Unanimous Consent Request

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, this morning the Republican majority of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee authorized another smattering of subpoenas in what seems to be an ongoing effort to disparage a former Vice President and his family.

While the rest of the country is busy fighting COVID-19, this is what the Homeland Security Committee has been up to--using the powers of the Senate to, in effect, conduct opposition research for President Trump's campaign.

The Republican chairman has said he plans to release a report about it next week--merely a month before election day. There is a dark similarity here to the Republican effort in the House in the previous election to discredit the Democratic Presidential candidate with the Select Committee on Benghazi.

You may remember the now-minority leader of the House Republican caucus bragging that the Republicans created the committee to bring down Hillary's poll numbers. You know what they say about a political gaffe: It is when politicians tell the truth.

Well, it seems like the Republican chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has made the same gaffe that Minority Leader McCarthy made in 2016. In a little-noticed interview with a Wisconsin radio station last month, Senator Johnson said that his probe would ``help Donald Trump win reelection,'' and yet somehow the current activities of the Republican majority in the Homeland Security committee are even worse than what the House Republicans did in 2016, because in the rush to find scraps of information for these investigations, Senate Republicans may have collected and propagated disinformation that came from Putin's intelligence agents.

Some of the allegations that the Homeland Security chairman is now pursuing are the same ones pushed by Andriy Derkach, a known Russian agent who was sanctioned by President Trump's own Treasury Department for interfering in our elections.

Powerful Senate Republicans are echoing the same claims that the Russians are pushing, the same nonsense that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 elections and not just Putin.

We have all become so inured to scandal during this scandalous administration, but the fact that a powerful Senate committee may have fallen victim to misinformation from Moscow is appalling.

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Mr. SCHUMER. I will yield.

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Mr. SCHUMER. I am aware of it. Everything I have stated here is factual--everything, every single thing.

So, this afternoon, my colleagues and I have drafted a simple resolution that calls for the cessation of any Senate investigation or activity that allows the U.S. Congress to act as a conduit for Russian disinformation.

I cannot fathom how any Member of this Chamber could justify blocking such a resolution. There must not be a single aspect of this Chamber that wittingly or unwittingly furthers the propaganda machine of Vladimir Putin.

Now, I know what my friend from Wisconsin might say. He will deny receiving information from the particular Russian agent that I have mentioned, Mr. Derkach, but Chairman Johnson has never provided a full accounting of all the Russian- and Ukrainian-linked individuals he sought information from. One of the chairman's subpoenas, for example, targeted a Ukrainian national who is an associate of Mr. Derkach.

So anticipating his objection to this resolution, I would simply ask the chairman to provide a full accounting of whom he sought information from, so we can know who they are, what their motives are, and, therefore, the Senate can see if they are trying to interfere with our elections.

The chairman should have no issue furthering a complete accounting of his contacts with Russian and Ukrainian sources. The American people ought to know whether the U.S. Senate has been sullied by potentially receiving information from discredited Russian agents. The American people should expect the Senate to pass this resolution today.

What were our Founding Fathers most worried about? One of the top things--top things--was interference by foreign powers in our elections. Back then, their concerns were about bribery or treason or a foreign actor who infiltrated our government. Today, in our information age, the methods of foreign interference are different, but the risks are the same.

Our chief adversaries--Russia, China, Iran, North Korea--have found that disinformation and misinformation are a weak point in open societies like ours. That makes it incumbent on us--all of us--here in the Congress to be careful about the information we receive and repeat.

In the zeal for partisan advantage, we hope the Republican majority on the Homeland Security Committee has not become a sympathetic audience and a potential entrance point to foreign influence campaigns, wittingly or unwittingly. What a disastrous and disgraceful state of affairs. The Senate should pass this resolution today.

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