National Foster Care Month, Economic Growth, Mueller Report

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, May has been recognized as National Foster Care Month for over 20 years to bring awareness to the challenges that foster youth face.

Through my work on the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth, I have had the opportunity to hear firsthand what children in foster care need. They need love, support, safety, and permanency. They need a family. I salute all those who dedicate their time and resources to help these kids.

In moving forward, I will continue to work to find better solutions and to secure better outcomes for youth in foster care.

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, last week, the Department of Labor released its monthly scorecard for the U.S. workforce.

The unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, which is the lowest rate since December 1969--a new 50-year low. Moreover, an additional 263,000 jobs were created. Job gains have averaged a robust 218,000 over the past 12 months. Additionally, for the ninth straight month, year-over- year nominal wage gains have equaled or exceeded 3 percent.

It is good to see this administration's tax reform and pro-growth policies continuing to improve the daily lives of all Americans.

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, the taxpayers spent $30 million on the special counsel's investigation. Now we know without a single doubt that there was no collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia. For more than 2 years, the Democrats screamed collusion and did so not based on fact but based on rumor, hearsay, and probably wishful thinking. They have done a huge disservice to the American people by taking that approach.

As I have said before, the real collusion was actually with the Democrats. Here is how it has evolved. It was the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee that hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research against Candidate Trump. Then Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, to compile what we now hear always referred to as the Steele dossier. That document was very central to the fake collusion narrative, and it reportedly used Russian Government sources for information. So the Democrats paid for a document created by a foreign national that relied on Russian Government sources--not Trump; the Democrats. That is the definition of collusion.

But Democratic collusion didn't stop there. Last week, The Hill newspaper reported that a Democratic National Committee contractor contacted the Ukrainian Government to get dirt on the Trump and Manafort during the Presidential election. Specifically, the Democratic National Committee contractor reportedly ``wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets working to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against U.S. interests.''

The Democrats were up in arms about the Trump Tower meeting when the Trump campaign was approached about dirt on Hillary Clinton. Here, the DNC proactively pounded the door of a foreign government for dirt. Where is the outrage at that? The special counsel ignored all of that in his report; thus, he didn't fulfill all of his responsibilities.

The Deputy Attorney General appointed Mueller in May of 2017 to investigate alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The Deputy Attorney General further ordered that if the special counsel believed it was necessary and appropriate, he was authorized to ``prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters.'' But that is not what the special counsel did on the obstruction question. Instead, the special counsel declined to make a traditional prosecutorial decision. The report said that ``[t]he evidence that we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.''

As the Attorney General said when he released the report and then again in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, the role of a prosecutor ``is to make a charging decision.'' It isn't a prosecutor's job to exonerate a subject; it is to charge a crime or, in the alternative, not to charge a crime. But in his report, the special counsel explains his decision not to even make a decision. He says, among other things, that stating the President had committed a chargeable offense without actually charging him, under the Justice Department's guidance, would be unfair to the President because, according to the special counsel, then the President couldn't defend himself properly before a neutral factfinder. Instead, the special counsel laid out 200 or so pages of facts and hand-wringing relating to the obstruction and then dumped all of this material on the Attorney General's desk.

It reminds me of former FBI Director Comey's declaration in the summer of 2016 that Secretary Clinton was extremely careless in handling classified information but that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case against Secretary Clinton. FBI Director Comey made a prosecutorial decision that wasn't his to make; it was up to the Attorney General to make. That was Attorney General Lynch. Comey also released derogatory information about Secretary Clinton and then refused to show all of his work.

The special counsel's report is at least equally problematic. The report lays out 200 pages of investigative product but leaves the charging decision hanging in Never Never Land. Nevertheless, the report asserts that if the special counsel team could have found the President did not commit obstruction, they would have said so. But, again, that is not what prosecutors do. That is a reversal of the innocent until proven guilty standard that is basic to American justice. If it really were a thorough investigation, it seems the inverse would be true as well. The inverse is that, after a thorough investigation, the special counsel did not have enough evidence to conclusively state obstruction actually occurred.

During the Attorney General's May 1 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he noted that if the special counsel found facts sufficient to constitute obstruction, he would have stated that finding.

Curiously, the special counsel spilled a lot of ink in his report to explain why he believed the President could be charged as a matter of legal theory. So why didn't he just make that decision or at least make a very clear recommendation to the Attorney General and stand behind his own theories?

The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General asked Mueller whether he would have charged obstruction but for the Department's guidance on charging sitting Presidents. The special counsel said no, which means, if warranted, that there was no barrier for him to make that charge.

In the absence of a decision from the special counsel, it was then up to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, who appointed Mueller and supervised his work. The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General reviewed all of the facts and evidence that the special counsel collected. The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General evaluated it under Mueller's own legal theories, even though they disagreed with some of those theories. After all of that, the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General determined that the evidence was not sufficient to charge.

Oddly, the special counsel's report is probably the most notable for what it doesn't address at all.

The special counsel's report does not address the genesis of the Russia investigation. It doesn't address whether the FBI used improper surveillance techniques on the Trump campaign or individuals associated with the Trump campaign. It doesn't address the credibility of the FBI's sources.

It doesn't address whether the Steele dossier was a Russian disinformation campaign. Even one of the reporters at the publication that initially dumped the dossier into the public domain wants to know where it came from and what it means. The special counsel's report doesn't address whether Department of Justice officials turned a blind eye to potential misconduct. It also doesn't address whether the Department of Justice misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when it applied for that court's decision against the Trump campaign.

So now we know what reasonable people have long suspected--there was no collusion and no obstruction of the collusion investigation. Yet we still don't know how this so-called collusion investigation got started in the first place.

In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey testified that he briefed President-elect Trump about these allegations in January 2017 even though, according to his public testimony, Director Comey considered them to be, in his words, ``salacious and unverified.'' If, in fact, they were salacious and unverified in early 2017, then what were they months before that when Comey started the investigation? We know the allegations against Page were unverified when they were used by the FBI and the Justice Department to support a FISA application to spy--yes, spy--on an American citizen, an American citizen who, by the way, has never been charged with anything.

In January of 2018, Senator Lindsey Graham and this Senator wrote to the Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director Christopher Wray about the allegations in the Steele dossier, about its author, and, more importantly, about its bankrollers. In that memo, we described inconsistencies between what Steele swore to a British court about his contacts with the media and what the Page FISA application represented to the FISA Court about those same contacts. The FISA application represented that Steele did not communicate with the media about his intelligence reports but that he told the British court he did.

We noted in our memo that if Mr. Steele had lied to the FBI about his media contacts, it would bear on his credibility. That would be a huge problem because the FISA application and its renewals depended on taking Steele at his word. Remember, at that time, the Steele dossier was still ``salacious and unverified,'' and those were Comey's words. So it mattered a whole lot whether the FBI and the Department of Justice could trust Steele and his dossier.

In our referral, Senator Graham and I also noted that Mr. Steele's contacts with the media likely affected, in our words, the ``reliability of his information-gathering efforts'' in compiling the dossier. By the time the Department of Justice and the FBI filed the FISA application and even before the FBI officially opened the investigation, the Steele dossier was probably the worst kept secret in Washington, DC.

The same can be said for the government's efforts to look for ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. All of these folks--the media, lawyers, lobbyists, campaign organizations, private research firms, FBI officials, the Department of Justice and Department of State officials, and even foreign intelligence agencies--reportedly had access to the dossier information or the dossier itself. An attorney for Clinton and the Democratic National Committee even passed on some aspects of this information directly to the FBI's general counsel before the FISA was issued.

Basically, this piece of paper was, in some form or another, all over this town, and the more the dossier was shopped around, the more vulnerable it became to its manipulation.

We also know that at least as early as the summer of 2016, foreign intelligence agencies were reportedly feeding information to the CIA about Trump campaign associates and that the FBI was using a source to seek information from individuals who were associated with the Trump campaign. At about that time, Fusion GPS had hired Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

We need to know if leadership in the intelligence community and the FBI were already gathering intelligence on Trump associates when Fusion hired Steele. We need to know whether the Obama administration was looking so hard for connections that it figured the Steele dossier would justify efforts to continue its surveillance activities. Further, we need to know if the Russians knew our government was that hungry for information to the point they packed the dossier with disinformation just to sow chaos. If so, it looks like the Obama administration fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and it certainly seems like some in leadership may have ignored clear warning signs.

Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr spoke with top FBI leadership about Steele's work the day the investigation opened, and after the FBI terminated Steele as a source, Ohr continued to feed Steele's work to the Bureau. At various times, Mr. Ohr made it clear to the FBI that the information from Steele could not be taken at face value because it was based on hearsay. Ohr noted that Steele had an anti-Trump agenda and that the whole operation was bankrolled by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Of course, the Clinton campaign wasn't keen on the world's knowing it was footing the bill for the dossier. Its lawyers even lied to the media about this fact for more than a year. That is not my saying it. A New York Times reporter said that.

So, by the time the FISA application was filed and every time it was renewed, FBI and Department of Justice leaders were very much aware of the political bias and the purpose of the unverified information that supposedly supported it, so much so that according to reported text messages between former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his staff, the FBI worked to create--these are their words--a ``robust explanation'' for ``any possible bias'' of the source ``in the package'' supporting the FISA application. It also seems from these text messages that the FBI was getting pushback from at least one individual at the Justice Department about seeking the FISA.

In the end, the FISA application was presented to the court with there being no mention whatsoever of Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, or any mention of the source's political bias and with only mere speculation by the FBI that its primary source was not peddling his information far and wide. The FISA application was then granted by the court and was renewed three times. Let me say that again. The FISA application was granted and renewed three times.

The FBI surveilled an American citizen for many months based on salacious and unverified information that had been gathered by a former foreign intelligence officer who was desperate to keep the President out of office. He was British Agent Steele. That former intelligence officer used Russian sources, including Russian Government sources, at the behest and with the funding of a rival political party and campaign.

The Democrats and the mainstream media have been screaming at the top of their lungs about salacious, unverified allegations that this President stole an election by working with the Russians, but it is a sobering and verified fact that the Democrats actually paid for dirt from the Russians to damage their political opponents.

So now, after the taxpayers have spent $30 million to work through this swirling cesspool of allegations, when the Attorney General says he has concerns about certain aspects of this investigation, I agree with him. I don't know whether laws were broken or protocols were breached or rules were violated, but for decades, I have been doing oversight of the Federal Government, including of the Department of Justice and the FBI, and I think there is certainly enough there to be asking questions.

For example, did the Obama administration improperly use the U.S. intelligence community to attempt to neutralize and denigrate a political opponent? Did the Obama administration fail to properly assert oversight of the Department of Justice and the FBI FISA process?

These questions must be answered.

It is fundamentally American to care not just about what laws the government enforces but also how the government enforces those laws.

If the greatest enemy we see is the person on the other side of the political spectrum, then the foreign powers who seek to divide and weaken our Republic are going to succeed.

Now, I have been trying to get to the bottom of all sides of this issue for years, and I have urged my Democratic colleagues to join me.

I am encouraged that the Attorney General is taking a look, and I am encouraged that the independent Department of Justice inspector general has been looking at these issues as well. I have no idea what they are going to find.

I know Mueller turned a blind eye to what they are investigating, however. The American people need answers--all the answers.

It is not just this administration that has been dragged through the mud with wild collusion and obstruction theories. The American people have had to listen to those falsehoods now for years. Many in the media have been breathlessly flooding the airwaves with speculation and what- ifs about the bogus Trump collusion narrative.

Now that the report is out, some media figures are still struggling to come to terms with Mueller's findings and decisions. It is as if they are unhappy with the results or perhaps they are embarrassed that the world is learning that we have been sold a bunch of snake oil for the past 2 years and now they are finding out that the jig is up.

I hope the mainstream media will pursue the origins of the Russian collusion investigation and do it with the same vigor as they have been pushing the collusion narrative for the last 2 years, and there ought to be some apologies from some of them. This would all go a long way to restoring their damaged credibility.

So I am going to do whatever I can to make sure the people get these answers.

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