 21 of our States in ways that, frankly, found a great deal of vulnerabilities. Russia also did it in ways that manipulated social media that, quite honestly, caught our Intelligence Committee and the social media companies off guard.
Our Intelligence Committee spent a year in its review of the conclusions of the intelligence community, and in January of 2018, it unanimously agreed that the intelligence community's findings were correct--that the Russians interfered and that they did it on behalf of one candidate, Mr. Trump, against another candidate, Mrs. Clinton.
For those reasons, I respectfully object to the request of my colleague from Kentucky.
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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, in closing, I hope we can move past this. The President himself has called for the release of the report. In a rare stroke of unanimity, the House voted 420 to 0. I think many in this body would like to move beyond this issue. The only way we are going to be able to move beyond this is to get this report released, to get it out to the American public, and to let those of us who are charged with the intelligence community's responsibilities see all of the report, including the underlying documents. I hope we can get to that point.
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