Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Texas yielding to me. I rise in opposition to this rule. And I have a whole stack of things that I will raise, but in the time that is available, I will say this: We watched as the Medicaid program was opened up more and more under President Obama. And when that happened, it caused a significant amount of turmoil in my State and many States across the country. And so President Trump has stepped in and decided that he is going to offer an opportunity to have the equivalent of block grants going back to the States and let them make the decision, let them write the regulations because the States know best. This great experiment in Federalism that we have, where the closer to the people that the decision can be made, the more effective that decision is and the more effective the resources of our taxpayers are. That is the attempt and the endeavor on the part of President Trump, and I regret that so much politics have been churned into this, we have a hard time focusing on the policy. When I see what happened at the prayer breakfast, and when I listened to the statement that has been made by the Speaker publicly in a conference a little earlier today, it spills forth upon this. Some of her words essentially show up in this document. Madam Speaker, it is time for us to take a deep breath. Impeachment is over. Let's focus on policy.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on January 30, 2020, because of the need to travel back to Iowa. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: ``no'' on rollcall No. 33; ``no'' on rollcall No. 34. Personal Explanation

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman's remarks again, and I would just point out that, of this list of disasters that we have and the delays we have in declaring these disasters, there is one here on April 29. A disaster declaration was declared for severe storms and flooding within the Sac and Fox Tribe in Mississippi and Iowa--and I actually live in Sac County, although that is not part of that reservation--with an incident period spanning March 13 till April 1. However, the disaster declaration was April 29, so there was a month-and-a-half delay in that one. I have other examples of this, Mr. Chairman, but I think that we have made our point here today, and I appreciate the attendance and diligence of the Members on both sides of the aisle. Mr. Chairman, I urge adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I appreciate the gentleman's remarks with regard to this amendment. I would point out that we have 435 Members in this United States Congress, and it was envisioned by our Founding Fathers that we would get ideas from every one of those districts. And they also recognized that we are all human, and no matter how diligent we might be, no matter how much we care about the people we are helping, sometimes things just kind of slide along, look good on the surface, and we are busy. So that is why we all want to look at this, and that is why I have the privilege to be here to offer this amendment. Having gone through natural disaster after natural disaster after natural disaster, suffered from them myself--in fact, the 1993 flood is probably why I am in Congress today, because I realized the degree of risk was not proportional to the potential for profit if you are under water. So I want to help those students who want to keep their credit in line, and I appreciate the support across Congress to do so. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time remains.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk made in order by the rule.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, this amendment, in reading through the bill, brings something forward that we have experienced a number of times in the natural disasters that have poured forth and the flooding in my district over the 17 years-plus that I have represented the folks in the Missouri River bottom, in particular; but, also, it affects everybody else around the country. In reading the base bill, it says that the 3-month grace period that is granted for a student loan begins on the date that the declaration of disaster is issued, and often that declaration of disaster is issued sometimes months after the disaster is over. The crisis is also over for the former student who was paying their student loans and having difficulty meeting those obligations because they have been the victim of a natural disaster, whether it be a hurricane, whether it be a flood, whether it be a tornado or some other type of natural disaster. This morning, I saw there was an earthquake down across from Florida, across the Caribbean. What this amendment does is move that date back to the initial date of the disaster itself rather than the date that it was declared a disaster. The language in the current bill says, ``date on which the major disaster or emergency was declared.'' Instead, the language becomes, ``initial date of the incident period of the major disaster or emergency.'' Mr. Chairman, I would point out some of these dates along the way that stand out to me. There was flooding in North Dakota that began on October 9 of 2019 and continued until October 26 of 2019. That disaster was declared not then, but declared on January 21, 2020. That would have been the first date that the grace period would kick in under this language. I ask that that grace period kick in immediately. Although the announcement will come from FEMA and wouldn't be on the first day of the disaster, that is the first day that they feel the financial stress. I will go through a number of these. The courageous people of Hornick, Iowa, bounced back from that flood as strongly as anybody I have seen, but that began on March 12, and the disaster declaration came March 23. So they lost some of those days. And I look down to Tropical Storm Michael in North Carolina, and that disaster began October 10 to 12, 2018, and 4 months later, January 31, 2019, was the declaration. So the credit of these people who are trying diligently to pay their student loans is damaged unless they have this grace period that begins when the stress period begins, and that is what my amendment does, Mr. Chairman, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I come to the floor today to raise the issue and be thankful of the progress that we have made with regard to trade. We have been through a year and a half or more of intense trade negotiations. I have watched as our markets took a hard hit and tailspinned down for a couple of days, down the limit awhile back, and slowly creep back in again. We produce a lot of corn, soybeans, cattle, hogs, eggs, and renewable energy in the Fourth Congressional District of Iowa. In fact, it is the number one egg-producing congressional district in all of America. We saw a publication on the part of Bloomberg that when the tariffs were put onto Chinese goods coming into the United States by President Trump, the Chinese retaliated with tariffs on products like pork and soybeans. Bloomberg just showed a map of the United States where that hit the hardest and it happened to hit exactly over the red counties in America that produce a lot of corn and soybeans, and you could add to that the other products I mentioned, Mr. Speaker. The situation that we are dealing with now is that we have gotten a long way through these trade negotiations, and we are coming around to the other side of it with China. In spite of all of this difficulty in all these markets that have been suppressed over this period of time, we found some new trade outlets. For one thing, instead of having one big pipe going to China, we have got multiple, smaller pipes going to other locations in the world. And today the President signed phase 1 of the trade agreement that will increase by about $16 billion a year our egg product exports to China. That includes a lot of soybeans, it includes a lot of pork, and it fixes that component. It also addresses the intellectual property issue that has been a big barrier for the trade negotiations with China. The value of U.S. intellectual property--the creation that comes out of the minds of Americans--is pirated by the Chinese somewhere between $500 and $600 billion a year. That gets addressed to a degree in this agreement and it gets addressed again in the next phase of the agreement. U.S. Trade Representative Lighthizer has spoken on that issue to me, and he seems to be, I will say, fairly confident that we are going to get at least a reasonable beginning to something that is awfully hard to fix. I would add also that it isn't just China. We are waiting now for the U.S. Senate to pass the USMCA Agreement. It is only the impeachment trial that stands in the way of getting that done. That will happen soon, within about a month or so, or perhaps less. Further we have Japan, we have South Korea, and by the end of this month the United Kingdom will be out of the E.U., and the door is open for a bilateral trade agreement with the British. If we could get that all done, as I said to the President the other day, we may find ourselves in the very best position we have ever been in, at least in our lifetime, with regard to trade in multiple locations, so that we are diversified in our markets so that we can send out to multiple countries and at the same time have a strong relationship with China and other countries. We are moving into an excellent position here. We have got a strong economy, and we have got a strong Dow. This really is a great time to make investments in America, and they are doing that from around the world. Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the President today.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And given that we have had some serious discussion here this evening, I really appreciate my colleagues, Chris Smith and others, who have spent an hour addressing the life issue here. As we come up on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, January 22--I believe that is a date that will live in infamy--America is becoming a more and more pro-life country. And as we watch the transition that is taking place in this country, that has to do with the March for Life that comes out here every year, when thousands of people, many, many young people ride from my neighborhood about 18 or 20 hours on a bus to get here, and they gather on The Mall for the events and the speeches and the rally and then march to the Supreme Court building. We often host them here with some hot chocolate. Each of these years that go by, I meet more and more young people that have become part of the pro-life network. So the network that is here, it strengthens people. They look around and they see that they are not alone. They come from churches; they come from schools; they come from families; they come from neighborhoods; and they understand that they are not alone, that there is a patchwork of people that are active across this country that is emerging into the majority in America. I will submit that we are now a majority pro-life nation, and that would be consistent with polling, the Barna poll that we did about, I suppose, a year and a half ago or a little more that showed that, just on the Heartbeat bill alone, which I happen to be the author of, H.R. 490, that we saw 61 percent support for the Heartbeat bill, without exceptions. Republicans were up at about 85 or 86 percent; independents were around in the 60th percentile; and Democrats are even in support of it, in the majority, at 59 percent of Democrats. So it may have been that America was a little bit ignorant about the beginning of life and the science of life and the moment that life begins, but we all knew that in our hearts when, in 1973, it was one thing, and it was a political agenda that was driven. And Norma McCorvey regretted that she happened to be Jane Roe. So she actually didn't get an abortion, and she became pro-life in her later years and became a pro-life activist. So it didn't serve her, and it surely didn't serve America. But some number of over 61 million American babies have been aborted since that period of time. And there have been struggles in this city. There have been women that come to this city and march for abortion, and so many women who come and march for life. But here is what I see. In 1976, Mr. Speaker, our firstborn child came into the world; and, of course I anticipated that with eager and nervous anticipation. But when that little boy--actually, not so little. He was almost 9 pounds. When he went into my hands and my arms and I looked at him and I held him in awe at the miracle that he was and is today, it was just stunning to me that, from my wife, Marilyn, and I came this little baby, this miracle. To look at him, to look in his eyes, to see his dark hair, and he turned out to be a blue-eyed, dark-haired little guy, and he had a lot of hair on his head, and it was just such a miracle to see and count the fingers and toes and look how perfectly they were formed. As he lay in his crib, I would sit and look at him, and there was an aura about that little baby boy. There was an aura about him. And you could have convinced me that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, that is how strong that was to me, that little boy miracle. As I looked at that, I thought this little guy here, how could anybody take his life now in these first minutes of his life or how could someone take his life the minute before he was born or the hour before or the day before he was born or the week or the month or the trimester, the first, second, or third trimester? And I just thought that through as I held that little miracle in my hands, and I knew that this life was precious and a miracle the moment that I could hold him and touch him and see him and feel that warmth and smell that fresh baby smell on him. And within minutes I went back through this process of development of this miracle from the moment of conception until birth. And at that moment I knew that you couldn't take that little baby's life at any point in this stage. I knew that his life began at the moment of conception. And from that moment on this miracle and millions and millions of other miracles needed to be protected from that moment on, that life begins at the moment of conception. That was 1976. Twenty years later I went out to San Diego to the Republican National Convention, and certainly I had all of my colors on and all the things that are attached to your lapels and your delegation credentials that are out there. And on a Thursday afternoon at 3:00 I see on the tri- fold schedule there that said Christian Women for Choice are gathering there in San Diego at a location about a block and a half away from the convention center. Something called me internally and said, you have to go down there and see what is going on. I was curious. What scripture would be quoted to me from Christian Women for Choice? I took a friend with me and we went down and found this area. It was about an acre, I suppose, in size, maybe a little less, chain-link fence all the way around, stage in the middle, big old speakers up there and microphones. There were people still milling around, but there wasn't a program going on on the stage at that point. I went to an individual that looked like he was at least associated with somebody in charge and I asked him who was the leader of this and who is the head of the Christian Women for Choice. And he said, that is my wife, and he pointed to her and took me over and introduced me. We ended up on the stage. And as that conversation began, it became a debate. And I remember there in San Diego, for every delegate--I remember the number they told me--there was as many as 15,000 press in that city to cover the convention. So we had quite a lot of press in that protest zone where they would be looking for controversy. So the leader of Christian Women for Choice and I went at it in kind of a no-holds barred debate that just clashed back and forth between us. And several of the others would chime in for her, and every once in a while her husband would put his chin up over her shoulder, and he would bark some things at me, too. Mr. Speaker, I was far enough from home and convicted enough, having enough conviction for those that don't understand what that means, that I could just unload all of the things that needed to be said in the middle of that debate. She began to demand that we go out and collect the billions of dollars in child support that is owed by deadbeat dads is what she called them. And I said, I am happy to do that. I think they need to pay their child support, and I will be working to do that--it turned out in the Iowa Senate for starters--but you can't make that claim because that father doesn't have anything to say about whether that child is going to be born or not. If the mother is the only one that has anything to say, then when that child is born you don't have the claim that the father needs to pay the child support. Save the baby's life, protect this baby, and then we can hold the father to this. I am happy to do that. You don't have any claim to that, because you don't give the father any say in whether that baby is going to be born or not. And what I didn't hear anybody say here in this pro-life discussion that we had is the pain that a father goes through when the mother decides to abort the baby. I know people who have gone through that pain and that agony, and they were helpless to do anything about it. They want the baby. They say, I will raise the baby. It is mine. This is my flesh and blood. Give birth to this baby and I will take care of this baby for life. And when the mother says no, sometimes it is even a spiteful act. And I have had that happen close enough to me that I know that to be fact as well, Mr. Speaker. But in that debate with the head of Christian Women for Choice in San Diego in 1996 two things came out of that. Sometimes when you are tested under fire you get to a place where the principles are tempered to a point where they are no longer negotiable and they are as rock solid as they can be. Now I stand in auditoriums in schools K through 12, wherever the situation might be, and I will say to them, ``One day in your lives you will have this question come up around you, whether it is you asking the question or whether it is a friend of yours, acquaintance, or a relation, and it will be the question of abortion. Here are the two things you need to know''--and I will ask this question first, I will say, ``Is human life sacred in all of its forms?'' And they look a little bit slightly confused about what does ``all of its forms'' mean. And I say, ``Look at the person next to you. You are sitting next to one of your friends. Is that person's life sacred?'' And they are looking at you, Is your life sacred? And they will nod their heads and say, ``Yes, our lives are sacred.'' I say, ``So if you believe that human life is sacred, then is there any form of human life that is not sacred?'' How about someone that is a paraplegic, a quadriplegic, someone who is incapable of functioning verbally or getting up and moving in any way; is that person's life sacred? I say, yes, and so do they. They recognize that we have to have passion and compassion for all human beings. And so then once you establish that human life is sacred in all of its forms, then I say to them: Now you only have to ask one other question and that is, at what moment does life begin? Does it begin a week after birth? Does it begin the day after birth? Does it begin the minute after birth? That doesn't make sense to anybody in that gymnasium. These are young people, but they understand some things that seem to be confused over here some days, Mr. Speaker. I say to them, ``What about that baby a minute before the baby is born, is that life?'' And some of them might look a little confused, but most of them know it is life. But I will say, But how about the week before? How about the month before? How about if that baby is born by cesarean, when does that baby become alive? Is it the moment the mother is opened up by the surgeon in cesarean and that baby is brought forward? How could that be? We take it back to the moment of conception. We say even more accurately, the moment of fertilization, but the moment of conception. We get to this place where most every young person in that gathering understands human life is sacred in all of its forms. It has to be the highest value that we have, and that it begins at a moment and the only moment that exists is the moment of conception. From there on out it is a matter of continuum and continual growth and continual cell division, continual metabolism getting to the point where that baby is in a condition to be able to live outside the womb. And then we nurture that baby, up on that baby's feet, we nurture that baby all the way through until that baby is in a condition where they can take care of themselves and eventually take care of their own parents and their own children. That is life. It is precious. If you sit around in a household in a family, especially when we go through the holidays that we have gone through, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's, where families gather together and you watch with joy as they interact with each other, and you know there might be in some of these homes--you know there are--there is grandpa's empty chair over in the corner, he is gone now. He is missed. There is a vacancy in the chair and there is a vacuum in the family because maybe grandpa or grandma has been such a big part of that family, but they still cherish the joy that they have shared. They don't often lay an empty cradle there in the living room for that baby that was aborted, but that is also the soul and the spirit that is not there to share in that family joy as well. This Nation has aborted 61-plus million babies. The back of the envelope calculation says that if half of them were girls and you look at the frequency of abortion going back to 1973 in the years that these women would be having babies you can easily get to the place where we are not just missing 61 million--I say that; it sounds odd even as I say it--we are not missing 61 million, as appalling and as ghastly as that is, we are probably missing another 61 million of the babies that were never born because their mothers were aborted. Add it up. Call it 120 million. Round it back to 100 million. Here we are in this country, we have aborted a workforce of 100 million. And I hear over here, well, we have to import people into America. We have to have cheap foreign labor because, after all, the total fertility rate is low enough in America. We are not replacing ourselves, and we are not raising enough workers to fill the gap. I recall in the Iowa Senate there was a bill to require each health insurance policy to cover contraceptives and the female State Senators made this argument--back then we were at a full employment workforce as well, Mr. Speaker, as full as it is right now. Right now we are kind of knocking on the door of the lowest unemployment we have had in Iowa. Well, we had that back in about 1997 or 1998, as well. Some of the State Senators went off to the women's State legislators gathering, and they came back with this idea that was going to spread all over the country: every health insurance policy has to cover contraceptives. Here is the argument they made: They said, with this short workforce that we have, this full employment economy we have, we can't afford to have women missing work because they are pregnant and having babies and taking care of babies. And back then I said, Who is going to do the work in the next generation or two if we don't have babies being born now? How do you fill that gap? It seemed to me to be a simple equation that I had raised, but yet their agenda worked opposite it. We need to remember, this Nation has sinned, and this sin of abortion weighs on the conscience of a country, a country that could well have 100 million more American babies born here, raised here, learning our civilization, learning our culture, learning our history, learning our language, sharing and growing an even greater Nation than we are today. And the recovery of that is heavy. Even when we end this ghastly practice of aborting babies, innocent, unborn human life, we have a long way to go to ever get back to where nature would have had us if we hadn't interfered with abortion. It troubles me a great deal. And one of the things I have done is drafted and introduced the Heartbeat Protection Act. That is H.R. 490. What it does is it protects any baby with a heartbeat. In fact, it says this: If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. It is really that simple. And so it requires that if an abortionist is preparing to perform his trade, he must first do an ultrasound. If that ultrasound produces a heartbeat, then that is the first certain physical sign of life in the womb, a heartbeat, and that is about 6 weeks into pregnancy. We don't punish the mother. We do punish the so- called physician, the abortionist. If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. And in the last Congress we took it to 174 cosponsors. Mr. Speaker, it protects every baby because it is innocent, unborn human life. These sacred souls, and I believe that God places a soul in that little baby at the moment of conception. But their sacred, little souls, we protect all of them. There has been some discussion here in this Congress and around the country about exceptions for rape and incest. This bill doesn't have exceptions for rape and incest. We had the votes to pass it off the floor of the House in the previous Congress a little more than a year ago, and we had the votes to sustain it going through the Judiciary Committee in the previous Congress a little more than a year ago. We didn't get this to the markup in Judiciary. We had a hearing, we didn't get it to markup, and therefore, we didn't get it to the floor. I fear that we have failed an opportunity that we could have sent a very strong message over to the Senate, which likely would not have taken it up. But to the rest of America, that having exceptions for rape or incest says that those babies are not precious. I argue that they are as precious to God as my own grandchildren are precious to me. There cannot be a legal distinction between a baby that is born as a result of conception that comes from rape or that comes from incest. In fact, they are as precious as any others. In this legislation, H.R. 490, if we were to incorporate exceptions for rape and incest what we would have instead would be exceptions that the Court could look at and say, Just a minute. What about equal protection under the law? If there is going to be equal protections for all persons, whether born or unborn, then if there are exceptions for unborn persons that are the result of the act of rape or incest, then doesn't the Court look at that and conclude that we are inconsistent and that the equal protection clause really doesn't apply and that Congress didn't apply the equal protection clause to all of the unborn? We must protect all of them, Mr. Speaker. From a moral standpoint, it is the right thing to do. From a legal and analytical standpoint, and with an anticipation of a court that would one day see this legislation--I would never sue on this, but you know the other side will--we have to make sure that we are consistent and that we are legally sound without exceptions for rape and incest. Furthermore, if you have incest that is taking place in a family, if you allow abortions for incest, that means that the family member that is perpetrating incest on usually the innocent young girl gets a pass each time there is an abortion because there is not evidence of his crime. But if you prohibit abortions for the sake of incest, you are likely to uncover the crime of the family member that is abusing, generally, the young lady within the family. So I am grateful for my colleagues, that they came here and each one of them spoke up with passion for innocent, unborn human life. We will get there one day. Just like Dr. Martin Luther King said: I may not get there with you, but we are going to get there. We will be a pro-life nation by law, and we will recognize these lives from the moment they are conceived within the womb. Mr. Speaker, I will conclude the component of this discussion on the life issue. Again, I thank my colleagues for the work that they do. Correct the Congressional Record

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to make a short comment here on another circumstance that has taken place in this Congress, and it works out like this, that a year ago last week, an unprecedented action took place in this Congress, and that was I did an interview with The New York Times, and I was misquoted in The New York Times. That quote, some people would say that, well, it was an organic, spontaneous eruption of social media and print media. I say, instead, no, it was an organized effort to set this up and create a railroaded firestorm against me. I knew that that was going to take place, and I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, why I know that. And that is, even though there was a nearly perfect storm created against me in the previous election, and we emerged from that with a victory, after the election and before Christmas of 2018, a very highly placed and respected political operative said to me they are going to try again. They have chosen a messenger to go to the President, and this messenger has the President's ear. The messenger is to convince the President to send out a negative tweet on me, and that negative tweet is supposedly going to trigger the worst firestorm of media assault on me that could possibly be unleashed, and that they would make that try again in that way. Well, I preempted that at the White House to the extent I could, and I believe that was successful. In fact, I have no doubt that that was successful. Then, by January 8 of last year, I was able to get a meeting with that messenger, who said, ``I would never do that to you, Steve,'' but that also let the messenger know that I knew what the strategy was and what the attempt would be. I let them know that I am going to blow this thing wide open and tell the public what was going on if they made that effort. That was on January 8. That sent the message through, perhaps, to any planners and strategists that I knew what was up. The very next day, a State senator announced that he would challenge me in a primary. That was at 11:23 a.m. He had no media planned. He had no website. He had no activities or any kind of evidence that he was planning to run that was at least on paper. Still, he announced by Twitter that he was going to run against me. He was also scheduled to swear in to the next General Assembly, the Iowa General Assembly, on the following Monday, about 4 days later. The most improbable time for anyone to announce they are going to run in a primary against a seated Member of Congress was that day, but he did that that day anyway. I let the messenger know I knew what was up. The next day, I get a primary opponent. The following day, The New York Times story came out, and the rest is history, Mr. Speaker, The New York Times with the misquote in it. There is no tape. It is his word against mine. He has notes, he says. He admits there is no tape. He has notes, he says, but he won't divulge even the question that he would say that he asked me. So I made the point here on the floor, that if I had uttered those words, it would have been in repetition to a question he asked me. But I often defend Western civilization. I never have uttered those words, those two odious ideologies. One of them is on this chart right here. When I gave the answer that questioned the definition here of what is this, white nationalism, what is it, I said: It might have meant something different 1 or 2 or 3 years ago, but today it implies racist. Well, what did it mean before that? We went back to the year 2000, LexisNexis, and it was virtually unused. You can see all the way along here. Mr. Speaker, I will describe it because you can't actually see it, but I can. All the way along here, you can see that it is virtually unused until you get to 2016, and then this term was used 10,000-plus times, then 30,000. It is still up at 20,000 times, so 2016, 2017, and 2018. I could not have been more accurate when I said: It might have meant something different 1, 2, or 3 years ago. This is in 2018: 1, 2, or 3 years ago. What did it mean here, when nobody was using it? That is a hard definition to come up with because it is not in this big dictionary over here. You can't look up two words together and find out what they mean by looking in a dictionary. That is the annual records, Mr. Speaker. So we looked into 2016 and asked the question: When did this jump up? Well, it jumped up right here in the month of November and then up there pretty high yet in December 2016. What happened in November? Two things: Donald Trump was elected President and the Democrats gathered at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel to plan a strategy and what they were going to do to prevent him from being an effective President. Then we broke the month down, and here is what we have. November 14 and 15, the time that George Soros and the Democratic leaders were in the Mandarin Occidental Hotel planning a strategy. Well, was it a weaponization strategy of the term ``white nationalism''? You bet, right there. That is what happened, Mr. Speaker. So they launched that as a weaponization, and they used it as a weapon against me. When I stated those words here on the floor of the House of Representatives, I said there is a pause between the two odious ideologies and ``Western civilization.'' I made that case, and then I demonstrated that significant pause. Even though we have the best stenographers, I believe, in the world here, and they have been great for me to work with, it came out with exactly the same mispunctuation that The New York Times had. So I have introduced the bill called H. Res. 789 to correct the Congressional Record to at least reflect what the C-SPAN video shows that I said. Now, it also demonstrates that if these excellent people here can end up with that punctuation, it is pretty easy to explain what happened to The New York Times. Meanwhile, there have been only four people in the history of the United States Congress who have been removed from their committees. Three of them are either Federal felons or confessed Federal--they have been convicted of Federal felonies or confessed to Federal felonies, three of them. And me? There is not even a rule that I violated. It is just simply the will and the whim and the bloodlust of a political lynch mob, and that has been going on for over a year now today. And it is going to end, and I am not going to wait until this next year goes by and have to win another election and make a case. Furthermore, the term ``white nationalist'' had never been consciously even uttered on the floor of the House of Representatives since 1789 all the way up until the time that Donald Trump was elected President or George Soros led this situation at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel. So this resolution, H. Res. 789, is filed and cosponsors are signing on to it. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record an article from Politico. [From POLITICO, Nov. 14, 2016] Soros Bands With Donors To Resist Trump, `Take Back Power' (By Kenneth P. Vogel) Major liberal funders huddle behind closed doors with Pelosi, Warren, Ellison, and union bosses to lick wounds, retrench. George Soros and other rich liberals who spent tens of millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton are gathering in Washington for a three-day, closed door meeting to retool the big-money left to fight back against Donald Trump. The conference, which kicked off Sunday night at Washington's pricey Mandarin Oriental hotel, is sponsored by the influential Democracy Alliance donor club, and will include appearances by leaders of most leading unions and liberal groups, as well as darlings of the left such as House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairman Keith Ellison, according to an agenda and other documents obtained by

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I will conclude my remarks, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized and address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I come before you this morning to remind this House and to speak about the procedure that is pending in the Senate and some activities that need to take place in this House before that is likely to happen, and that, of course, is the impeachment of the President of the United States. It took place December 18, and we will have been waiting nearly a month before the Articles of Impeachment would be transferred over to the United States Senate which would then begin the enactment of a trial--hopefully a fair trial--with an opportunity for the President to defend himself over in the United States Senate. I was here in this city for 3 days of the impeachment hearings before the House Judiciary Committee in 1998 and I was able to observe the activities here in this House and how people acted. I will say the people who were defending Bill Clinton were not serious outside the camera and in the House Judiciary Committee. Here we have an impeachment that has been brought forward on two different charges and we have watched as from the beginning, from clear back in November of 2016, this discussion about impeaching the President of the United States began. It began on November 9 when the first Democrat stepped up and said: We are going to impeach this President. We had people who ran for office to get into this Congress who announced: We are going to impeach the--I can't put those words into this Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker. So this has been a driven agenda and it began as soon as the other side realized that Donald Trump was the duly elected and legitimate President of the United States. There are two reasons that this impeachment is taking place here. One of them is because there is a deep, visceral hatred for Donald Trump among the hardcore left in this country that is driving the caucus on that side. Another reason is because the investigations came about because of the weaponization of the executive branch of the United States. I mean particularly the Department of Justice and within it the FBI, some of the State Department, and much of the intelligence community working together to surveil President Trump's campaign operations and then President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration activities and communications before that and surveillance afterwards. Also I mean the circumstances that came about when James Comey took information that was proprietary and many say classified and leaked it to a professor of Columbia University with directions to leak it to The New York Times with the objective of creating a special counsel that needed to be Robert Mueller who couldn't have been changed differently by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he had recused himself from Russia. This is the backdrop of this. Impeachment puts a cloud up in front of the activities that took place that should appall this Nation at the highest level. So what I ask, Mr. Speaker, is this: Let's get these Articles of Impeachment done in this House this week, let's send them down across the rotunda to the United States Senate, and let's ask the Senate then to go ahead and work your will under your rules. But my ask is this: having lived through this as a witness back in 1998, we didn't get a clean verdict in the United States Senate. I am going from memory here, I didn't look up these articles and the actual vote, but I remember this: the public never knew from each Senator whether they believed that President Clinton was guilty of the various charges that were brought before him. All wrapped in one question was: If he is guilty, is he worthy of being removed from office? When you package those things together and you had Democratic Senators defending Bill Clinton, they said: Well, I didn't have to wonder if he was guilty because if he was, it didn't rise to the level to remove him from office. I would like to know, I think the public wants to know, and I think it is the constitutional duty of the United States Senate to give us a verdict: Did the President actually obstruct Congress? Did he actually abuse power? What were the definitions of those things? They are not crimes. What were the definitions? Let's find out the judgment of these Senators, yes or no, guilty or not guilty, and then the next question is: Should he be removed from office? I say not. I didn't see the evidence here. I don't see any crimes, and there have been no crimes. All it amounts to also is in delaying these Articles of Impeachment if the Speaker can block a majority action from the House of Representatives, then the Speaker can block every action from the floor of the House of Representatives. It is not a sustainable position for the Speaker to refuse to message and have a de facto veto because that would make the Speaker of the House all-powerful with a veto for any piece of action that would come through the floor of the House of Representatives. Let's get this done this week, and I encourage the Senate to get it done quickly. I would like to see the President stand here before us at the State of the Union address February 4 and be able to announce to the world that he has been exonerated by the United States Senate.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. I rise in opposition to this rule and primarily in opposition to H.R. 1230, that is one of the subjects of this combined rule that we have. The legislation that is coming before, the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act, reaches way too far. I am one of the people in this Congress that has met payroll clear back to 1975. I haven't kept track of all the people we hired, but we hired them across the full range that we had the opportunity of their age, whether it was on the young side or whether they stopped showing up on the other side. We want people that can do the job, and we want to take good care of those folks. We want to build a reputation that we are a good place to work. I want to have all of those workers come together at the Christmas party and join together like family, and that is what happened just this past week with King Construction. I think about what the impact of this proposed legislation does, and it works in the reverse of what many of the proponents would like to have it do. Certainly, when you take the definition of age discrimination and you expand it to mean if it is only the preponderance of the evidence--what we have in current law is a preponderance of evidence and the but-for language. In other words, if an employee alleges they have been discriminated against because of age, there could be multiple other factors that were involved in that decision. Yet, as long as age is a component and it could be asserted effectively that that age was a but-for component, then that would be satisfactory as far as the legislation is concerned. I think what happens instead is employers make prudent decisions, and when they do the hire, they are going to think, I have this applicant before me that is 62 years old. Picking an age, it could be 72 or 75 or less. That employer is going to have to make the calculation, what if this person is just setting me up? Or what if this person can't do the job and I have to remove them or terminate them? You are setting yourself up as an employer for potential liability, and that decision gets made at the hiring end, which means there will be a lot of seniors that don't have an opportunity to work because of the concern about the litigation that could be brought forward. We have protection now, Mr. Speaker, in law and in state law, and that is where it needs to stay. It is a problem that doesn't exist and doesn't need to be solved.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I come to the floor today, Mr. Speaker, because this is the 1-year anniversary of the date that a disparaging misquote in The New York Times was posted, January 10 of 2019, this being January 10 of 2020. I am hopeful that this new year we have, 2020, will bring about some clarity of vision on the part of my colleagues, the American people, and I don't know that I have as much hope for the press. But this day, a year ago today, I was misquoted by The New York Times. The Times alleged that I had used three terms and asked, why does that language become offensive? Well, the truth is that it was a 56-minute telephone interview, a call on my cell phone. I didn't have a way to tape it. But I have a practice over the years, I have done interviews with any kind of media I can think of, and if I don't have a means to tape what I say to them, I make it a point not to repeat anything, say anything that I haven't already said to the press. That way, there is nothing new out there for them to take and manipulate it in the article. When that phone rang that morning on the 5th of January, 2019, if that is a Friday morning, about 8:35 in the morning, I took the call. I would have preferred to have done it in the office, but sometimes you need to get some work done and move on to other things, and that was part of the incentive. The reporter for The New York Times told me that he had been assigned by his chief editor to write an article about how it is that the immigration policy that I have advocated for at least since the first days I came to this Congress and years before that, so sometime around 2000 or so, that that immigration policy of build the wall, end birthright citizenship, enforce the rule of law, end the sanctuary cities, and the list of other things that have been part of what I have championed along the way here in this Congress, he was assigned to write an article about how it was that our President Donald Trump had adopted my immigration positions and gotten elected on those immigration positions, and now the national debate was surrounding the very topics that I had talked about for so long. So we embarked upon a 56-minute interview. He didn't have a tape, and I didn't have a tape. I know he didn't have a tape for a couple of reasons. One of them was that, on an occasion or two, he asked me to carefully repeat the statement I had made so that he could type it down and get it accurate. That told me that was one he is going to quote. It wasn't the one of controversy, however. Then the second piece of it was that we asked him on the telephone the following week: Do you have a tape? His answer was: Why do you want to know? In that phone call, he would not answer the question as to whether he had a tape. We found out later on that he had admitted that there was no tape. So we asked for his notes. He wouldn't release his notes. We asked him for the question that he had posed to me, and he wouldn't even speculate as to what the question was that he had posed to me in this 56-minute interview. He did assert that he can type as fast as anyone can talk, that he is highly trained on that and so skilled that the words would be perfect and so would the punctuation be perfect. Now, I am here on the floor of this House of Representatives. We have some of the best stenographers in the world here. They get more practice in the House than anywhere else, and they talk slower in the Senate. I have asked them: About how fast can you type? A lot of them are about 130 words a minute on a conventional typewriter, and when they get to what I call the magic keyboard here, Mr. Speaker, then those words may go up to as many as 260 words a minute. Then I asked them: Can you keep up with me when I am on a roll? They say: No. We are always glad when you pause and let us catch up. These are the best there are anywhere. I can't believe that a reporter for The New York Times with a conventional and not a magic keyboard can outpace the people on this floor to keep up with these fast-talking people in the House of Representatives, the very best there are in the world. That is not his skill set anyway. So when he asserts that he could type it up accurately with utter precision and the punctuation would be correct, even when I asked the best in the world what about the punctuation, if that comes out to be perfect, too, they will say: No, I have to go back and listen to the tape to make sure we get that part of it right. We get the words right, but the punctuation may be in question. I have great respect for the skill sets here. I do not respect the response that he gave in defense because it is not believable that a reporter can be on a telephone on the other end typing at a speed with the kind of precision necessary to settle the kind of cases that we have here. Nonetheless, when that story came out on the 10th of January, things blew up here in this Congress, and I immediately put out a statement that should have shut all that criticism down. I put it out with clarity. I clearly rejected more emphatically than anyone in this House of Representatives has, including the resolution that passed the following week, more clearly than anyone else has the idea of the odious ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy. Those are ideologies that didn't exist in my environment anyplace that I was in all of my growing up, in my formative years, my adult years, and my time here in the Congress. When our minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, asked for a meeting with me on the following Monday, it was his assertion that it has always meant the same thing. I said I don't know how we know, if it is language that has not been used or utilized. How do we know what it meant to people? You couldn't look up an ideology that is two words, not one, in this huge dictionary over here. You won't be able to look up ``white nationalism'' or ``white supremacy'' there because that is a phrase. It is an ideology that ties two words together with a meaning that perhaps could be different. So in an interview with Dave Price of WHO-TV on October 20, 2018, he had asked me the question: What is a white nationalist? I said it might have meant something different 1 or 2 or 3 years ago, but today it implies racist. I knew that because I have been paying attention to the weaponization of language. This is what the left has been doing. They have been calling people racist for 20, 25 years, and they have watched as Republicans--especially Southern conservative Republicans--curl up away from that kind of accusation because it shuts them down. I recall the conversation that I related, actually, to The New York Times reporter in that 56-minute interview. In my answer to the question, whatever it was that he asked me: What had happened in February 2013? That was an immigration meeting down the hallway over toward the Senate side where we had a discussion about immigration with four or five Senators, five or six House Members, and some nongovernment representatives who were also there at the table and around the table. It was the first time that I had met Senator Ted Cruz. He had made a statement that we need to be very careful with the language we use, especially on immigration, because if we are not, if we use any language that is offensive, they will use it against us. I listened to that, and I thought that I had better respond. I said: Well, Senator, I agree with what you said, but we also need to keep in mind that if we let them define that which is offensive, then whatever language is effective will be defined as offensive. I waited for his answer, which was essentially a nod, which I took to mean an agreement with me, and I believe it was because it was certainly a logical statement, and it was objective. I set this up this way, Mr. Speaker, so that when I lay out this case, it is going to be clearly understood by all who are paying attention. It says: I am just going to take the term ``white nationalist,'' that is what Kevin McCarthy was so concerned about and believing that it confirmed some kind of a hidden ideology in me that no one had been able to discover in personal contact with me that had been discovered by The New York Times reporter over the telephone. He argued that the response I gave, that it might have meant something different 1 or 2 or 3 years ago, exposed that I didn't know that it was a negative connotation that had to do with white nationalism. And somehow or another, he assigned another belief system to me, which is generally what the left does. I asked for 24 hours to disprove this. He said you have 1 hour and walked out of the room--1 hour. Well, it takes a lot of digging. I just proved it clearly but not in an hour. So what I have here, what I would like to show you, Mr. Speaker, is this: What did the term ``white nationalism'' mean in the year 2000, when it was virtually unused, or in any year prior to that, when it was also virtually unused? What did it mean in 2001, 2002, and 2003? All the way up, you can see that it was virtually unused, and it never even starts to move until 2016. This is a LexisNexis search of the term ``white nationalism'' or ``white nationalist,'' derivatives of this term. LexisNexis, Mr. Speaker, goes into blogs, web postings, newspaper print, and magazine print. You name it, if it is in print out there, then LexisNexis is very likely to have it all. This is the only objective way you can quantify the utilization of this term. ``White nationalism'' is virtually unused all the way up until 2016, actually. There, it jumped up to 10,000 times a year. It was virtually unused, and all of a sudden, in 2016, there it goes to 10,000 times a year; in 2017, 30,000 times; and in 2018, it is still up there at 20,000 times. How did it happen that a terminology that had been virtually unused all of a sudden becomes used multiple times, up to 30,000 times a year, when 1 to 200 times a year is this virtually unused definition down here? How did it happen that this is the word that gets tagged on me? Is that an accident, Mr. Speaker? I don't think so. In fact, any objective person looking at the data couldn't come to that conclusion either. This is the annual utilization: virtually unused up to 2016, then up to 10,000 times a year, and then up to 30,000 times the next year. It is still at 20,000 the following year. This is a weaponized term created by the left to attack conservatives with. It is one of their weaponized terms. They have multiple weaponized terms now because they wore out the term ``racist'' and needed to make up new terms that they could be offended by. How did this happen, that 2016 was the year that the term ``white nationalist'' was used 10,000 times in that year? I asked them to break this thing down, LexisNexis' utilization of ``white nationalist,'' month by month throughout the year 2016. That is the jump year down here. Here is the data. From November and December, it is down here, used a little more, perhaps you could still call it virtually unused, but there is a little blip in August. Then it jumps up in November, and it is still up there in December. What happened in 2016 that brought about the use of the term ``white nationalist'' as an almost always pejorative term? It is almost always used to attack conservatives. What happened? Well, there is the circumstance that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States on November 8, 2016. When that happened, there was already a gathering for the hierarchy of the Democratic Party to gather together at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel here in Washington, D.C. Their agenda was to best plan how they were going to utilize what they expected would be a Hillary Clinton Presidency. They admitted that they had to change their agenda when they got the surprise of Donald Trump winning the election as opposed to Hillary. They did change their agenda at the Occidental Hotel. By the way, it was led by George Soros. His face is on the front cover here of Politico's article that tells about this. There are several other articles, Mr. Speaker, but George Soros led on this. There, they planned how they were going to deal with a Trump Presidency and how they were going to try to handcuff, tie down, refuse, and resist. Mr. Speaker, if we remember what happened, that came into our verbiage also. I didn't run the LexisNexis numbers on this, but I am certain I am right. ``Resist,'' ``resistance movement'' would be also, probably, a little more used than ``white nationalist,'' but we might be able to define that as virtually unused until the conference at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel in Washington, D.C., that started on Sunday, November 13, the Sunday after Trump was elected President. There, they planned how they were going to deal with the Trump Presidency and how they were going to handcuff him, tie him down, resist, resist, and resist. The resistance movement was born in this hotel by Democratic leadership led by George Soros and no doubt funded by George Soros. The executive director position that was managing over all this was a former Soros staff person. They planned their resistance movement, and out of that also came some words to be weaponized: white nationalist, white supremacist, Nazi, and fascist. That is what I was talking about in my interview with Trip Gabriel as what had happened to weaponize language and how it was being used against people. We should never forget that we have the left in this country in particular--and I hope it is to a lesser degree, and I believe it is, from the other side--that assigns a belief system to people and then attacks them for the belief system that they have assigned. They use the words that they have been assigned to use to assign to people for the belief system that they have assigned. So what we have is virtually unused ``white nationalist'' here throughout all these years until we come to 2016. Then we have the events of November 13, 14, and 15, checking out on the morning of Wednesday the 16th of November. That was taking place at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel. Clearly, somebody said: We are going to start using ``white nationalist'' against conservatives. Get to it. They were at it while they were in the hotel, and it showed up some 5,000 times in that little window of time there. Now, if you wonder, well, maybe I am not right on the date, Mr. Speaker, I had them break down the month of November 2016. Here is the month of November. The 1st, 2nd, kind of virtually unused, under 100 times in any given day. Until you get to they checked in here, the 13th of November, and, zing, all the way we go up to here to the top and back, this peak right here represents the times that they were in that hotel, making the decision and activating the weaponization of a number of terms but certainly the term ``white nationalism.'' So, they all knew what they were doing. They were in that hotel, and they knew what they were doing. I am just not convinced that the people in the leadership on the Republican side knew what was being perpetrated against our ideology, Mr. Speaker. And it seemed as though a number of my own leadership decided that they were going to jump on the bandwagon, too, with no chance for self-defense. I would reflect that, even if you go back through all of Christianity, if you go back through Judeo-Christianity, if you go back through Western civilization, if you go back through the foundation of American culture and civilization--you can go back to Jesus; you can go back to St. Paul--everybody accused had a right to face their accusers and had, also, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. I can find no exceptions in anybody's framework. That is the standard. That is the civilizational standard. I have listened as our minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has aggressively and effectively, I believe--and I am glad he is doing it-- defended our President of the United States and said that he deserves due process and he deserves a fair process and that he is innocent until proven guilty. I agree with all of that. But Kevin McCarthy doesn't seem to agree that should be in a manner that I would be treated. I believe that I deserve due process and I deserve innocent until proven guilty. And I would point out that there is no evidence to make the case against me--no evidence, no real evidence. I have put out the fact- check document. It is on my website. It went on in March of last year. It is about six pages. No one has poked a hole in any of that rationale. And here is another ``no one,'' Mr. Speaker. Even though Brett Kavanaugh had about six or seven or so accusers, and I believe Brett Kavanaugh was unjustly accused in every one of those cases, but at least he had an opportunity to face his accusers and at least one of them came forward to testify and could be examined by the panel of the Committee on the Judiciary that was there. Brett Kavanaugh, I believe, was exonerated from those charges. He is now seated on the United States Supreme Court, and I believe that he will go on to be a stellar Justice on our United States Supreme Court. But he had a chance to face his accusers, and he had them. In my case, Mr. Speaker, not only did I not have a chance to face my accusers, neither do I have the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. But on top of that, I don't have any accusers--not one. Of the tens of thousands of people that I have dealt with face to face in my years in public life--roughly, a quarter of a century in public life, and we have been in the construction business dealing with people clear back to 1975--there is not one individual who has come forward and said that I have treated them in any kind of disrespectful, disparaging, or racist way of any kind whatsoever. I don't have an accuser to face, not one, unless it might be hearsay. And even the hearsay doesn't seem to be out there. This is the analysis of the weaponization of language and the eager embracement of it by my own leadership who has denied me any due process. So, here I am, the fourth Member of Congress in all of history to be removed from my committees--only the fourth, Mr. Speaker. And the other three, fairly modern history: James Traficant, who stood on this floor and said, ``Beam me up, Scotty.'' He was convicted of something like nine different Federal felonies and he ran for reelection from prison. We lost a couple of Republicans in this Congress, one from Buffalo and one from California, either convicted or confessed to Federal felonies. I regret that. But that is three of four are Federal felons. And then there is me. I am treated like a Federal felon by my own leadership in this House of Representatives because somebody called the hit from up the chain above them, and they decided that they needed to do that under the command of the individual or individuals that called that hit. So only four people removed from all their committees in the history of this Congress, three are either convicted or confessed Federal felons, and there is me. And there is not even a rule that I violated, let alone a law, let alone a Federal violation, a felony, to be treated like a Federal felon by my own leadership for a made-up story that doesn't hold up, cannot hold up under the scrutiny of history, and it must be rectified. So, on top of that, I have heard our esteemed minority leader say that there is no constitutional charge against Donald Trump for impeachment, that they are made-up charges on the part of the Democrats, and that it is either treason, bribery, high crimes, or misdemeanor, and the President has violated none of those. And I agree with him. That is true. None of those reasons for impeachment of a President exists in the activities that have been examined here in this House of Representatives, even down in the secret bunker of Adam Schiff. They don't exist. So they made up a couple of charges, and one of them was obstruction of Congress, and the other one was about putting our Nation at risk. Well, that is a judgment call, and I think the President made the right judgment call on Soleimani; he has made a lot of right judgment calls up and down the line. But because you disagree with the President is not a reason to impeach him. There is no statute, no law, no rule that the President is guilty of, or at least has been proven to be guilty of. There is no substantive information that supports that allegation. They impeached the President of the United States in this House of Representatives on December 18 because they don't like Donald Trump. And then part of what they cooked up in the Mandarin Hotel on the following week after he was elected President in 2016, those are some of the reasons. The biggest reason is they need a shield from prosecution in the investigations and prosecutions that are taking place now in the Department of Justice and the FBI looking into the weaponization of our Federal Government for political purposes, for going in and misrepresenting information to the FISA court, for perhaps duping a FISA judge or maybe having a FISA judge that should have been a little more alert. How many times did James Comey sign a FISA request when he knew the information was false? You can go on and on. If that comes forward and indictments are brought forward on that, that is going to crush the other side. They need this impeachment as a shield, and that is the biggest reason why they decided to move forward. But I believe the foundation was laid in that Mandarin Hotel on that weekend starting on Sunday, November 13, 2016, and concluding on Wednesday when they checked out that morning. I believe that is when much of the strategy was put together. And I would go further, Mr. Speaker, and that is that we had the Mueller investigation that tied this country up for nearly 2 years. The strategy on that, I believe, was discussed in that hotel room. That is just too close to the pattern of things that flowed out of there that we do know of. And we know from the own words of James Comey that he went in to interview the President, to brief the President on whether or not there was the existence of an investigation that the President was under; and, out of that, he typed up his notes and handed them over to a professor at Columbia University with the directions or understanding that they would be leaked to The New York Times, with the objective of the leakage of those notes that were written up by James Comey to bring about a special counsel to investigate Donald Trump for alleged nefarious activities in Russia and that the special counsel was to be Robert Mueller. All of that was known before James Comey went in to brief Donald Trump. All that was known before to James Comey. As that flowed out and Mueller is named as the special counsel, we went, then, through 2 years, and we had the investigators that went from 13 up to 18, built-in bias in most of them and perhaps all of them, and they came up empty. And that was about May 7 of last year. Then they had to look for another reason to impeach this President. They thought the Mueller report was going to do it, and it didn't. They couldn't make the case. They tried. And afterwards, some of them tried again. They tried to resurrect it again and again. Finally, the house of cards on the Mueller investigation collapsed, and they had to come up with something new. Well, then there is the phone call of July 25 of last year, which I have read through the transcript of that multiple times, Mr. Speaker. Never do I see anything in there that troubles me. And I believe Professor Jonathan Turley, in his testimony before the House Committee on the Judiciary, when he said, to the effect that, if you had told George Washington that he could be impeached for a conversation he had, that his powdered wig would catch on fire. That is what we are dealing with. So these very, very thin excuses for impeachment, but the calendar was turning pages over and they needed to get this done, so they took the thinnest of excuses and turned that into what was a show for the American people that I think will live in infamy throughout history. In my case, Mr. Speaker, I have clearly proven that these allegations are false. There is no rule that I have violated. There is nothing that is pointed to. There is nothing in history that says that there is a pattern in this Congress that the freedom of speech of a Member of Congress, whether he is accurately quoted or not, can be disciplined by the will or whim of a leader in this House of Representatives. Everyone in this country has to have the First Amendment right, freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and all of the rest of the rights that we have in the Bill of Rights. But the chilling effect of the actions taken by the leader here of the minority in the House of Representatives chills the freedom of speech of everybody in here--at least on the Republican side--and everybody that is either running as a candidate in, potentially, a primary or aspires to run for office. The most principled people we have in this country will not want to submit to censorship by a leader that may or may not have enjoyed their support to get elected to that leadership position. This is a chilling, chilling effect, and the history of this is not going to go down very well as people examine what happened. There is much, much more to come out. Mr. Speaker, as I watch the clock tick down, I make the point that I have introduced a resolution here, and I will have a number early next week, but it has just gone in in the last few hours. I have been waiting to drop this resolution. I am dropping it and introducing it on the anniversary of the misquote that got dropped on me 1 year ago today for The New York Times that allegedly launched this firestorm that has brought about these things that I have talked about. This resolution makes the case clearly that The New York Times could not be right and that I could not be wrong, and the balance of this was people wanting it to be true and so they wrote it up. So this disproves The New York Times quote; and, additionally, Mr. Speaker, I delivered that quote on the floor of the House of Representatives the following Tuesday in the fashion that I would have said it if I had actually said it. In other words, I would never tie together white nationalism, white supremacy, and Western civilization. No, Mr. Speaker, I would never do that, because they don't fit at all together. The pejorative terms were: Nazi, fascist, white nationalist, white supremacy. And I made the point there would be a distinct pause, and I would start from the beginning and say, But Western civilization, how did that language become pejorative? Why I did sit in classrooms while all of that time being taught about the merits of our civilization? And this Congressional Record misquoted me exactly the same way that The New York Times did. This amendment fixes that. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on Roll Call Vote No. 430 at the end of the series on June 27, 2019. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: NO on Roll Call No. 430.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on Roll Call Vote No. 174 at the end of the series on May 1, 2019. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: NO on Roll Call No. 174.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Brady), the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, and perhaps one of the most successful in modern time. I am looking at this USMCA trade agreement. I said from the beginning that I would not have opened up NAFTA; it was good for Iowa agriculture, it was good for Iowa manufacturing, it was good for America in many areas. But the President promised that he would open it up and that he would prevail in his negotiations. He has followed through and he has kept his word. For a year and a half I have been having discussions with every entity that I can find that has been affected by this trade agreement. They all say, We are better off. They might say, We are marginally better off, but they say, We are better off, until you get to dairy, where we are a lot, lot better off than we were in the past. This is a terrific trade agreement. Whatever the nuances were afterwards where there were some changes that didn't affect, I don't think, the district that I represent, what this amounts to is this: It is a huge victory for the President of the United States, for Americans everywhere, for Iowans in the Fourth Congressional District, which is the number one agriculture producing district in all of America. We are happy. We are delighted. We are thankful to have this Christmas present coming to us. We say, Merry Christmas, Mr. President; Merry Christmas, America.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I start out, first, that this is the largest, most massive coverup of such a list of crimes against our country, and to go so far as to bring impeachment hearings to try to cover all of this up. I would take you back to October of 2015, when Barack Obama said Hillary Clinton would never intend to jeopardize our national security. Again, the following April, the next month, Peter Strzok wrote the statement that was delivered by James Comey: They have spent Democrat money and Hillary Clinton money in Russia to pick up dirt on Donald Trump. And then Joe Biden goes to Ukraine and makes the statement: Here is a billion dollars, but you must do what I told you to do. You are accusing Donald Trump of doing that which Joe Biden has confessed to doing. And, by the way, Joe Biden was not the opponent of Donald Trump. He is in a 21-way primary, and he is running third in that race. His opponents are the other 20 Democrats. How would anybody dig into that mess of 21 people and decide he is going to go overseas and pull some maneuver like this? You have to assign him a motive. You assign him a motive, then you create the dots, then you go dot to dot. But the reality is that it was Biden who was doing the extortion of the power play in order to protect his own son, and it was Donald Trump that was following the law that said you have to ensure that there is not corruption here before this money is handed over. By the way, there was a violent war going on in Ukraine, and that is when we sent blankets and MREs over there, under Barack Obama. But when I hear this from the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson): He doesn't think he can win the election fair and square, so he would cheat--and I have heard that here on this floor. No, it is the other way around. Democrats' number one proponent of impeachment is Al Green of Texas, and he said those very same things; and they brought this case November 9, the day after Trump was elected.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and to be recognized for 30 minutes here as the week closes out and we head back to our districts for Thanksgiving. The scenario that has been playing out here now for several weeks in this Congress has been a topic across the news, across the land, and certainly reverberates within the walls of this building and the halls of the outside buildings everywhere around this country. I speak, of course, of the attempt to impeach our President, President Donald Trump. The circumstances around this week and last week and the previous week are pretty fresh in our minds, but I would like to paint the scenario on how we got to this point and how the effort to impeach Donald Trump has evolved into the hearings that we are seeing now that are taking place before the Select Committee on Intelligence--finally out in the open--and the hearings and the deliberations that I think are likely to take place on the other side of this Thanksgiving divide. Madam Speaker, it all fits a path and a continuum, and it is something that one can trace back clear into as far back, I will say, as perhaps the fall of 2015. Being a Representative from Iowa, I have been involved in the Presidential selection process at the first-in-the-Nation caucus. We did an event on January 24, 2015, that effectively launched the Presidential campaign for the Nation on that day and brought in a dozen candidates that were eventually announced as candidates for President on the Republican side, and a number of other folks who we had speak that day who we thought might enter into the race. There was a short handful that were invited that didn't come to that event. But because of that, I found myself in the middle of this churning of the nomination process. I saw the policies and the issues that flowed from that debate, and I was in the middle of the debate myself intensively for nearly a year and a half. At that event that we did in Des Moines at the Hoyt Sherman Place--it is a theater that our future President Donald Trump spoke from the stage that day, as did a good number of others--as we watched this all unfold and they saw that Donald Trump was moving closer and closer to the nomination--we didn't know this at the time, but we know it now--there were powerful forces within the departments of government that were positioning things against whoever the Republican nominee would be, but certainly against Donald Trump as he became the nominee. We have seen the texts that came forth from Peter Strzok and from Lisa Page that talked about how it could never happen; that Donald Trump could never beat Hillary Clinton. But they had an insurance policy in the event that that outside long shot actually took place. Madam Speaker, I want people reminded of this because this insurance policy is being executed right now here in the House of Representatives in these impeachment hearings that are being conducted by Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. Now, a number of things happened that need to be investigated that were not investigated nearly as deeply as they should have been and that is, for example, the mishandling of classified information on Hillary Clinton's server, her using a private server that she had set up intentionally to avoid the secure server that one would have as a Secretary of State. The evidence shows that it is very likely, if not already confirmed, that Barack Obama communicated with Hillary Clinton through that server knowingly, and that he had an email address that was exclusive to him, that was certainly known by a number of people who he communicated with on the offline off channel, against-the-law effort to communicate outside the bounds of the government secure servers. That was going on and she, you know, she paid for BleachBit. She hired people to scrub those servers to get rid of the information. There were over 30,000 emails that were the property of the American people in the form of the Federal Government that were destroyed. We haven't found those, and she has not been held accountable for that. And the mishandling of that information was clear. It was a stark violation of Federal statute. In October of 2015, and again in April of 2016, then-President Barack Obama said: Well, Hillary Clinton would never intend to jeopardize our national security. And when he spoke those words, he spoke those words into what became later on, effectively, law. Because the law doesn't require that there be any intent. Negligence, gross negligence, is the only requirement. She was clearly grossly negligent. She certainly intended to circumvent the secure servers that had been set up for that very purpose of protecting the classified information of all of those emails that we got down out of Anthony Weiner's laptop. There was reported to be 650,000. Some of them were classified emails that went up into that laptop of Anthony Weiner. But she was never taken to account on that. There was an interview of Hillary Clinton that took place July 2, 2016. That interview had in it, by testimony of the then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and also James Comey, the director of the FBI, both testified that there were eight agents in that room that questioned Hillary Clinton. They disagreed on how many were from the Department of Justice and how many were from the FBI. Since the FBI is a division of the Department of Justice, I think that it is probably not as important an issue as this is: That we don't know their names. But I believe they were handpicked to bring about the result. The statement that was delivered 3 days later by James Comey on July 5, that 15- to 17-minute long presentation that sounded like an indictment of Hillary Clinton until you got down to the last few sentences of it, was written clear back in May, and it had the words ``gross negligence'' in it. And they changed those words from ``gross negligence,'' because that matched the statute that would have been a clear violation, to ``extreme carelessness'' as opposed to ``gross negligence.'' And then James Comey said Hillary Clinton would never intend to, and you could not prove intent, so no serious prosecutor would prosecute because you couldn't prove that she intended to jeopardize our national security. But the statute doesn't require the intent. It was Barack Obama's words that plugged intent into the effect of the language in the statute that I believe was clearly violated by Hillary Clinton. And furthermore, of the eight that were in that room, the number of investigators that questioned Hillary Clinton, and that is a number that is again agreed to by Loretta Lynch and by James Comey, those eight, we don't know who they are. I asked her under oath who was at the table. She said she didn't know. In fact, that she had never known. And I asked a previous attorney general that question: What are the odds that an attorney general under those circumstances, the highest-level investigation that the Department of Justice could ever conduct--aside from impeachment, by the way--was the investigation of Hillary Clinton's mishandling of the emails and the classified documents, what are the odds, I asked the former attorney general, that Loretta Lynch wouldn't know who was in that room questioning Hillary Clinton? That former attorney general didn't want to go on record, so he held his hand up. Zero is what he signaled with his fingers, in that fashion. It looks like an ``okay,'' for the Record. Well, of course, it wasn't okay to get that answer. And I never believed it. I don't believe it today. I believe I was lied to under oath. And when I asked James Comey the same question under oath as well, he gave me a similar answer. He didn't know. What are the odds James Comey didn't know who was in that room questioning Hillary Clinton? And then I asked the question of Peter Strzok under oath, and Peter Strzok gave me an honest answer. He said, ``I was.'' Well, we have seen him in most everything that was going on, and in fact, he was on Robert Mueller's investigative team as well until the text between himself and Lisa Page came out, and then there was no choice, he had to be removed from the Mueller team. Peter Strzok showed up everywhere that these kind of finaglings were going on, and I believe that he was the one that put the team together that questioned Hillary Clinton that brought about a result that he wanted, and not necessarily an objective one. So I would ask each one of them, I want to see--this is former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and James Comey, Peter Strzok and others, I want to see the videotape of the interview of Hillary Clinton that took place July 2, 2016. Sorry, there is no videotape. Then I want to hear the audiotape. Sorry, there is no audiotape. Then I want to read the transcripts. Sorry, there is no transcript. Well, they actually weren't sorry. We all know that, Madam Speaker. But there is no videotape of that interview, the highest-level interview that one could imagine at the time. There is no audiotape; there is no transcript. What exists? And their answer is, there is a 302 report. The 302 report is compiled from the notes of the investigators that were in the room. But we don't know who those investigators were, except for Peter Strzok. He said he was in the room, but he wouldn't tell me who the others were. And so some place out there, there are presumably eight sets of notes. Madam Speaker, seven other people were there that heard the testimony of Hillary Clinton, and they are all anonymous. And if we had them before this Congress and we were able to ask them questions under oath, I am going to guess that one or more of them are going to tell us the truth about what took place in the room that day. But nonetheless, they went through that process. James Comey stepped up and delivered a 15- to 17-minute statement to the press and to the public that resulted in no further action on the gross negligence, which is a violation of Federal statute, by Hillary Clinton. And, therefore, we moved on to the Presidential election. And further, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page--and I am going to suggest many others--set about trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States. And they were pumping information into the press. We had the Steele dossier. And you know much of this narrative as it unfolded, but once we got to the election, and Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, he is President-elect on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The following Sunday, in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel here in Washington, D.C., the highest level of Democrats in the country converged on that hotel starting Sunday afternoon, led by--according to a Politico article that I checked--led by George Soros, himself, in that hotel. His face is front and center on the article--in fact, several articles that are out there that tell about this gathering. So the gathering was scheduled to plan how they were going to utilize--and I use that word kind of cautiously, instead of what I would prefer--how they were going to utilize the new Presidency of Hillary Clinton. But, of course, they had to change their plans, Madam Speaker. So the plans instead were, how do we deny the ability of Donald Trump to govern this country? What shall we do? And out of that conference that was that following Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning, those days, they planned how they would resist this President, this duly-elected President under the Constitution of the United States with over 62 million votes cast for him--an electoral victory--over 300 electoral votes, and they planned on how they were going to deny the will of the American people under the Constitution. And that plan started out with the resistance movement. And almost immediately, you saw protests in the cities across the country. And I know some of those protestors were paid to go protest, Madam Speaker. So the disruption in our society began, the resistance began. And what about the rest of the planning that likely took place there--and I use that word carefully, too, because a lot of this was never reported and never spoken to, but we know they planned the resistance movement. And you would see demonstrations in the street with big banners that said ``resist'' or ``resistance.'' We saw also nearly a million women came to this city that protested the inauguration of Donald Trump, wearing those pink hats. And I wouldn't repeat into the Record what they named those hats, Madam Speaker, but I met hundreds of them. I argued with scores of them, as a matter of fact, at a setting over in one part of the city that night. Many of them were carrying obscene signs, obscene symbols, and they were there to resist the inauguration of the President and let the world know that they rejected President Donald Trump as a duly-elected President of the United States. And other things took place, I believe, in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. And I believe that was when they accelerated a strategy to weaponize certain words in our English language and into the political- speak here in the United States. ``Resist'' was one of those words that they used, and that connotes that you are a revolutionary group, that you are fighting against an illegitimate government, that word ``resist'' or ``resistance.'' And it foments friction within the streets, and it divides Americans, and it accentuated the differences between us. Instead of coming together after an election, like we want to do and need to do, instead, we are being divided strategically by the hierarchy of the Democratic party in a strategy that was put together in the Mandarin Hotel in this town. And then as this unfolded, other pieces of the strategy came together, but some of those things that I believe happened inside that hotel were the acceleration of the weaponization of words. And I can think of one that I know the data on from memory, and it was this: White nationalist. I looked this up in LexisNexis, because the question came up in front of me in kind of an unexpected way. And so we went back in LexisNexis, first, to see if I had ever used those terms. Never, from the year 2000 all the way up until January of this year when the New York Times misquoted me as using it. But it was virtually unused from the year 2000 all the way up until 2016. And that means 1 to 200 times a year that would show up in print somewhere in a blog, or maybe a scholarly report of some kind or another, the term white nationalist. We didn't use those terms as Americans. We didn't write about them, we didn't speak them. It was outside the mind of anything that we were paying attention to collectively--1 to 200 times a year. So the graph is flat from 2000 up to 2016. And 2016, abruptly, it shoots up to 10,000 times a year--virtually unused until 2016, 10,000 times. Many of that was in the latter part of the year, after the meeting in the Mandarin Hotel. And then the following year, 2017, that term white nationalist was used 30,000 times. And in 2018, it was still used up there at 20,000 times, Madam Speaker. That was one of the words they weaponized. They weaponized Nazi and fascism and white supremacy altogether, and they want to attack Western Civilization itself. There are other ways to divide America and to pit us against each other, but they were weaponizing terms. Other things, the insurance policy that I mentioned earlier. Well, what is that insurance policy? It is tying the President up with protests, lock up everything, delay the confirmations, so that he can't put his government in place. You saw that happen in the Senate over and over again, where they did everything they could do to slow down the confirmation of the President's appointees and not let the President have the team that he wanted to run this country, and to slow down the confirmation of judges in our judicial system as well. All of that was taking place. And that all fits within a strategy and a plan that I believe is rooted in that day, in that Sunday after the election, beginning there, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, after the election of Donald Trump. Furthermore, the resistance, the weaponization of language, the delay of confirmations, the obstruction of the ability of the President to deploy the people he wants within this government--and meanwhile, then there was a strategy that was implemented, initially, by James Comey, and also Robert Mueller. Both of them interviewed to be the continuing director of the FBI. And James Comey has admitted all of this under oath, and he has told the public this, and, I think, bragged about it. And that is, that when he had his meeting with President Trump, he went out and sat in his car, and he typed up the notes on what he remembered. He took those notes, by his own admission, to a professor at Columbia University, who is his friend, with directions for that professor to leak that information to the New York Times. By leaking the interpretation that was typed up by James Comey to the New York Times, they strategized that they could trigger a special counsel, especially, and that special counsel needed to be Robert Mueller. They pulled that all off with the cooperation of the second-in-command at the Department of Justice, Rod Rosenstein. And so as those recommendations unfolded, we had Mueller as special counsel, James Comey was fired by the President--he resisted that, of course. But the Mueller report then, as they dug through that and spent nearly $30 million, and they had their team of Never Trumpers to put on to investigate. And all the while, they were going to find the smoking gun. I am going to use the term ``the blue dress.'' That would be the reasons that they could impeach Donald Trump. They never found it. For nearly 2 years of the Mueller investigation, Democrats in this town and across the country were just anxiously waiting for: ``When does this information come out that we can grab and say gotcha?'' Madam Speaker, when do you investigate a crime without a crime? When you identify the person whom you want to find guilty, and then you scour everything you possibly can to try to come up with something that you can use to declare the man to be guilty enough that you can do what they already wanted to do, which is remove this President from office. If they can't remove him from office, then they want to render him ineffective so that they can push their agenda down on him. At the very least, they want to wound him in such a way that they can figure out how to beat him in the election. That is not speculation, Madam Speaker. That is out of the mouth of one of our Members who speaks on impeachment in this House almost every single day, that we have to impeach Donald Trump because we can't beat him in the election. The will of the people has already been inhibited and diminished because of the actions of this Congress and the actions of a complicit press, and here we sat with that all unfolding through the Mueller report. It finally came out with a big flop. If you are wondering how this all fits together, Madam Speaker, then think back that there were 4 to 5 weeks of kind of silence after the Mueller report flopped. There were some who tried to resurrect it again to try to find a morsel in it that they could grasp and embellish. They just couldn't get traction because there was nothing there. After those 4 to 5 weeks, then we end up with the whistleblower, the whistleblower who was not privy to this telephone conversation that took place on July 25, a whistleblower who I believe is a Democrat operative. The associations that are reported to me and many others say that he has been under the wing of, in the employment of, and in cooperation with many of the highest level people who are partisans on the Democratic side. This whistleblower is kind of interesting. He triggers an impeachment investigation with second-, third-, and fourth-hand information. He has no eyes-on, hands-on, or ears-on experience or experience of any kind. He writes a second-, third-, and fourth-hand whistleblower report. Actually, he didn't write it. A team of lawyers wrote this. He mailed it to the chair of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on August 12. We had Adam Schiff with this whistleblower report in his hands August 12, and nothing happened for weeks because they were still planning their strategy. Adam Schiff said that he doesn't know who the whistleblower is. That is going to turn out to be one of the clearest examples of untruth that one has seen in this Congress. With a straight face, he looks into the camera and says: I don't know who the whistleblower is, and I haven't met with him. I think it will be corrected eventually in the Record. The whistleblower must come forward. But when he filed that whistleblower report that was written by the lawyers for him, and it is secondhand, thirdhand, fourth-hand, 100 percent hearsay information, when he filed that, it was filed with the inspector general in the intelligence community. The rules on accepting whistleblower reports require that it be firsthand information, not hearsay information. The inspector general changed the rules to be able to accept second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay information as a whistleblower complaint. How far do you have to go to have to change the rules on the spot in order for that complaint to even be considered? Now, the whistleblower becomes public in front of everybody for a day or 2 or 3. Even much of the social media, I believe, is complicit in this effort to get rid of Donald Trump. They take down any information that would identify this whistleblower. This is like the emperor has no clothes. He is known by thousands of people in this country. I would say tens of thousands of people, even, at a minimum. He is known by, I would say, at least half the Members on the Republican side, and I could speculate on the Democratic side. Half the Members on this side know who this whistleblower is, but we can't speak his name because now the emperor has no clothes. We are going to act like we don't know who he is. Somehow, his information is credible enough, even though it is hearsay, that you are putting America through all of this pain, this agony, and this trying to turn over another stone, and maybe there will be something underneath there that we can use to get rid of this President. They are trying to find the firsthand information that has been missing, so they bring Ambassador Sondland forward. Surely, he would have firsthand information. He testified that he understood that there was a quid pro quo. It turns out that his understanding was an assumption. It wasn't necessarily an experience, that he had anything that he could point to. But he testified just yesterday. I thought it was pretty interesting. The Republican attorney, Steve Castor, asked him this question: ``Why don't you tell us, what did the President say to you on September 9 that you remember?'' ``What did the President say?'' That would be firsthand information, to answer that question. Ambassador Sondland said: ``Well, words to the effect--I decided to ask the President the question in an open-ended fashion because there were so many different scenarios floating around as to what was going on with Ukraine. So rather than ask the President nine different questions: Is it this? Is it this? Is it that?'' He is demonstrating how he might ask nine different questions. He said: ``I just said, what do you want from Ukraine?'' This is exactly the quote that will now be in the transcript of his testimony yesterday. He said: ``I may have even used a four-letter word.'' That sounds like an honest statement, then. Sondland, the Ambassador, testified yesterday that the President's answer to that question, the question of what do you want from Ukraine was this: ``I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. I just want Zelensky to do the right thing, to do what he ran on.'' Then he finished up: ``Or words to that effect.'' That makes it pretty clear that the President isn't asking for a quid pro quo. If there is some kind of suspicion on the part of disloyal bureaucrats who are of an opposite ideology from a duly elected President of the United States, who don't agree with his foreign policy, or who try to undermine his foreign policy and undermine the Presidency itself and the effect of the Presidency itself, that is what happens. They create these scenarios. They say that, surely, he must have wanted a quid pro quo. This is clear evidence that there was not one. He stated multiple times that he was never told by the President that there were preconditions for the aid to be released. He was never told that there were preconditions. I thank Congressman Michael Turner for bringing this out yesterday in such a clear fashion when he asked Ambassador Sondland so directly that question. Then Representative Turner, to nail this down, said to Ambassador Sondland: ``After you testified, Chairman Schiff ran out and gave a press conference and said he gets to impeach the President of the United States because of your testimony.'' The understanding and the implication was that there was a quid pro quo, is what Representative Turner is saying. He continues the question to Sondland: ``And if you pull up CNN today, right now, their banner says, `Sondland ties Trump to withholding aid.' Is that your testimony today, Ambassador Sondland, that you have evidence that Donald Trump tied the investigations to the aid? Because I don't think you are saying that.'' Ambassador Sondland's response was: ``I have said repeatedly, Congressman, I was presuming. I also said that President Trump,'' but Turner cut him off and said: ``So no one told you, not just the President? Giuliani didn't tell you? Mulvaney didn't tell you? Nobody-- Pompeo didn't tell you? Nobody else on this planet told you that Donald Trump was tying aid to these investigations; is that correct?'' Sondland said: ``I think I already testified--`` Turner cut him off again and said: ``No, answer the question. Is it correct? No one on this planet told you that Donald Trump was tying this aid to the investigations? Because if your answer is yes, then the chairman is wrong, and the headline on CNN is wrong. No one on this planet told you that President Trump was tying aid to investigations, yes or no?'' Ambassador Sondland answered ``yes,'' which means no one told him that there was any quid pro quo. It was all in his head, and America is all tied up in these knots over this kind of secondhand information that is distorted in the minds of the people who delivered it to us. This must be firsthand information, and it must be factual. America needs to be released from this. There is nothing here again. We are going into the third year of this Presidency, and still, they persist. Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you here. I wish you and everyone a very, very happy Thanksgiving. Let's come back happier than I happen to be today. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for yielding to me and for leading here on this National Bible Week. I would like to start out with just a touch of levity, because we are called to address the Speaker, and I know that the Speaker happens to also be a man of God and a Bible scholar. In addressing the Speaker, I enjoy revisiting Ecclesiastes 10:2, which says: ``A wise man's heart is at his right, but a fool's heart at his left.'' I couldn't resist that, and I pray that you forgive me, Mr. Speaker, for that bit of levity at this time. I would move on to my favorite verse, which is Ecclesiastes 9:10: ``Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.'' It calls us not to just wander through this life and touch things gently and kind of let the flow of life go by, but we are given gifts by God. He fills us with skill sets that we haven't yet developed, whether it is intellectual, whether it is physical, but skill sets of the heart, and to put our vigor to those things that please Him. So with that verse in mind each morning, I pray that God will loan me the measure of his wisdom, that He would have me use this day to go forth and glorify Him. And if there is time for a little extra blessing, let me do so with joy. That sustains me through every day. Another verse that sustains me through these future days came to me this morning at our gathering. This is the first chapter of Jeremiah, verse 17, that says: ``Meet them undaunted, and they shall have no power to daunt thee.'' That says, in my vernacular, never let them see you sweat, but go forth with courage and with confidence. Do those things that God calls you to do, and do so with your might. I also look back on a verse in James that has caught my eye for some time, and it calls us, I think, in the right way, Mr. Speaker: ``Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.'' That fits with a prayer that I offered for years when we went through the farm crisis years of the 1980s. Things were falling down around us. The economy had essentially collapsed, and my neighbor's farms were being sold weekend after weekend in farm sales. I was being tested in a similar way myself. Each day, I would pray that God would be finished testing me and start to use me. And we should take joy in that test before we are made perfect in the tests that He provides for us. I know they are in the Book of James, which is one that has stood out for me for a long time, and that is: If you fail to do what you know is right, then you have sinned. And I recall an issue that was going on in the Iowa State legislature. I was here in Congress, but I needed a bill introduced and moved in the State legislature. There were those who knew it was the right thing to do, but they didn't have the courage to introduce it because leadership was pushing against them, and it was going to be a big political fight. But I found a young man who is my State representative today, and when I raised the issue with him, he said: I will do this. And I said: You understand the burden of this and the potential consequences if you step forward in this arena? And he looked at me and he said: If I don't introduce this bill, I will not be able to receive final absolution. Whoa, that told me something about the man and the character and the faith of this man. I don't know if this verse in James was something that had been branded on his heart. The meaning of it was--the words, I don't know--but he had to be thinking, if he failed to do what he knew was right, then he would have sinned. But he stepped forward and did what he knew was right. And I appreciate Mr. Lamborn, the gentleman from Colorado, speaking today about Western civilization and about the foundation of Western civilization. It is everywhere where the footprint of Judeo- Christianity laid the foundation, this Western civilization. The values in it are rooted in the Old and the New Testament. America would not and could not be the great Nation it is today if we were not a nation that was rooted in Biblical values. And I think that is something indisputable. Mr. Speaker, I want to bring something to the attention of this Congress and people across this country that not a lot of people know. And this was in Jamestown in 1607. When they landed at Jamestown, the first thing that the settlers did as they arrived there, they erected a cross. They knelt. They took Communion, and they prayed. The prayer is so profound, Mr. Speaker, that it should be hanging on the walls or somewhere around this Congress, and I don't know that it is. But here is their prayer, 1607, in this New World: ``We do hereby dedicate this land, and ourselves, to reach the people within these shores with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to raise up godly generations after us, and with these generations take the Kingdom of God to all the Earth. May this Covenant of Dedication remain to all generations, as long as this Earth remains, and may this land, along with England, be Evangelist to the world. May all who see this cross remember what we have done here, and may those who come here to inhabit join us in this covenant and in this most noble work that the Holy Scriptures may be fulfilled.'' If that doesn't speak to the American destiny, I don't know what does. It had to be the hand of God on them. There is no way a mortal would have understood the path that they were all to follow and all that follow them. I appreciate the opportunity to address this topic, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I rise to honor, this week, to celebrate what actually took place on Monday, the 28th of October, Oxi Day, the 79th anniversary. I wanted to address this because of the strong spirit of the Greek people, who rose up against the Axis Powers 79 years ago this week when a representative of Hitler's Axis Powers, who happened to be the minister from the Italians, arrived at the residence of the Greek leader Metaxas and demanded that they surrender Greece to the Italians and the Axis forces. There, Metaxas looked him in the eye and said, boldly and strongly, ``Oxi,'' which is Greek for ``no.'' That is the most resounding ``no'' that I know of in history, Mr. Speaker. That resounding ``no'' inspired the Greek people. Within hours, the Italians and the Axis forces had started their invasion of Greece, and they were overconfident. They thought they would waltz in because they had all kinds of military firepower, but what they underestimated was the tenacity of the Greek fighters, their knowledge of the terrain, and defending their own soil. They were defeated, and the Greeks chased the Italians back to Italy, which forced, then, Adolf Hitler to divert five divisions down through Greece and down through the Balkans into Greece to put down the--they called it a revolution or a resurrection. What it really was, was inspired people defending their country, the very cradle of democracy. As Hitler diverted the five divisions down to Greece, he was already planning the Operation Barbarossa. I want the body to know, Mr. Speaker, that the original date for the invasion of Russia under Operation Barbarossa by Hitler that his Nazi forces put together was scheduled to be May 12, the following spring. This is late October, the last days of October. So when he diverted his five divisions down to suppress what he said was the resurrection in the Balkans, which was the Greeks defending the cradle of freedom, that delayed his ability to invade Russia. This tenacious battle on the part of the Greeks--now, I should also put it into context here, that no one expected such a small nation to derail the unstoppable Axis forces. They had watched as the Axis forces had gone through Czechoslovakia and Poland, Romania and France, and down through the Balkans. It looked like those Axis forces were going to sweep over the world. It didn't look like there was much hope for the United Kingdom and the British Empire across the channel. When you think about the inevitable clash that was going to take place between the Nazis and the Russians, that would have been the clash that would have determined which power ruled the world--coupled with Japanese imperialism, America isolated as a lone island, sitting over here on this continent, in the Western Hemisphere, awfully tough to battle on both sides when you have the resources of the globe lined up against you. The future of America may well have turned in that battle as well, Mr. Speaker. So I rise to honor, support, and, with awe, celebrate the Greek fighters, who George Beres writes: ``As Hitler learned, Greeks can be stubborn against all odds. `Oxi,' the word `no' in Greek, may sound like a negative, but it has become the most positive word in the language. It suggests the independence of a small nation when confronted by selfish demands of much larger nations.'' I would point out that if Hitler had been able to launch Operation Barbarossa on May 12--he was delayed 5\1/2\ weeks. Those 5\1/2\ weeks would have given him time to take Stalingrad, to take Moscow, before the bitter Russian winter. That would have changed the entire course of the war. The Greeks did it twice for us, in Crete and then again on Oxi Day starting those 79 years ago this week. I am awfully proud of the spirit of the Greeks. I would close, Mr. Speaker, with this quote from Winston Churchill in the aftermath of the Greek battles against the Nazis, which says: ``Hence, we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.'' Let us honor them. We are a nation that has descended from the democracy that was formed in Greece. We modified it to a constitutional republic and did a little improvement on it, but we can use a lot of Greeks in this country. They understand freedom, and they are great fighters.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to be recognized as I address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I appreciate all the eyes and ears that are paying attention here this evening as we take up this most serious business that this Congress has only addressed three previous times in the history of the United States of America. As we go back through American antiquity, we will see that there was an impeachment process that was advanced shortly after the Civil War with Andrew Johnson as President. Then we sat back for over a century before there was another issue that arose, and that was in 1974 with the impeachment effort of Richard Nixon, who resigned before he faced the judgment of this United States Congress. Then, in 1998, I happen to have been here in this city, not an elected Member of Congress, Mr. Speaker, but I came here into this city as a State senator from Iowa to an allied conference. As I opened up the newspaper, I saw in there that it said that there are impeachment hearings taking place in room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building for the dates of December 7, 8, and 9 of 1998. I concluded that whatever was going on in that conference wasn't as important as me being seated there in that Judiciary Committee as a spectator to be able to witness the unfolding acts of history as the House of Representatives passed judgment upon then-President Bill Clinton. As I listened to the testimony, and, of course, Mr. Speaker, I had been watching on television many of the other open public hearings that had taken place before the House Judiciary Committee, I was pretty well informed as to the charges that were being brought against Bill Clinton. As I listened to that debate in those 3 days, December 7, 8, and 9 of 1998, I watched some other things go on around me that I would not have picked up if I had just been watching the committee hearings on C-SPAN. I remember Representative Barney Frank coming into the room. He wanted to ask questions of the witness and make his statement. They advised him that he had to have a tie on before he could be recognized. Then he went out and borrowed a tie from someone and made a big show out of tying that tie before he was recognized to speak before the Judiciary Committee. I recall also that Democrats, in particular--in fact exclusively-- didn't appear to be taking it seriously. When they were off the sight of the camera, they were joking, laughing, and cutting up outside the scenes. I thought that that was not the decorum that we should have when we have the most serious of constitutional issues before us, the very impeachment of a President of the United States and the prospect that that impeached President--relatively soon to be impeached President--would be standing trial before the United States Senate to determine whether the acts that he had been accused of, not convicted of, but accused of in the form of an indictment out of the House of Representatives, whether he was guilty of those violations, which by my recollection were perjury, subornation of perjury, and obstruction of justice. It seems to me those were the three charges that made their way out the center aisle here in the House of Representatives and over to the United States Senate where Chief Justice Rehnquist presided over a trial in the United States Senate. The question was: Was President Clinton guilty of the charges that were brought against him right here in this House of Representatives? And if he was guilty, did those violations that he was found guilty of rise to the level that he should be removed from office and put Al Gore in as President of the United States? That was the question before the United States Senate. It was profound. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, it broke my heart to see how this country was torn apart over the disrespect in the Oval Office, the disrespect for the United States, and the disrespect for the Constitution and the decorum of the Presidency. I had a difficult time retaining my composure when I went back to Iowa to talk about what I had seen. I recall going out to Arlington Cemetery during that time and making my way up the hill and walking around over to the eternal flame at the grave of President John F. Kennedy. Very close to him now, of course, is the grave of Bobby Kennedy, and not very far away is the grave of Teddy Kennedy, the three brothers who served this country so well. I remember standing with my back to that eternal flame and looking down across Arlington Cemetery and all the crosses that were there, around 285,000 of them at the time, and looking at the bridge that goes over the Potomac and on down the Mall. If you know where to look, Mr. Speaker, it is a little bit out of center, but you can tell where the White House is from President Kennedy's grave. I thought about the caisson with President Kennedy's casket winding its way down Pennsylvania Avenue, winding its way out across the Potomac River, winding its way out to Arlington, and winding its way up to that place on the hill where I was standing where President John F. Kennedy was buried with the eternal flame still burning and still blazing there on that location never having been snuffed out. I thought about a country that was full of grief for losing a President to the atrocity of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and what that meant, the blow to our Republic, the blow to the history of America, and the blow to the heart and soul of our country that took place when Lee Harvey Oswald pulled that trigger down in Dallas that day. I thought about what our country had gone through from 1963 until that year in 1998, when we had gone from grieving for a President lost and aspirations not achieved because of a President lost, to a place where we have a President elected who, I believe, so disrespected the office that he conducted himself in it and next to it in a way that was never imagined by our Founding Fathers and in a way that I won't describe here on the floor of the House of Representatives. It washed over me on that day, Mr. Speaker, what had taken place and what had been taking place in the Oval Office of the President of the United States and the rooms adjoining the Oval Office, the disrespect and in a way the desecration of that respect for the office that we so embrace and hold so dear. It was so difficult for us to say good-bye to President Kennedy and not that many years later put our Nation through this impeachment hearing of a President who, I believe, did lie under oath, did direct others to lie under oath, and did obstruct justice along the way. There were four charges brought to him here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I believe three of them were presented over in the United States Senate. I haven't looked that up in a long time. It is not a place I like to go revisit very often, Mr. Speaker. I recall also that the decision was made here in the House of Representatives that said that we are impeaching the President of the United States for his activities with an intern and his refusal to tell the truth about them when he is under oath, that the trial took place over in the United States Senate. I think of my junior Senator at the time, Tom Harkin, whom I have had a good personal relationship with him, watching him on C-SPAN--as every Senator had to do, Mr. Speaker-- walk down the center aisle of the United States Senate, as if walking down here to this table right beside me with a large book there. On that large book it said: I do hereby pledge to do impartial justice under the law and the Constitution of the United States of America, so help me God. Each Senator was required to sign that book that they would do impartial justice. That meant they took the position of jurors to determine whether Bill Clinton was guilty of perjury, of obstruction of justice, of subornation of perjury, to listen to the evidence that was presented before the United States Senate and come to an objective conclusion as to whether they believed that President Clinton had violated the law in those areas. And the second question was, and if so, does it rise to the level that he should be removed from office? He was already impeached, Mr. Speaker, but does it rise to the level that he should be removed from office? Our Founding Fathers in the Constitution gave us those standards to interpret in our time. The wisdom of our Founding Fathers just amazes me time after time, how they left the language in such a way that we got to decide, in the context of contemporary values, whether or not the violations that I believe were committed by President Bill Clinton rose to the level that he should be removed from office. As I said, my junior Senator walked down that aisle--as did 99 other Senators--and signed the book to do impartial justice under the law and under the Constitution. He walked back up that center aisle, he stepped out those double doors outside the Senate Chamber straight down through the rotunda where we are today, stepped up to the microphones, and he said: I will never vote to remove Bill Clinton from office. No matter what, I will not vote to remove Bill Clinton from office. The ink wasn't dry on his pledge to do impartial justice under the law and the Constitution, and he already took a pledge not to do impartial justice under the law and the Constitution. He had already drawn his conclusions. Here is what happened with many of the Democrats that would refuse to vote to remove Bill Clinton from office: they stepped out before those same microphones over and over again and said--because the question was such as: Is he guilty and should be removed from office, all what wrapped up in one. Then the question was, Mr. Speaker, for them, they said: Well, I didn't have to decide whether he had actually committed perjury or obstruction of justice or subornation of perjury, because even if he had, I didn't think it rose to the level that he should be removed from office. Time after time the Democrats who voted to protect President Bill Clinton from being removed from office made the same statement: No matter whether he is guilty or not of perjury, obstruction of justice, or subornation of perjury, so what? It didn't rise to the level that he should be removed from office. So they voted to protect his position in office, even though we had a Vice President whom they liked and respected, and I think would have made a reasonably decent President during that period of time. But they held that ground, I believe, for partisan reasons, Mr. Speaker. Now, the legacy of that history echoes back over here to the House of Representatives and may echo back to the United States Senate again, if whatever a President is charged with, no matter whether he is guilty or not, doesn't rise to the level that he should be removed from office, then I guess the Senate is not going to remove him from office by a two-thirds vote margin which is required by the Constitution. So let's apply those values today. Let's apply the Bill Clinton values today, and they come back to be this: that if the charges that actually don't exist yet against Donald Trump are some charges that are lesser than the charges that were leveled against President Bill Clinton, then how do these Senators--some of whom are still there from 1998--how could they vote to remove Donald Trump from office in the United States Senate if they can't even find a charge in the House of Representatives--and they have been churning around here for nearly 3 years looking for charges they can impeach him with--if they can't come up with a charge that is perjury, obstruction of justice, or subornation of perjury? The biggest thing they have charged him with is collusion, and that is a laugher. The definition of collusion is pretty vague. If you and I team up together, Mr. Speaker, and we go out and set up a business enterprise, somebody will say we are colluding. If I say: I am going to sell lemonade at a stand on the corner of Fourth and Vine; and you say: I am going to sell lemonade on the corner of Fifth and Vine, that is collusion. It is no crime, and it is no violation of our moral standards either, Mr. Speaker. Whatever charges at this point have been speculated against President Trump are nowhere near that which I believe Bill Clinton was guilty of but not convicted and removed from office. But we never found out. The jury in the Senate never gave us a verdict on the violations of President Bill Clinton. They wrapped him up in the same question: Did he commit perjury? Democrats said: Well, who knows? It doesn't matter. I didn't have to answer that question, because I didn't think he should be removed from office even if he had. Time after time Senators signed the document, walked back, and decided, as Tom Harkin did, I will never vote to remove Bill Clinton from office, even though I just signed a document that said that I will do impartial justice under the law. I am saying this, Mr. Speaker, because this impeachment process that we are in the middle of now is a very politicized operation and organization. Look at the votes that will come down here to the floor of the House of Representatives tomorrow. The Rules Committee met tonight, and they had their dialogue going on there. They are going to bring an impeachment resolution down here. We are going to have a debate on the rule, we are going to vote, and it is likely going to be a clear partisan vote--Republicans on one side voting ``no,'' Democrats on the other side voting ``yes.'' They don't have to believe it, they just know which jersey they have on. I am not asserting that Republicans don't conduct themselves in a similar way. Instead, I am asserting this, this is a partisan operation, and they calculate that they could bring these charges against the President of the United States, and in the effort to impeach the President find a way to tie his hands so he can't be as effective as the people who elected Donald Trump want, pray, and expect him to be. I would take us back to this election that took place and the many hearings wherein I have questioned the witnesses before the House Judiciary Committee. Some of the witnesses whom I have questioned under oath go back to be, let's see, Janet Napolitano, Loretta Lynch, Rod Rosenstein, Christopher Wray, and James Comey. The list goes on. Peter Strzok would be one of those people. Another one I listened to would be Lisa Page. I don't believe I ever asked her a question, but I have listened to her testify. They put this whole scenario together. The texts that went back and forth between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page told us what was going on. They had weaponized the FBI, weaponized the Department of Justice, weaponized the State Department, and weaponized the CIA, the branches of government that were mobilized to attack not only Conservatives and Republicans, but to attack the candidate for President, Donald Trump, who said during that period of time he believed that he had been wiretapped in Trump Towers in New York. That turns out to be true. The only way the left can argue with that, Mr. Speaker, is that they say that the definition of wiretap really doesn't apply anymore because we have so much wireless that we are not actually wiretapping we are just doing surveillance. An archaic term, though most recently archaic, doesn't mean President Trump wasn't right. He understood he was being bugged in the Trump Towers. Once he was advised of that by an admiral, Admiral Rogers, he moved his operations as President-elect out of Trump Towers in New York out to the golf course in New Jersey, where he could operate with a level of confidence that he wasn't being bugged in every conversation that he had. But there was a concerted effort, and it is a matter of fact today proven and not reasonably disputed that there was a sincere effort on the part of a good number of people at the highest levels of the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department to neuter this President by any means possible. They tried to do so with their undercutting of his campaign prior to the election in November 2016, and they continued to undercut this President as President-elect and as President of the United States. So I am going to give a little piece of factual history here, Mr. Speaker. And that would be this: President Trump was elected, became President-elect, on the Tuesday prior to November 12, 2016. Then those 5 days or so later--and November 12 was a Sunday--Sunday noon, early Sunday afternoon, all the highest ranking Democrats--except Hillary Clinton, who was still in mourning and hadn't gone out in public yet. All the highest ranking Democrats in the country found their way to the Mandarin Hotel here in Washington, D.C. There, they were to convene a weekend, or the early part of that week, planning how they were going to--I am going to use the word ``utilize'' and perhaps ``exploit'' the Hillary Clinton presidency that they expected to be a done deal with the stamp of approval of the voters on it by that date of November 12, 5 days later, after the election. But, of course, we all know the real history of it, and that was that Donald Trump was elected President instead. He was President-elect on the morning after the votes were counted on that Tuesday in November. So the Democrats had the Mandarin Hotel reserved. They descended into and upon the Mandarin Hotel, November 12, Sunday afternoon, of 2016. They had to change their agenda. Their agenda was how to exploit the presidency of Hillary Clinton, and it now became: How are we going to deal with President Donald Trump? The political article that first announces this was published the evening of November 12, 2016, and the picture in the center of that is a picture of George Soros. George Soros, one of the--I want to say the top funder for the Democratic Party in the United States of America, involved in some 60 countries, I believe, undermining the God-given freedom and liberty that we are trying to restore, protect, or advance, wherever it might be. George Soros was the headliner. Everybody that was there, except Hillary Clinton, they changed their agenda, Mr. Speaker. Their agenda was to be how to exploit the Hillary presidency, and it became: How do we resist Donald Trump? In fact, that word ``resist'' and the movement of resistance that was launched with demonstrations across the major cities in America, weekend after weekend, all the way up to, including, and beyond the inauguration of President Trump was a brainchild that emerged there at the Mandarin Hotel in Washington, D.C. Not only the idea of the resistance movement, Mr. Speaker, but other ideas on what they were going to do. By any means necessary, we have an ``insurance policy,'' as Peter Strzok wrote, to make sure that Donald Trump is never President, or if he is President, that he can't conduct the operations of a President. We are going to tie his hands one way or the other. So there they sat in the Mandarin Hotel from November 12 to November 15. They came in on Sunday afternoon, and Wednesday, noon, they are checking out of the Mandarin Hotel having had this conference, this seance, about what they are going to do with Donald Trump. One is, they are not going to let him govern. They are going to resist. The resistance movement and that language flowed from there. They also, I believe, designed certain pieces of language that they were going to weaponize so that they could attack Trump supporters. The Make America Great Again, MAGA, people, were going to be targeted by all kinds of pejorative statements and labels. They understood--they, in the Mandarin Hotel--that they had worn out that tired, old term called ``racist,'' the most dog-eared, worn-out card in the lexicon deck of the Democrats. They were going to continue to use ``racist'' because it still was effective, even though it was the most-utilized word that they had. I will say, also, that I learned this from a former Member of Congress, Tom Tancredo, who made it very clear. He said, when they start calling you names, that is when you know you have won the argument. They can't keep up with the debate or they wouldn't fall to name-calling. But ``racism,'' ``racist'' was worn out. They needed some other words to apply. So they began to generate some of them in the Mandarin Hotel. From that day, we started to see increased use in terms like ``Nazi,'' ``fascist,'' ``white nationalist,'' ``white supremacist.'' Those terms flowed out of the Mandarin Hotel and were kicked into gear and utilized across this country against people who were vulnerable to those kinds of labels. They knew what they were doing when they weaponized those terms. As a matter of fact, Mr. Speaker, I happened to have gotten a little curious and did a little search through LexisNexis for the term ``white nationalist.'' I chased it back to the year 2000, and put the search terms in, and I asked it how many times the term ``white nationalist'' was used between the year 2000 and 2016. It came back virtually none. To be precise, ``virtually none'' really means 100 to 200 times a year by all the publications out there. All the scholarship work that is being done, all the blogs, all the comments on all the articles written, and the articles themselves added up to 100 to 200 times a year from 2000 to 2016 that the term ``white nationalist'' had been used. That is virtually none in a great country like we are, with over 300 million people and all the publications that we have. My name shows up a lot more than that, just to give you an example, Mr. Speaker, and I am not always happy about that. But virtually not used, ``white nationalists.'' Then, when you get to 2016, this is the year at the Mandarin Hotel when they gathered together and decided what they are going to do to try to deny an effective Presidency for Donald Trump and to deny the will of the people. The LexisNexis search showed that that virtually never-used term of ``white nationalist'' jumped up to 10,000 times in 2016. In 2017, Mr. Speaker, it jumped to 30,000 times. In 2018, it was still there at 20,000 times. A word that was virtually unused now had become weaponized. You can look at the charts and the graphs on this, Mr. Speaker, and you will see that ``white supremacy,'' ``fascist,'' and ``Nazi'' all also took jumps. But the most stark jump is ``white nationalist,'' and that is the term that is most weaponized. All the rest of these are weaponized also. So when you weaponize the term, it changes the meaning of it, and they know that. They turn it into a pejorative term. I asked a couple of more senior Members who have served in this House of Representatives just last weekend: What do those terms mean? They said: They don't belong in our language. I never heard that language. I sat down here this morning with a gray-haired Member of the House of Representatives who grew up in a similar era that I did, from the South, and he said: We never used those terms. We don't know what they mean in common language. Well, they were weaponized, and the definitions that the people wanted them to have in that Mandarin Hotel November 12 through 15 of 2016 are the definitions that have been applied to those terms, and they are using them against people. That is just one thing. But they also determined that there were going to be demonstrations across America. These demonstrations ensued in city after city, all over the country. They had to be funded. People didn't have anything to be aggrieved about until they were told that they weren't going to be happy with President-elect Trump. So they began to demonstrate. It culminated here in this city, June 20, 2017, Mr. Speaker. That is when we came together to celebrate the inauguration of President Donald Trump. I traveled around this city. I was here for the inauguration, and I traveled to the events that it was important that I attend. Everywhere I went, the city was jam-packed full of these ladies in their silly pink hats. I won't describe for the Congressional Record what they called them, Mr. Speaker, but they were everywhere. They had posters and signs just replete with all the obscenities that one could imagine. I believe there were more people here protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump than were here celebrating the Presidency and the inauguration of Donald Trump. They jammed the streets. They stood in front of our car, and they blocked our traffic. They descended upon me in a McDonald's over there in a part of town. I thought I actually ought to have something to eat that day, and I ended up with about 200 of them in pink hats surrounding me. I thought, I will just debate them down to the last one. I kept asking them, ``Why are you here?'' ``We are here to demonstrate for women's rights.'' So I just kept asking them, ``What rights do men have that women don't have?'' That stumped every one of them. They didn't have a single answer to that question, out of 200 or so that approached me in that McDonald's that day. But I saw what they did in this city, and I asked them. They complained they didn't have enough money to pay for their health insurance, the Affordable Care Act. The un-Affordable Care Act is the more accurate way to describe it. But they had been able to buy a plane ticket from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., and a couple of hotel rooms so they could be there to demonstrate in their pink hats. Who funded that? It wasn't out of their pocket, Mr. Speaker. I would suspect it was out of the pockets of George Soros and his subordinates. But that bill is the foundation for what is going on here. It gets us into this new year. That was January 20, 2017. Shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated President of the United States, he had a meeting with James Comey. James Comey was interviewing for the job as Director of the FBI. There was also an interview with Robert Mueller, who I believe did not tell the truth, even though he was under oath. But the record showed that he was interviewing for the job of Director of the FBI as well. James Comey went outside his meeting in the Oval Office with President Trump, sat down, and typed up from his memory what he believed was the exchange between Donald Trump and James Comey. In short order, he took it up to Columbia University and handed it over to a law professor, who was a friend of his, with either the direct or the implied, explicit or implied directions: Leak this information in the private meeting with Donald Trump to The New York Times. The objective is to upset this country in such a way that they will have to name a special counsel to investigate the Russia collusion that we heard about for 2 years, and that special counsel needs to be Robert Mueller. Well, see how this unfolded? Our Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is a personal friend and someone whose intelligence and integrity I admire and respect, found himself in a place where he accepted some advice that I think, to this day, he would tell you he wished he hadn't accepted that advice, but the advice was to recuse himself from anything that has to do with the Russian investigation. Our Attorney General was essentially unable to address the circumstances of this Russia investigation. The special counsel is named--Robert Mueller. The special counsel is named by Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, the number two in the Department of Justice, and his position has been falling under significant question since that time as well. But, Mr. Speaker, we ended up with Robert Mueller. We ended up with about 17 or so investigators/prosecutors handpicked. Handpicked by whom? Was it Robert Mueller? It sure didn't sound like it 2 years later when he is under oath trying to explain the Mueller report before the United States Congress. It sounded more like he wasn't in charge, or if he was in charge, he didn't remember what was going on. That is a good example of why when you have witnesses to testify, especially in these times, when the destiny of America is on the bubble and can turn, you have to have those witnesses open in the public where people can watch them, watch their body language, watch their facial expressions, listen for the pauses before they answer the questions, and listen to the voice inflection to determine whether you believe that witness or don't believe that witness. If you just end up with a transcript that one day we are able to extract from Adam Schiff, you are not able to evaluate the demeanor of the witnesses. What you have to do, then, is you just accept what he has served up. But the Mueller investigation went on for nearly 2 years with roughly 17 investigators. At least 13 of them clearly had a history of partisanship, Mr. Speaker. Some of them were ruthless, undercutting, partisan prosecutors. Weissmann would be one of those who comes to mind for me. One of the people on that panel was Peter Strzok, and it looks like Peter Strzok was the individual who was in the center of most everything that was going on and the weaponization of the Department of Justice and the FBI. Was he the individual who named all the folks that were part of the Mueller team? And when the text with his lover, Lisa Page, came out, and we saw the partisan, nasty, bitter, undercutting, on-the-verge-of-treason texts that came back and forth between Peter Strzok and his lover, Lisa Page, it became obvious even to Robert Mueller that he needed to remove Peter Strzok from the investigative team, the Mueller team that was seeking to find something that they could impeach Donald Trump for. That was Peter Strzok. But we went through nearly 2 years of that, $25 million to $30 million. When the Mueller report came out, they asked Robert Mueller to come to testify before Congress. Throughout all of that, the Democrats were licking their chops, Mr. Speaker, as: Surely, we have this Mueller report. He is such a smart guy. James Comey handpicked him, and James Comey despises the President, and he will move to New Zealand if Donald Trump is reelected. So, surely, James Comey gave us good advice that Robert Mueller will be the man who can pull this information out and document the transgressions of Donald Trump so that we can impeach him and remove him from office because of that animosity that exists when a person steps up and tells the truth and tells America first and says we are going to restore the respect for the rule of law and we are going to restore our border security and we are going to restore our American strengths. All of these points that come forward--America first--all of that was apparently anathema to the people in the Department of Justice and the FBI and other departments--the CIA, for example. So we saw, as this unfolded, this great anticipation that the Mueller report was going to bring forth these items, multiple items, that would be just cause to impeach Donald Trump. And it landed with a big thud because we had open hearings, and the testimony of Robert Mueller fell flat for a number of reasons. Some said that he wasn't astute enough to be able to deliver the Mueller report effectively. That may or may not be true. But I will make the argument that the real reason was lack of substance. If there had been substance there, someone on the Democrat side of the Judiciary Committee--maybe several, and most likely several--would have pulled that substance out and brought that forward so that we would know what it was in the Mueller report that they thought should be worthy of impeaching the President of the United States. Well, if you remember, Mr. Speaker, when the Mueller report landed and Robert Mueller testified before the committee and his testimony came out to be very empty and vacant and vacuous, there was a silence out of the Democrats for, oh, a couple of weeks like: What are we going to do? We are still determined that there must be something in the Mueller report that we can use to impeach the President, but we don't know what. We don't know what we can make stick with the American people. Because, in the end, this judgment on the impeachment is up to the American people. That is how it transfers through the system eventually--not right away, not directly, but eventually. Well, they finally figured out, after 2 weeks or 3 weeks or so, that they weren't going to be able to utilize the Mueller report to impeach the President. So, what do they do? Well, we are going to have to tool up another kind of an argument. What shall we use to get rid of this President? Two years burned up on the Mueller report, all the weaponization of the Department of Justice and the FBI. I want to make sure, Mr. Speaker, that people understand. I lived through Watergate. I watched it closely. I lived through the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I watched it closely, even more closely than Watergate. But, as far as Bill Clinton's impeachment was concerned--and he was impeached--it wasn't so much a matter of corruption within government as it was the matter of the corruption of the President himself. Be that as it may, it threatened our Republic, our constitutional Republic. But, if I take you back to 1974 and we talk about the Nixon impending impeachment--not the actual, but the impending impeachment--and we think about what actually took place then and Watergate, this, I will say, horrible event within American history that tore this country apart, what happened was a few of the campaign operatives for Nixon's reelect team broke into Watergate to see what they could gather up in information from the Democrats. That was really stupid, and it was really against the law, yet it wasn't within the knowledge base of President Nixon that they were about to or had invaded that space and committed that burglary. But, when Nixon found out that they had committed the burglary, he set about trying to cover it up. We were involved in the Vietnam war at the time. We had Vietnamization. Peace with honor was the message that President Nixon was involved in. And we were having success; I would say, from my memory, significant success. But President Nixon decided that the violations of the law that took place in the Watergate break-in, he made a decision to try to cover it up. Rather than stepping forward and saying these people need to be frog-marked into justice and we are going to clean this up and it never was anything that was commanded from on high out of Nixon's office, instead, he set about trying to cover it up, which was a dramatic mistake in judgment by the President of the United States. Had he been successful and we had never heard about this, the Vietnam war may have had an entirely different result, Mr. Speaker. So, President Nixon had a number of things, a number of responsibilities to weigh when he made that decision to try to cover it up. But, nonetheless, we are at this place in history where we look back in the rearview mirror and we say that was a mistake to try to cover it up because he got caught. He would have been removed from office because Republicans had integrity and Democrats had partisanship and, I believe, integrity, so they decided that a President who was that dishonest, who would go to that level, needed to be removed from office. That was the judgment at the time of the people who were elected here in the House and in the Senate. And I do not quibble with those decisions or those positions that were taken. That was Richard Nixon, 1974; Bill Clinton, 1998. These things that I have talked about--covering up the crime of a burglary for political-motivated purposes, covering up the sexual activities by committing felonies of perjury, obstruction of justice, and subornation of perjury--those truly are at least, if they are not high crimes, serious misdemeanors. But they came up with nothing in the Russia investigation with Robert Mueller, nothing that could stick, even though they had rigged this game against the President of the United States, President Trump, with the dossier. And who colluded with the Russians to produce the dossier? The DNC. I mean, it started out with a check written by Paul Singer to do opposition research, because he is a never Trumper. He got what he could get out of the dossier effort in the beginning as it got handed over through Fusion GPS, funded by the DNC, and checks written through the attorney's office in order to try to defuse the trail, following the money trail on how this was put together. But we know the dossier was unverified and it was full of manufactured narratives, much of it plugged in there by the Russians to upset the election results of the United States. And, if you look at their efforts, yes, they did try to affect the results of the election here in the United States. I believe that is true. But I don't know that they had a choice on who they wanted to be President of the United States so much as they just wanted to create chaos within our system. So they spent something like $100,000 on internet ads. That is a piece of it. They did other things to try to hack into messages going out. There is no evidence that they affected any vote tally. There is always a speculation that, perhaps, they did affect the way some people voted. But we also know that there were, I will say, I am going to say, hundreds of millions of dollars--it runs into the billions--spent on advertisement in this country to also affect the election. So, I recall sitting there with a group of Russians at a conference that we had, and, after having excoriated them for their effort to upset our elections here, their response was: So 13 of our Russian hackers were in a building in Russia and they created this much chaos in the United States of America for $100,000 worth of ads and 13 of them working in there trying to be hackers. Think how bad it would have been for you all if there had been 26. That was their answer to me. Mr. Speaker, I reflect on that, and I have to give them a little nod, kind of a little silent smile of he had enough audacity to make the statement. What it amounts to, really, is it says that 13 Russians didn't affect the election here in the United States. What they did was wrong. They have been indicted by the Mueller people. We will never see them again. They are never going to be brought to justice. Thirteen Russians, and we were all tied in knots for 2 years, $25 million to maybe as high as $30 million of the Muller report that comes back to be nothing. So what is the next play? It is kind of like you call a big play in a football game and you drop back to throw this pass and you get sacked for a 25- or 30-yard loss. You go back to the huddle. What are you going to do now? Well, we are not going to run a dive play that is going to get 3 yards. We are going to have to come up with another trick play. Well, what is that going to be? Let's see. We are going to get the President for a phone call to Ukraine. And we know the story on that. It is contemporary, Mr. Speaker. I don't have to refresh the body on this very much except that, when you read the transcript of that phone call, that transcript that has been vetted by at least six different people who are professionals to make sure that the context of that call and the language of that call is reflected within the transcript that they type up for that call, I read it with this peace, or I thought: I am going to get to a place where I get this little peace in my gut that kind of flips and says, ``Oh, he actually said that?'' And I read it with that in mind, carefully. I found no place that troubled me in any way whatsoever. When the President said--and I have heard him in his own voice and person say this--it was a perfect phone call, he has got a strong argument. It is pretty close to a perfect phone call; although, I don't think much of anything is ever perfect in this society. And the request to go in and do the investigation of Burisma and any board member, as I looked at that request that was there, this country has been full of questions about what was going on in Ukraine. And if Joe Biden's son is on the board for $50,000 a month with no energy expertise whatsoever, isn't that worth looking into? And we also have the videotape of then-Vice President Joe Biden saying: Yeah, I held a billion-dollar check out and dangled it in front of the Ukrainians, and I told them that, ``If you don't fire that prosecutor that is investigating the oil company whose board my son is on, if you don't fire him, I am leaving in 6 hours with the check, and I am not coming back.'' And he said--and I can't say these words here on the floor, but it was son of a blank. They fired him, within a very short period of time. That leveraged the investigator out who was on the trail, at least he believed, of corruption in Ukraine, and that corruption pulled into question at least Hunter Biden, if not Joe Biden himself. So, why was Joe Biden so determined to extort the firing of the investigator in Ukraine by dangling a billion-dollar check in front of him--which was a loan guaranty, to make the record correct. Why was Joe Biden doing that, and why is it moral for Joe Biden to enforce a shutdown of an investigation that would be cleaning up corruption in Ukraine before U.S. dollars would be put into that system? He is enhancing corruption. He is not cleaning up corruption. And Donald Trump's statement, if it is to be read at all, was an encouragement to go in and do the investigation to clean up the corruption, not to enhance the corruption. A billion-dollar equivalent of a bribe by Joe Biden--I will give you this billion-dollar loan guaranty if you fire the investigator that is investigating the corruption--versus Donald Trump implying, but not saying: Can you help us out here? Can you help us with the investigation? Can you reopen this investigation into Burisma, because I am hearing a lot of problems over here in the United States about what has been going on in Ukraine. Now, is it happenstance that Joe Biden is a potential political rival? He is not a political rival right now, Mr. Speaker. He is a candidate in a Democratic primary for President of the United States that started out with, I don't know, 24 or so Democrats altogether. And he may still be the marginal frontrunner, although I think Elizabeth Warren--I am confident she has passed him up in Iowa, and it looks like the momentum of his campaign has flattened out. But why would President Trump be so concerned about this that he would ask that they would go in to do this investigation? And I will say, instead, a President of the United States has a duty to investigate for corruption, and he has an obligation by law not to advance those funds until there are assurances that corruption is cleaned up. That is a statute that has been served up to him, and it exists out there. And I have read the language. I just don't have it in front of me to quote it to you exactly here tonight, Mr. Speaker. So President Trump, I believe, was following not only his conscience and good judgment and leadership, but following the law that compelled him to ensure that corruption was being cleaned up in Ukraine before U.S. aid could go into Ukraine. And they found a way to turn this around and say, well, no, we are going to assign the President a motive, and then we are going make the motive stick, and that motive will be--they will rise to the level that we are going to impeach him in the United States House of Representatives for seeking to use U.S. dollars as an incentive for an investigation into his political opponent. How about an investigation into corruption? The corruption was being investigated until Joe Biden stepped in and extorted the firing of the investigator in Ukraine. And all Donald Trump said was, can you light this back up again, and let's find out what the truth is. Why is anybody on the other side of the aisle, Joe Biden or Hunter Biden or anyone else included, why are they worried about an investigation if they are clean? The investigation must be shut down by Democrats for some reason. I mean, from where I stand, I am clean. And so, if somebody says I am going to investigate Steve King, I say, fine, go ahead. You know, if that is all you have to do with your life, go ahead. They said the other day what happens if they bring ethics charges against those of us who went down to the SCIF and said we are going to bring sunlight into this basement room here that Adam Schiff is holding his secret impeachment hearings in, and some of the Members said, well, gee, it is going to cost us millions of dollars to defend ourselves if they bring ethics charges against us. And I said, it is not going to cost me a dime. Lock me up if that is the case, because we have a Constitution to protect and preserve. We have a country to protect and preserve. We have a legacy that is handed to us from our Founding Fathers that requires us to step up and defend our Constitution and the rule of law and the principles of truth, justice, and the American way, no matter how heavy the partisan politics get. And they are heavy. They are so heavy that the history of impeachment is kicked aside by Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. And I picked up the impeachment resolutions from 1974, Resolution of Inquiry. ``Following is the text of House Resolution 803, as approved by the House February 6, 1974.'' This is the Nixon impeachment resolution. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the 1974 resolution for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. 1974 Resolution of Inquiry Following is the text of House Resolution 803, as approved by the House Feb. 6, 1974: Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary, acting as a whole or by any subcommittee thereof appointed by the chairman for the purposes hereof and in accordance with the rules of the committee, is authorized and directed to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States of America. The committee shall report to the House of Representatives such resolutions, articles of impeachment, or other recommendations as it deems proper. Sec. 2: (a) For the purpose of making such investigation, the committee is authorized to require-- (1) by subpoena or otherwise-- (A) the attendance and testimony of any person (including at a taking of a deposition by counsel for the committee); and (B) the production of such things; and (2) by interrogatory, the furnishing of such information; as it deems necessary to such investigation. (b) Such authority of the committee may be exercised-- (1) by the chairman and the ranking minority member acting jointly, or, if either declines to act, by the other acting alone, except that in the event either so declines, either shall have the right to refer to the committee for decision the question whether such authority shall be so exercised and the committee shall be convened promptly to render that decision; or (2) by the committee acting as a whole or by subcommittee. Subpoenas and interrogatories so authorized may be issued over the signature of the chairman, or ranking minority member, or any member designated by either of them, and may be served by any person designated by the chairman, or ranking minority member, or any member designated by either of them. The chairman, or ranking minority member, or any member designated by either of them (or, with respect to any deposition, answer to interrogatory, or affidavit, any person authorized by law to administer oaths) may administer oaths to any witness. For the purpose of this section, ``things'' includes, without limitation, books, records, correspondence, logs, journals, memorandums, papers, documents, writings, drawings, graphs, charts, photographs, reproductions, recordings, tapes, transcripts, printouts, data compilations from which information can be obtained (translated if necessary, through detection devices into reasonably usable form), tangible objects, and other things of any kind. Sec. 3. For the purpose of making such investigation, the committee, and any subcommittee thereof, are authorized to sit and act, without regard to clause 31 of rule XI of the Rules of the House of Representatives, during the present Congress at such times and places within or without the United States, whether the House is meeting, has recessed, or has adjourned, and to hold such hearings, as it deems necessary. Sec. 4. Any funds made available to the Committee on the Judiciary under House Resolution 702 of the Ninety-third Congress, adopted November 15, 1973, or made available for the purpose hereafter, may be expended for the purpose of carrying out the investigation authorized and directed by this resolution.