Recommending That the House of Representatives Find United States Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in Contempt of Congress for Refusal to Comply with A Subpoena Duly Issued By the Committee on the Judiciary
Floor Speech
Mr. Speaker, the dishonesty that we have just heard is illustrated by what Mr. Jordan just said, his selective quote from Mr. Hur's report. He said: ``Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice- presidency when he was a private citizen.''
The report does say that, but he neglects a sentence a paragraph later: ``However, for the reasons summarized below, we conclude that the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.'' That is deceptive.
Secondly, as the majority well knows, the President asserted executive privilege in this matter. Maybe that was proper, maybe not, but the way to contest executive privilege is not by a contempt resolution. It is by going to court and letting the court decide whether the exercise of executive privilege is warranted or not. For that reason also, this resolution fails.
Mr. Speaker, the Judiciary Committee, under Republican control, has spent the last 18 months and 20 million taxpayer dollars in a desperate search to find something, anything, that they can use to damage President Biden and to protect Donald Trump.
Other committees have gotten into the act as well, spending untold taxpayer money not to benefit the American people, not to feed hungry children, not to address our housing crisis, and not to improve our healthcare system, but on a single-minded quest to follow every rightwing conspiracy theory in the vain hope that it might lead to some evidence of wrongdoing.
What exactly have they delivered to the American people on their investment? Nothing. No evidence that the conspiracies are true, no indictments, no impeachment, no wins of any significance. The Republican leadership knows that if they don't come up with something to show for the millions of dollars they have spent, the MAGA political base may stay home next November.
They are scrambling in a desperate attempt to look like they have accomplished something. They were fervently hoping that Special Counsel Hur would indict President Biden for mishandling classified documents so that they could attack President Biden and misdirect the American people away from Donald Trump's treacherous handling of classified information.
However, the special counsel cleared Mr. Biden of wrongdoing for reasons that have nothing to do with Mr. Hur's gratuitous and widely contradicted comments about the President's memory.
What do our Republican friends do when an investigation turns up short? Simply put, they engage in fantasy. That is what they are doing here today. Unable to come up with any wrongdoing by the President, they have now trained their sights on the Attorney General. They accuse him of withholding key evidence, but the Attorney General has substantially complied with their every request. Sometimes he has been too responsive, in my opinion, given the obvious bad faith of the MAGA majority.
The DOJ has produced 92,000 pages of documents since Republicans took control of the House last year and has made dozens of witnesses available for interviews, hearings, and briefings. That is more pages of documents and more witnesses than the Trump Justice Department produced to Congress in 4 years. Just last week, the Attorney General himself spent more than 5 hours testifying before the Judiciary Committee.
With respect to the subpoena at issue in this contempt resolution, the Department turned over all the information Republicans asked for. There has been no obstruction, only cooperation. In reality, the Attorney General and DOJ have been fully responsive to Congress in every way that might be material to their long-dead impeachment inquiry.
All that remains are audio files for which the President has asserted executive privilege. In a letter to Chairmen Jordan and Comer, the Department of Justice noted that producing the audio recordings would ``raise an unacceptable risk of undermining the Department's ability to conduct . . . high-profile criminal investigations; in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of the White House officials is exceedingly important.''
The chairmen claim that they need those records to understand the pauses, pace, and tone of the conversation. This is absurd and clearly pretextual. In any event, it does not outweigh the extensive concerns expressed by the President and the Department.
Moreover, with respect to the recording at issue in this report, a complete certified transcript has already been provided to both committees, and no credible allegation has been made that these transcripts have been altered in any material way. The only thing that has not been introduced is the recording itself, something that in the wrong hands can be easily manipulated.
That is not an idle concern. Deepfakes and misleadingly edited videos and recordings have proliferated in recent years. Last year, a witness testifying in a closed-door deposition told us that she was the victim of a manipulated video made by a third party but shared widely by the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, who refused to take down the video even after it was abundantly clear that it was manipulated. That video contributed to a flood of death threats against the witness.
This isn't really about a policy disagreement with the DOJ. This is about feeding the MAGA base after 18 months of investigations that have produced failure after failure.
Like most of the bills House Republicans have pushed on purely partisan lines, this contempt resolution will do very little other than smear the reputation of Merrick Garland, who will remain a good and decent public servant no matter what Republicans say about him today.
This resolution may boost Donald Trump's spirits before his sentencing, but it will almost certainly not convince the Department of Justice to produce the one remaining file in question. Like the broader impeachment effort before it, this contempt resolution will have been a partisan stunt, destined to fail from the very start. As I said before, if they were really interested in getting this recording, they would contest the assertion of executive privilege in court, not bring a contempt resolution against the Attorney General.
The American people actually need us to do important work. I am tired of these games, and so are the American people.
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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman just attacked Special Counsel Smith. This dangerous attempt to demonize anybody who would hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions is despicable and it is a full-out assault on the basic tenets of our democracy.
I want to remind my colleagues that these types of actions have consequences. They affect the lives of many men and women who have dedicated themselves to public service and upholding the rule of law.
Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record a June 11, 2024, article from The Washington Post by the Honorable Merrick Garland titled: ``Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end.'' [June 11, 2024] Unfounded Attacks on the Justice Department Must End (By Merrick Garland)
Merrick Garland is attorney general of the United States.
Last week, a California man was convicted of threatening to bomb an FBI field office where hundreds of agents and other employees work. In one of his threats to the FBI, the man wrote: ``I can go on a mass murder spree. In fact, it would be very explainable by your actions.''
These heinous threats of violence have become routine in an environment in which the Justice Department is under attack like never before.
In recent weeks, we have seen an escalation of attacks that go far beyond public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate and necessary oversight of our work. They are baseless, personal and dangerous.
These attacks come in the form of threats to defund particular department investigations, most recently the special counsel's prosecution of the former president.
They come in the form of conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself. Those include false claims that a case brought by a local district attorney and resolved by a jury verdict in a state trial was somehow controlled by the Justice Department.
They come in the form of dangerous falsehoods about the FBI's law enforcement operations that increase the risks faced by our agents.
They come in the form of efforts to bully and intimidate our career public servants by repeatedly and publicly singling them out.
They come in the form of false claims that the department is politicizing its work to somehow influence the outcome of an election. Such claims are often made by those who are themselves attempting to politicize the department's work to influence the outcome of an election.
And media reports indicate there is an ongoing effort to ramp up these attacks against the Justice Department, its work and its employees.
We will not be intimidated by these attacks. But it is absurd and dangerous that public servants, many of whom risk their lives every day, are being threatened for simply doing their jobs and adhering to the principles that have long guided the Justice Department's work.
In my first job at the Justice Department some 45 years ago, I worked on what would become the department's first edition of the Principles of Federal Prosecution. That set of rules for prosecutors enshrined what every department employee lives by every single day: an unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial application of our laws. That commitment has been sustained by dedicated career professionals who serve across administrations of both political parties.
The Justice Department makes decisions about criminal investigations based only on the facts and the law. We do not investigate people because of their last name, their political affiliation, the size of their bank account, where they come from or what they look like. We investigate and prosecute violations of federal law--nothing more, nothing less.
We do this not only because of the principles that have long guided our work, but also because we know that our democracy cannot survive without a justice system that ensures the equal protection of law for all its citizens.
The Justice Department will continue to uphold its obligation under the Constitution to fiercely defend the right of all Americans to peacefully express opinions, beliefs and ideas. Disagreements about politics are good for our democracy. They are normal.
But using conspiracy theories, falsehoods, violence and threats of violence to affect political outcomes is not normal. The short-term political benefits of those tactics will never make up for the long-term cost to our country.
Continued unfounded attacks against the Justice Department's employees are dangerous for people's safety. They are dangerous for our democracy. This must stop.
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Mr. NADLER. It is absurd and dangerous that public servants, many of whom risk their lives every day, are being threatened for simply doing their jobs and adhering to the principles that have long guided the Justice Department's work. I would also remind my friends on the other side of the aisle that the conviction of Mr. Trump was in a State court in New York having nothing to do with the Federal Government.
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Mr. NADLER. Dean).
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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?
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Mr. NADLER. Balint).
Mr. Speaker, House Republicans have spent the last 18 months in a futile effort to dig up dirt on President Biden, which has culminated in their epic failure of an impeachment inquiry. This resolution is nothing more than a desperate attempt to save face with the MAGA- sphere.
They seek to hold the Attorney General in contempt even though he has already turned over all the underlying information they requested in their subpoena. This resolution will not change that fact, but facts have never been the animating force behind their investigations.
It is a show, and apparently, the show must go on even though the script hasn't turned out the way they wanted. Nevertheless, the reviews are in, and it is a flop, so I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this resolution and to put an end to this farce.
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