-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I sit on the Judiciary Committee and was present for the confirmation hearing of Pam Bondi in her quest to be Attorney General of the United States.

I have to say that there is a lot to admire. She had been a competent prosecutor for many years. She was the twice-elected attorney general of a major State. And she said a lot of the right things about independence of the Department and rule of law.

What I couldn't get over was how things changed when she got to a topic that would have been sensitive to Donald Trump--something that would have gotten Donald Trump all twitchy. When she hit those topics, it was like, watching the plane fly into the Bermuda Triangle and all the navs and coms go crazy.

She couldn't say obvious things--things like: Did President Biden win the 2020 election? That is an easy answer: Yes, he did, sir--or ma'am. Super simple. When she can't say that, that is a sign.

When she told us that there had been a peaceful transfer of power--a roomful of Senators who have had to flee this Chamber because of the violence of January 6 and go and shelter in a secret location, and she had to tell us that there had been a peaceful transfer of power. Again, haywire.

No predication, she said. She couldn't say there was no predication to go after somebody like Liz Cheney or Jack Smith. Predication is the key to being able to opening a case like that. The predication is pretty apparent--or its lack is pretty apparent, and she could not agree that there was no predication to open a case.

Last, she pretended that the candidate for FBI did not have an enemies list. He had an enemies list. He published his enemies list. He said that the people on his enemies list were criminals. He said that now it is time to go on the manhunt for the enemies that he identified on the enemies list. So when she can't state the obvious, it causes real concern.

It causes real concern because of the lawlessness this administration has already demonstrated in the first 2 weeks.

She got a lot of questions about pardons: Would she support violent offenders in the January 6 attack on the Capitol being pardoned? We were chastised for having asked such questions by our Republican colleagues who said: You know, you are asking her ridiculous hypotheticals. That will never happen. Jim Jordan: Oh, that wouldn't happen. The President would never do that. Over and over again, Republicans said: Oh, that would never happen. Well, what happened? He pardoned the violent offenders.

In fact, some of them are already up to no good again. We have got some arrested for assaulting police officers. We had some shot in a violent confrontation with police officers. This is just in the 2 weeks since their pardons. And, here, soliciting a minor. That is the quality of people that the President was willing to pardon. So those pardons are another signal about a very strange and dangerous time that President Trump is taking us into.

As my colleague from Vermont just mentioned, we have got these little characters--I call them the muskrats--running around in Treasury, running around over at USAID, getting into systems where they have no business, where apparently they are not just able to get into the payment systems for Social Security and things like that--tax refunds, whatever--but they can actually manipulate the systems and they can leave backdoors so that Elon Musk can continue to access that data even after this raid by his little muskrats is over.

We don't know the details of what they have done, but there are probably a great number of laws, including privacy laws, that they are violating by running around without proper authorization through these enormous accounting databases. And of course the billionaires that helped bring Trump to office live off data. Now they have access to one of the biggest datasets in the world. Do you think they are going to be responsible about that? I sure don't.

Right now in Rhode Island, funds are frozen, and people can't get straight answers about how they will ever get access to funding that has been duly appropriated, authorized, and obligated. The freeze of those funds by the President is now in violation of not one but two court orders.

So the lawlessness is apparent, whether it is the muskrats running around in Treasury looking at everybody's files or whether it is court orders being patently violated or whether it is violent offenders being pardoned so they can go out and solicit minors again.

I mean, the whole thing really calls for probity and good judgment and adherence to constitutional norms from an Attorney General, and when she can't answer as simple a question as ``Did President Biden win the 2020 election?'' my alarms go off. And they particularly go off when we get to her FBI Director, Kash Patel. She suggested she would be able to rein him in. I have my doubts.

He made completely preposterous explanations of how his enemies list wasn't an enemies list, even though he had called those people ``criminals'' and that there would be a ``manhunt'' for them. He denied having a role with the J6 Choir, which was a singing group of violent attackers from January 6, and he had taken credit for producing their recording but pretended he didn't know that they were January 6 violent attackers.

He assured us that FBI agents would be protected against political retribution, which was beginning as he testified and which is going on at the Department right now--massive, unprecedented political retribution.

He won't tell us what he told a grand jury in proceedings in which he pled the Fifth Amendment. Well, if you plead the Fifth and then you go into a civil proceeding, your having pled the Fifth is something that the civil attorney can use against you. It is called the adverse inference. A jury can draw the conclusion that the testimony that you would have given had you not asserted your Fifth Amendment privilege would be harmful to your case. They are legally available to reach that conclusion. A judge will instruct them that they may reach that conclusion.

Here we are in the Judiciary Committee, and we can't get an answer from this guy about his grand jury testimony. We know he pled the Fifth. And, what, are we not supposed to take the adverse inference that a regular jury would take from pleading the Fifth? It is a mess.

This guy Patel went into a court in Colorado to testify for Trump. How did he do when he went in front of that court and testified? Well, the presiding judge said that he ``was not a credible witness,'' his testimony was ``illogical'' and was ``completely devoid of any evidence in the record.''

OK. So I used to be a U.S. attorney, and we used to take FBI agents and we would put them into court to make cases. If an FBI agent working for me had gotten that kind of a response from a Rhode Island district judge--that he was not credible, that he was giving testimony that was illogical, that he could not be believed--there would be repercussions. We would need to see if that was a Giglio disclosure problem for this person. We would need to understand why this FBI agent couldn't be trusted by a Federal judge.

This isn't just an agent; this is the guy who wants to run the FBI. So to trust Pam Bondi to rein in a character like this who has ``virtually no experience that would qualify him'' to lead the FBI, says former Attorney General Bill Barr; who has ideas that are ludicrous--``absolutely unqualified for this job,'' ``untrustworthy,'' ``an absolute disgrace to . . . even consider him''; a guy who ran on his website, ``Kash Patel retruthed,'' imagery of him chain-sawing his enemies list people--this is actually a video clip. We can't play it here, but it is a video clip of him chain-sawing through his enemies list, and he thought that was cool to retruth.

That is the kind of person we are dealing with. Pam Bondi is going to be able to restrain him? Not if she can't even say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

This was his last comment. He said I had misquoted him. To the press:

We are going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.

Like he didn't win it.

We are going to come after you. Whether it's criminal or civilly, we will figure that out. But yeah, we are putting you all on notice.

That is what is coming to the Department of Justice. The FBI is in danger of being turned into the political enforcement weapon of this President, who is already breaking the law over and over again in just the last 2 weeks. And a woman who cannot say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election I believe is not going to be able to restrain this kind of misbehavior, let alone the kind of misbehavior we are seeing out of the Oval Office.

So regretfully--because there was a lot to like about Ms. Bondi-- regretfully, I cannot possibly vote to confirm her.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source