Unanimous Consent Request--S. 4791

Floor Speech

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Mr. HAGERTY. Yes, there is, Mr. President.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, under oath, has said:

We are not moving forward with the fund, period.

Why is that not enough for my colleagues from across the aisle? Because they have a deeper and much darker motive. They want to erase the Biden Justice Department's unprecedented weaponization by abolishing every means of holding it accountable. I am not going to stand for it.

Has there ever been a more systematic effort to surveil and oppress the political operation of a sitting President's opponents than under Joe Biden?

We all know the answer. In fact, my esteemed colleague from Iowa Chairman Grassley has called it ``arguably worse than Watergate.''

The Biden DOJ's Arctic Frost Operation involved a taxpayer-funded army of lawyers obtaining financial information on over 400 individuals and groups that happened to support President Trump in the 2020 election.

Yet, despite serious internal concerns and objections that were raised within the DOJ that this wasn't a proper basis for a search, President Trump's home was raided, at Mar-a-Lago, in a made-for-TV operation.

This witch hunt extended even to the halls of the U.S. Senate. By now, everyone is familiar with how the Biden DOJ subpoenaed the records of eight Republican Senators--myself included--specifically because of conversations that we had in anticipation of a vote that was coming up on this matter.

That is a serious affront to congressional privileges, and it was a clear violation of the Constitution's speech or debate clause.

Did the Constitution matter to the Biden DOJ or to their allies at Verizon? It seems not. The Biden DOJ and Verizon violated the constitutional rights of numerous Republican Senators.

Several of my staff were among those with the temerity to serve in the Trump administration. Without any reason to think they were involved in any wrongdoing, members of my staff were subpoenaed, they were forced to hire counsel, and they were subjected to depositions. The costs can be ruinous.

As my staff was tortured, I saw firsthand how the process was the punishment. Think about it. If you could ruin someone's financial future, there is no need to prove them guilty. If you can set an example that working in a Republican administration will get you put on a ``do not hire'' list by left-leaning law firms or make you the target of taxpayer-funded investigations by a Democrat-controlled and weaponized DOJ, then you achieve another chilling objective--that is suppression.

Democrats in the last administration weren't satisfied with targeting Republican officials and staffers; they went even further. To take just one example, the DOJ under President Biden brought its enormous power to bear on the groups it hates the most. In my home State, that was pro-life demonstrators. Yes, that is right. When violent crime had skyrocketed in American cities across the Nation, the Biden DOJ devoted precious resources to criminally prosecuting peaceful pro-life demonstrators in my home State of Nashville, TN. They were letting go criminal illegal aliens, who would strike again, just so they could prosecute those whose politics they disagreed with. What a disgrace.

My colleagues across the aisle are simply trying to cover up and sweep under the rug the fact that the Department of Justice under President Biden became a tool to destroy his political opponents.

Just so there is no mistake, this is far from the first political controversy involving the DOJ's settlement authority. I won't recount all of the instances in which the Biden or Obama administration used DOJ settlement funds to funnel billions of dollars to their pet projects. Needless to say, my Democrat colleagues apparently saw no problem with that. Indeed, not a single Democrat ever cosponsored the Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act in the 114th Congress, in the 115th Congress, nor in the 117th or the 118th Congress. Yet now, when any victim of the Biden DOJ's weaponization might actually receive some recompense--well, now, they have found religion. And even that is an overstatement.

Today's bill is different in the worst way from Republicans' previous efforts to constrain the DOJ's settlement authority. This proposal by the minority leader isn't an evenhanded proposal that would constrain Presidents of both parties moving forward; it would solely invalidate a single settlement agreement involving specific parties. This treads dangerously close to the Constitution's prohibitions against ex post facto laws and retroactive legislation, and I have serious concerns that it violates the Fifth Amendment's due process clause.
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Mr. HAGERTY. Mr. President, I find it quite interesting that my Democratic colleagues are now seeking to somehow block some of the funds of the Department of Justice when they would never do this before. I mentioned earlier that Republicans put forward the Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act. In four previous Congresses, not a single Democrat was willing to join; not a single Democrat was willing to help us rein in the Department of Justice. Yet, when we find abject weaponization of the Department of Justice, when we have my own staff-- and I would ask any of the staff in this room to think about it, put themselves in their shoes. If you happen to work in the White House under a Republican administration, then you can find yourself, under a weaponized DOJ, subject to subpoena, subject to depositions, and your parents are putting $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 of their life savings at stake to protect and defend their children. This is exactly the conversation I had with my staff and their parents. It is heartbreaking. It needs to stop, and there needs to be accountability so this never happens again.

I am not about to stand here and just sweep this under the rug and act like the weaponization of the Biden DOJ never happened. Not in history has anything happened like this before, where a sitting President goes after his opponent and all of his opponent's allies-- subpoenaing U.S. Senators' phone records, like they did mine; having a corrupt operation with--it appears Verizon and the DOJ colluded. Maybe Verizon had a particular transaction like the Frontier acquisition that they wanted to curry favor with DOJ to achieve and therefore just violated the Constitution and handed my records over, along with other U.S. Senators'.

This should not be allowed to happen. We can't, as Americans, act like it never did, and to accept Senator Schumer and my colleague Senator Padilla's recommendation would somehow give credence that nothing ever did happen. Indeed, the worst weaponization of government that we have ever seen in our lifetime did happen under the Biden administration.

I will not stand for it.

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