Steve King

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. I thank the chairman for yielding me time, and I rise in support of H.R. 3102. Madam Speaker, I'd like to explain my position with this bit of a narrative. When I came into this Congress a little over a decade ago, I was watching the growth in the nutrition program, the food stamp program--and I'm well aware that it was established to try to put an end to malnutrition in America. Now, it was growing too fast for me at that time. At that time there were 19 million Americans that were on the food stamp program. By 2008, there were then 28.2 million Americans on the program. The cost in 2003 was about $25 billion. The cost in 2008 was $37.6 billion. Today, our number is knocking on the door of 47 million people. From 19 million to 47 million people, from $25 billion to $78.4 billion, and we're watching an administration that has been advancing the expansion of the signup of the nutrition program by spending millions of dollars in advertising to get more people to sign up, and hiring people to go out and recruit people to sign up for more food stamps. I listened to the testimony before the committee that we had from La Raza that said that food insecurity is now a reason for obesity in America; that people have insecurity about where some of their future meals might come from. Therefore, they tend to overeat when they do get food. And we can help solve this obesity problem by giving an unlimited supply of food stamps, the EBT benefits, to people. Then we will somehow get thinner. This thing has been turned completely around on its head from a problem of malnutrition to a problem of obesity--all tried by Democrats to solve with the same solution, which is more and more spending into a program. There won't be needy people that are taken off this. There isn't going to be food coming out of the mouths of babes. This is categorical. This is so that the resources are available to the people that need it, those that are truly hungry. By the way, this remark that it is a cynical ploy I completely disagree with. This is a sincere effort to manage our budget.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, and to do so the day after the anniversary of the tragic attack on America that took place September 11, 2001, and the tragic attack that took place against Americans in Benghazi September 11, 2012. Who would have believed, Madam Speaker, that a full year would go by and we would still not have the truth, we would still not be to the bottom of the Benghazi events. We still wouldn't have a timeline, we wouldn't have a chronology, we wouldn't have an autopsy report from Ambassador Stevens and others, we wouldn't have the testimony of those who were wounded and those who survived, and we wouldn't have the full story from the administration. And we wouldn't have yet the confession from the administration that they willfully, I believe, misinformed the American people and the United States Congress. And so the individual who has taken the lead on this Benghazi series of events and called for a special select committee to investigate is the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), and I am very pleased to yield to the leader on the Benghazi incident here in the United States Congress, Mr. Wolf of Virginia.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Virginia and ask if the gentleman could stick around for a moment. I have a couple of questions that occurred to me as I was listening to his presentation. I would like to ask for the record, and your knowledge of the Benghazi incident goes more deep than mine does, and I think probably as deep as anyone in the Congress does, Mr. Wolf, and so I wanted to ask: Do we know how many survivors there were from the Benghazi incident?

Mr. KING of Iowa. The information you provided here, especially information as to the numbers of survivors and the numbers of wounded, where they were picked up, and by a Libyan plane, not a U.S. plane, was that information that was forthcomingly delivered to you or the American people by our administration, or how did you learn those facts?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Do we know, has any of that information been entered into the record under oath, so far as witnesses are concerned, before the five committees that have jurisdiction?

Mr. KING of Iowa. And so, Mr. Wolf, is it possible that the Select Committee on Intelligence could have had testimony before the committee, and because they are bound by the confidentiality of classified information, that even if they learned something from an open source that also confirms something that they learned in a classified setting, they now are prohibited from speaking about that outside of that room?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Let me pick up on that. I have a measure of classified rating as a member of the Judiciary Committee. Those are the rules that we are bound by when we go into a classified setting. What we speak about there, what we learn there, even if we know it from an open source before we go in, or even if we learn about it from an open source after we go out, we cannot speak to that topic outside of the room. That's one of the reasons why we need the select committee. Even if all of the information we need to know happens to be gathered by the special Select Committee on Intelligence, that doesn't get that information that can be declassified declassified, that doesn't get it correlated with the balance of the information that is public knowledge, or the information that has come before the other committees. Another question: Do we have any autopsy reports from Ambassador Stevens or any of the other three fatalities that were killed in that action a year and a day ago?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Do we have a timeline that sets down events that took place from its inception to its relative conclusion in the operations and the cleanup that also correlates with a timeline of the situation room in the White House, and who was in the White House and what they knew and when they knew it? Are you aware of any timeline that correlates that?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Virginia. That's my understanding as well. And this colloquy that we've had here, I think, illuminates the questions, some of the questions that can be answered with a special select committee that would be addressing the Benghazi incident. And a full year and a day has gone by. The trail gets more cold every day. And just yesterday, I saw the announcement that the administration is going to make some of the survivors available to Congress, finally, after a full year, so that we can have some dialogue with them. I just envision the 9/11 Commission that sat around the table. They swore in witnesses. They built a public record. The American people watched in on all of those deliberations so they could draw their judgment on whose version was the most accurate and the closest to the truth. When the 9/11 Commission report came out, it was a bound book about that thick. I read it. A lot of us read it. But that was the definitive response to the United States Congress that said these are the facts as we can determine them, the reasoned judgment of the United States Congress. That also happened on the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President Kennedy. I think that the Benghazi incident deserves a full investigation in that fashion. I applaud the gentleman from Virginia for taking the lead on this, and I'll certainly support it all the way to its conclusion.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Virginia. And reclaiming my time, I appreciate having the dialog to this extent. And I know that the gentleman from Pennsylvania has a real focus on Benghazi. We've had some of this dialogue before, and so I would be very pleased to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry).

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania and appreciate his presentation here on the floor. I'd ask if he could stick around for a moment because I'm trying to do a little research of my own here, and that is that there's a patchwork of information that's been gathered together. Among the American people, they'd have collectively, within their memory and their records, all that's publicly available. If we could go out and pull it together and consolidate it, then we could organize it. This Congress is similar to that. We're representatives of the American people. And from each of our districts, each of our sets of responsibilities and access to information, we can put together some of the puzzle here. But it's hard to put together a puzzle if you don't have the picture that's on the box. This administration has the box, with the pieces, and the picture on the box of the puzzle of what actually happened in Benghazi, and they knew it almost in real-time. And they have been meting out the information, accepting or admitting to information as it was forced upon them thanks to the media, thanks to people that have done real research. I recall a statement made to our gathering in our meeting that there weren't any wounded from the Benghazi incident out at Walter Reed Army Hospital. One of our Members went out there and hung around the cafeteria until he found out otherwise and made personal contact and had deep conversations with at least one individual that was a survivor of Benghazi that was in a long-term rehab, Walter Reed. And so that's the level that we have to go to to get an admission. I wanted to ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania just a series of questions that clutter my mind. Have you seen a list of the survivors of Benghazi, those survivors that Mr. Wolf talked about that were picked up on the Tarmac at the airport in Benghazi and flown out by a Libyan plane?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Do you know the name of any of those 30-some survivors?

Mr. KING of Iowa. And have you seen a timeline that shows what happened in Benghazi from beginning to end, one that is credible, that you have confidence in?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Open-source timeline. Have you seen any timeline of the Situation Room in the White House?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Just wondering. When the assault went on in the compound that took out Osama bin Laden, and I would ask the gentleman, did you see any pictures from inside the Situation Room, and did you see a timeline of the events that took place on that assault?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Exactly. And as I draw a comparison to Benghazi and the takedown of Osama bin Laden, those circumstances would have been similar, except that we initiated the operation against Osama bin Laden, so I presume there were some people that got invitations to go into the Situation Room and be there. We saw the looks of worry and concern on their faces. I remember the President there in front of it, Secretary Clinton was there, and others in that setting. But we have no visuals of who was in the Situation Room during Benghazi. We have no timeline of who came into the room, who was in the room, who left the room or when. And in that list would be when the President came, how long he was there, and when he left. We don't know the answers to that, even though everybody that was in the Situation Room would have known when the President arrived. They would have known when he left. They would have remembered precisely all dialogue that came from the President and almost all that went to the President. That's how I envision it. Would you envision that the same way, Mr. Perry?

Mr. KING of Iowa. And so the American people need to know this. Do you have any knowledge of who had custody of the body of Ambassador Stevens from the moment he was killed until such time as he turned up at the hospital in Benghazi?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would agree. And the individuals that delivered Ambassador Stevens' body to the hospital should be available to us. We should have been able to put them under oath and gather the record of what took place there. We don't know who had custody of Ambassador Stevens' body. We just know his body showed up at the hospital. And the balance of that is conjecture, although we've seen at least one picture of him being carried through the streets in a vertical way, with no knowledge of whether he was alive or dead at that time. Most believe that he was dead at that time, but we just simply don't know. And can you imagine if it's your family member who had gone through this, and to be locked out from the truth, if you'd lost one of the four lives that we lost in that, or if you're one of those that is wounded and has been muzzled. The argument came out yesterday that the administration asserts that they have not commanded people to be muzzled or to be quiet about what happened in Benghazi, yet there's the intimidation factor. If your top officers lean on you and say, You've already taken a confidentiality oath, you better stick with that confidentiality oath. As a former member of the armed services, if you're bound by confidentiality and you've already taken the oath and then your commander, your superior comes to you and says, You've been involved in an incident, and you're bound to that confidentiality, would you honor that, Mr. Perry?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Do you believe that the attack by our enemies on our Ambassador and the other victims was a planned attack or a spontaneous eruption?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Do you believe that the administration knew in real-time that it was a planned attack on our Ambassador and an assassination attempt?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Do you think Susan Rice knew when she went before the five television networks the following Sunday?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania if he attended the classified briefing Monday at 5 o'clock.

Mr. KING of Iowa. What level of confidence did that give you when you see Ambassador Susan Rice there to lead the briefing?

Mr. KING of Iowa. And I would agree wholeheartedly, Mr. Perry, and end this one remaining component of this topic that I think that you alluded to somewhat in your statement. The question is: What was Ambassador Stevens doing in Benghazi? We've seen the announcement that came out last night or today that our administration is funneling weapons now into some elements of the Free Syrian Army. I'm concerned that those elements are the Muslim Brotherhood elements of the Free Syrian Army. But they have now announced that they're finally getting some resources in there. If that was the plan and the strategy, to funnel weapons into the Free Syrian Army a year ago, that would have been a better strategy because the Muslim Brotherhood hadn't completely taken over that operation then. But some have speculated in the media--and we don't know because we haven't had a select committee that brought all this information out-- that that was part of the business that may have been taking place in Benghazi. I don't have confirmation that that is the case. And I would ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania if you have seen any evidence that that might be the operation that was taking place and the reason that Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi that day.