CPSC Reform Act

Floor Speech

CPSC REFORM ACT -- (Senate - March 05, 2008)

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, throughout my career in the Senate, I have taken very seriously our constitutional responsibility of oversight. So I have actively conducted oversight of the executive branch of Government regardless of who controls Congress or who controls the White House.

These issues that I do oversight on are about basic, good Government and accountability in Government. It does not deal with party politics or with ideology. The resistance from the bureaucracy is often fierce. It does not matter whether we have a Republican President or a Democratic President. There is an institutional bias among bureaucracy not to cooperate with Congress in doing our constitutional job of oversight.

Protecting itself is what the bureaucracy does best, and it works overtime to keep embarrassing facts from congressional and public scrutiny. This has gone on too long. It is time for the stonewalling to stop. We have a duty under the Constitution to act as a check on the executive branch, and I take that duty seriously. I know other Members of the Senate do. But too often, we let issues in oversight slide that somehow we do not let slide in legislation. So I am asking my colleagues to ramp it up a little bit, to be more serious in the pursuit of information, but not just in the pursuit, to make sure that information actually comes to us when we do not get the proper response from the administration.

When the agencies I am reviewing get defensive and refuse to respond to my requests, it makes me wonder what they are trying to hide. They act as if the documents in the Government files belong to them. These unelected officials seem to think they alone have the right to decide who gets access to information--information, which, by the way, was probably collected at taxpayers' expense.

I have news for them. I am asking my colleagues to have news for them. Documents in Government files belong to the people, and the elected representatives of the people in our constitutional role of oversight of the executive branch have a right to see them. That right is essential to carry out our oversight function.

Let me summarize a few examples of the kind of stonewalling I face. But before I do that, I would like my colleagues to know this is the first of several trips to the floor that I intend to make about the executive branch and its stonewalling. I am tired of it, and I am going to talk about it until we in the Senate and this Senator gets what we are entitled to under the Constitution. All the kids in America study the checks and balances that are a part of our system of Government, and this is part of the congressional check under the Constitution on the executive branch of Government.

So let me start this evening with what is outstanding and is being held up at the FBI on the one hand, the State Department on the other, and the Department of Homeland Security in another case. Let's look at the use of the jet aircraft that is available for the FBI.

The Government Accountability Office is beginning an audit that I requested on the use of luxury executive jets by the FBI. I asked for the audit after a Washington Post article detailed evidence that the jets were being used for travel by senior FBI officials rather than for the counterterrorism purpose as Congress intended when the jets were provided. However, the FBI Director has refused to commit to providing the flight logs to the Government Accountability Office investigators who are working on this project.

What is wrong with a little bit of public scrutiny about the flight logs on a corporate jet, which the taxpayers have paid for, for the use of Government bureaucracy and Government officials?

Let's go to the Michael German case. For nearly 2 years, despite requests from two Judiciary Committee chairmen, the FBI refused to provide documents in the case of FBI whistleblower Michael German. It took more than a year for the FBI to respond to questions for the record following last year's FBI oversight hearing by the Judiciary Committee. Even when the responses finally came in, most of them ducked and evaded the questions rather than answering them very directly.

The FBI misled the public about the facts in the German case. Even faced with the evidence, the FBI still will not admit that German was right about domestic and international terrorist groups meeting to discuss forming operational ties. Now they are trying to hide that evidence from the public. Don't you think the public ought to know everything there is to know about people who are planning terrorist activities against Americans?

I would like to bring up next exigent letters. The FBI continues to stonewall this committee on requests for documents.

For example, last March, we requested internal FBI e-mails on their issuance of exigent letters. These letters were criticized by the Justice Department inspector general as inappropriate ways to obtain phone records without any legal process and said the letters contained false statements, promising that a subpoena would be on the way even when there was no intent to issue such a subpoena. Here we are, then, a whole year later, and the FBI has provided only 15 pages. We know they have been sitting on even more e-mails that should shed light on this controversy. It is enough to make you wonder what they might be trying to hide.

Let us go back to something now 5 years old--the anthrax case. Not 5 years I have been working on it, but it hasn't been too far short of 5 years. There is still no public indication of progress in the investigation of the anthrax attacks. Well, this involved attacks on individual Senators. A former journalist is being fined for failure to disclose her sources, despite press accounts stating the sources were unnamed FBI officials. Whether anyone in the Justice Department has taken any serious steps to find out who in the bureau was leaking case information about Stephen Hatfill to the press is still a mystery. And why should it be? It shouldn't be a mystery. Have they obtained and searched the phone records of their own senior officials to see who was calling the reporters in question? You know, it is mysterious, but the FBI won't say.

Let us go to the Cecilia Woods matter. We have been waiting 2 years for documents in the case of a whistleblower named Cecilia Woods. Woods came to my office to report that she was retaliated against for reporting that her supervisor had an inappropriate intimate relationship with a paid informant and that her supervisor was inexplicably not fired, despite overwhelming evidence of this misconduct. I asked to see the FBI internal investigation to find out why. I still have not received adequate replies.

Let us look at the Goose Creek defendants. It is not only the FBI we have problems with. The Homeland Security and State Departments are stonewalling Congress as well. Last year, I wrote to Secretary Rice--she is an honorable person, Secretary of State, doing well--and we wrote to Secretary Chertoff--he is an honorable person. We wrote about the case of two Florida State University students arrested near Goose Creek, SC, with explosives in their trunk. They are both Egyptian nationals. One of them, Ahmed Mohammed, entered the United States on a student visa. However, I learned he had previously been arrested in Egypt and that he even declared his arrest on his visa form. I wanted a copy of his visa application and other documents to investigate how our screening system for visa applicants could still be so broken 7 years after 9/11. Both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department have thus far refused to comply. Why would they want to keep information such as this from a Member of the Senate, who has responsibility for appropriating enough money to make sure we can keep terrorists from doing another attack against American citizens?

For today, I have given only a few examples. I am going to come to the floor again to outline more examples where these agencies and other agencies have delayed and delayed and delayed. Months turn into years, and we don't get the information we need. It is time for excuses to stop so Congress can perform its constitutional job of check and balance--in this case check the executive branch of Government--and our constitutional responsibility of oversight of that branch of Government, the executive branch.

I yield the floor.

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