Business Before the Senate

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, this is a busy week for all of us in the Senate but not so much for our friends in the House, who won't be back until the end of the month to vote on any legislation.

We are hard at work here in the Senate, and particularly in the Judiciary Committee, we have a lot to do. This morning, we held a hearing to examine the impact of COVID-19 on incarceration and detention. Across my State, nearly 5,500 offenders have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least three dozen have passed away. In addition, nearly 900 employees have tested positive, leading to 7 line-of-duty deaths.

This has been and continues to be a major focus of mine after having received a letter from the public employee union at the Federal Medical Center in Carswell in Ft. Worth, which is actually a medical facility for incarcerated individuals.

Unfortunately, we know that, just like the nursing homes and assisted living facilities--people who are elderly or have chronic underlying health problems are especially vulnerable to this virus. We need to do everything we can to make sure that people are treated humanely and fairly even while incarcerated.

Tomorrow, we will switch gears, and we will hold the next in a series of important hearings to examine the handling of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation. You will recall that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was opened in July 2016, in the midst of a Presidential election campaign. This followed on the heels of a now famous or infamous press conference that FBI Director Comey had on July 5, 2016, in which he claimed that no reasonable prosecutor would charge then- Candidate Clinton for the various email scandals he investigated. But unfortunately, as we found out later, he reopened that investigation again right before the November election, casting a lot of doubt on who interfered the most with the 2016 election. Was it Director Comey, or was it Russian active measures? Who had the biggest impact on the actual outcome?

As I said, this investigation against the Clinton campaign began in the summer of 2016. When the special counsel's report was released last April, it concluded that there was no collusion or obstruction that could be charged as an offense.

I had hoped that extensive investigation conducted by the former FBI Director, Bob Mueller, would close the chapter in this book, but as information about how the FBI conducted its work has come to light, thanks in large part to the outstanding work of the inspector general of the Department of Justice, Mr. Horowitz, it is clear that this story is far from over, and there is a lot we need to do together to help restore public confidence in our Nation's premier law enforcement agencies, known as the Department of Justice and the FBI.

We have learned--tragically, I say, because as a former judge and former attorney general, I revere these institutions of law enforcement--we learned about texts from high-ranking government officials in the FBI, in the upper-management echelon, vowing to stop Donald Trump's election.

We now have learned about systemic abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is supposed to protect the privacy of American citizens, and how it was manipulated and intentionally abused, and lies actually communicated to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to justify a warrant against an American citizen.

We have learned about a first altered and now missing 302 for Michael Flynn. He, of course, was the National Security Advisor for a short time for President Trump but was later charged with lying to the FBI. Amazingly, in a surreal course of events, the original notes taken by the FBI agents who interviewed General Flynn are nowhere to be found. We learned they were later modified. We have the modified version, after somebody got to change them, but we need to see the underlying ones.

It is no wonder that the steady drip of information paints a very troubling picture about the motivations behind the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the way it evolved over time.

The thing that concerns me the most is, if rogue FBI officials can do this against a Presidential candidate, if they can do what they did to Hillary Clinton and expose derogatory information while saying there isn't evidence with which to charge her with an offense, if that is tolerated, then what sort of protection do we as ordinary citizens have against that kind of abuse of the enormous power given to our law enforcement agencies and investigative agencies like the FBI?

So this is a monumental scandal. The American people deserve answers, and that is what the Judiciary Committee is hoping to deliver.

Tomorrow, we will hear from former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about the origins of the investigation and the role he played as the Deputy Attorney General at the time--the second highest ranking official at the Department of Justice. Of course Mr. Rosenstein, during his long and illustrious career as a former U.S. attorney headquartered in Baltimore, was closely linked to some of the key players in the decisions made during this investigation, and his testimony is a critical first step in learning the truth behind this misguided and rogue investigation.

On Thursday, the committee will vote on subpoena authorizations to obtain additional documents that are critical to our oversight responsibilities.

As we work to restore America's faith in our justice system, there is only one way we can succeed, and that is to find the truth and to follow the truth, wherever it may lead. That process will begin in earnest again tomorrow, and I look forward to working with my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee to uncover the facts, to share them with the American people, and to begin to persuade them that we take seriously the job of repairing the damage done by the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, conducted outside of all of the norms and rules that should guide those investigations, on the eve of a Presidential campaign, on top of the reason that Rod Rosenstein recommended to President Trump that James Comey be fired as the FBI Director because of his mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source