Mark Souder

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. I had a couple of points that I wanted to make. I hope we can take a little bit of time tonight to review our first day of hearings in our Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. But one of the things that you have already referred to eloquently a few times is this problem of the videotapes, in particular the missing audio on the most critical tape thus far that we know. I wanted to read a little bit from an opening statement of the chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice, when he was talking about the White House communications agency better known as WHCA. A clear picture is emerging and it has four distinct components: the utter lack of internal controls at WHCA, the problem of WHCA mission creep, the absence of accountability, and the disturbing pattern of White House obstructionism. Because it is most disturbing, I want to start with White House obstructionism we have encountered in this investigation. Now, the reason I wanted to open with that, because I am vice chairman of this subcommittee, at the time this was Congressman Bill Zeliff's opening remarks. This hearing was over a year ago. The agency we are talking about, WHCA, one of things we were raising a concern about, little did we know what we were up against here and why, was the White House Audiovisual Unit, with 111 personnel, which provides sound and light systems, lecterns, flags, seals and teleprompter support for White House media events. It also makes audio and video recordings of all presidential events for the national archives. Now, we thought we were dealing, we had no idea that there were tapes of coffees marked supposedly as democratic fund-raisers in their own system. But these were the statements written a long time ago, long before we knew about these particular tapes. Beginning in March 1994, the White House stubbornly opposed an audit as a potential breach of national security. When Congress pointed out that most of the information involved was not classified in any way, to my dismay, now that we have an audit report and are conducting hearings, the White House again is doing its best to obstruct and hinder these hearings by withholding witnesses and by altering testimony. We had the person they sent change his testimony several times. The GAO did a study that said that one of the problems was a separation of the accountability of this division, which is funded by the Department of Defense, and control, which was under the White House, to the point of writing and editing the statements of the Defense people we had. It is time for our subcommittee to have investigations where we call in the Defense personnel and say, where are the tapes? The tapes that were played on C-SPAN were clearly edited. They clearly were only short parts, key audio is missing.

Mr. SOUDER. You are jumping to the conclusion that that is the famous CIA. It could be a local agency. It could be a grocery store with those initials or something.

Mr. SOUDER. ``Sorry, audio missing.'' In other words, even in their editing they showed part of a tape with John Huang, who in this case is the person who allegedly made the statements about fund-raising there, and miraculously, like the missing Rosemary Woods section in the Watergate tapes, it is gone. We need to have immediate investigations into what has happened to these tapes because my impression, although we had a different impression at the time, was that what we were looking into, which was some purchases that were questionable and procedures in the WHCA office, that the reason the administration may have been stonewalling us long before this committee, the full Committee on Government Reform and Oversight ever looked at it, is they knew these tapes were in there and they have been stonewalling us long before March 4. They were stonewalling us way back to June. One of the things I also wanted to point out tonight is that one of the concerns that we have had is what are the linkages. As we talk about today's first hearing, we are going to be dealing with little pieces here and there that are hard to understand in the big picture. The big picture really has two parts. One is, has foreign money penetrated our system and what did we lose because that foreign money penetrated? And secondly, the other party keeps throwing up things, ``Dole did this.'' If Dole was President, first off, if anybody violated the law, they should be found guilty, as is the case with some people who contributed to the Dole campaign. If Dole was President, we would be asking questions of him. But nobody is even saying there is a fraction of the amount of money that dealt with the Dole campaign that is dealing with others. When we looked, as I have pointed out, in the past at other scandals in American history, you do not say, this one or this one could have been, you look at what is in front of you. We have a second problem, not just the foreign money but what else is for sale in our government. I want to give you the example of one case that I would like to insert into the Record, the full article. It has to do with the man who was recently nominated for Ambassador to Singapore. He is a friend of Mark Middleton, who certainly has been involved in this and called, because Mark Middleton has been tied to the Indonesian Riady family who have given hundreds of thousands of dollars of questionable contributions to Democrats; to Charlie Trie, an Arkansas restauranteur suspected of funneling campaign money from China; and to disgraced former associate attorney and Clinton friend Webster Hubbel. He had been in the White House prior to this. Then post-White House he went on the payroll of Steve Green. Steve Green has been a long time friend of the President of the United States. He has been a fund- raising star for him, worked for Mack McLarty, a boyhood friend and right hand man. He has given lots of funds to the Democratic Party, $11,000 at one point and others. He has slept in the Lincoln bedroom. He and his wife spent the night of their 28th anniversary in the Lincoln bedroom. If you are a friend of the President and you have given legal money, I am not complaining that you stayed in the Lincoln bedroom. We are a little concerned that there seems to be some tit-for-tat there, but okay, that is going to happen currently. But it is really interesting because this man has several times asked for favors, which included Samsonite luggage, of which his conglomerate is a primary owner. He flew on three of the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's overseas trade missions. He also happened to sit with Ron Brown at the swearing in of the President last time. Furthermore, just recently, just recently the company that he heads, actually it is not just recently, it was about a year ago, they announced that Samsonite, which has an 80 percent controlling interest in Luggage Distributors of Singapore, has decided to expand into Asia and that Singapore is now going to be their launching point for expanding Samsonite. I want to reestablish this point because this stuff gets confusing, but it is here and this is the type of thing we are looking for. I am not saying there is guilt here, but I am saying this is why time after time after time people are becoming suspicious. This man is a friend of Bill's. He stays in the Lincoln bedroom on his anniversary night. He gives $11,000 to the committee. He flies with Ron Brown overseas on several missions. He sits with Ron Brown at the inauguration. Then his company that he is working with targets Singapore and moves into Singapore. Now he is nominated for Ambassador to Singapore. What do we have for sale in our country? It is one thing to say you gave to the President so we are going to give you an ambassadorship. We have had that problem for a long time. It would be nice if we could clean up our government that way. But usually we do not give ambassadorships to people who have direct business interests in the country they are about to head to, and what we have done is seen this system, which was marginal in the beginning, and I, for one, favor reform of the system, taken to a degree that we have never seen before. It is shocking.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. The key thing is, as the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Shadegg] knows, he is an attorney, what we need to do is check out the statute of limitations on a lot of these things.

Mr. SOUDER. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, I had a series of pictures, but I want to use this to illustrate another point. This is a picture of the Vice President with Jorge Cabrera. I want to go through this case to illustrate that the things that we are going to hear tomorrow in our first House hearing are not isolated. There are so many that the Senate has already done, that we have pending, it is overwhelming. I want to go through this case to illustrate several points. The Vice President has been a good student of President Clinton's in more ways than one in fundraising. He attended a fundraiser in Florida for 60 wealthy contributors. One of the attendees was Jorge Cabrera, a drug trafficker with links to a Colombian cartel, and Dr. Joseph Douze, a fugitive who once blew up a bridge. The host for the evening was Jerome ``Jerry'' Berlin. He was indicted in 1990 and later acquitted on Federal conspiracy charges of bribing public officials. One of the politicians allegedly targeted in that charge was Senator Al Gore, who prosecutors said did not know of the alleged plot. One guest who paid the minimum $10,000 cover charge said, maybe the reason I got to sit with the Vice President is I was the only honest person in the room. To be fair, a Gore spokeswoman pointed out that the Vice President was disappointed to learn that his picture had been taken with a longtime drug dealer. This is my favorite quote so far of the whole investigation. ``He never wants to be associated with people who break the law.'' That probably makes for real interesting cabinet meetings. Some of the same donors at the fundraiser later received personal greetings from President Clinton and the First Lady. Only days later the Cali-connected Cabrera was sipping eggnog at the White House at a Christmas party. Cabrera, who gave $20,000 to the DNC, was later sentenced to 19 years in prison for helping to import 6,000 pounds of Colombian cocaine. He was indicted, mind you, when he was going to all of these fundraisers. At the time of the Gore fundraising and the White House visit, he had already been arrested twice on drug charges in the eighties, and pleaded guilty to nine drug-related charges. Court papers said that by 1995 he was deeply involved with the Cali Colombian drug cartel, the largest in the world. Ross Perot put it nicely: I never thought I would live to see a major drug dealer give $20,000 bucks in Florida, and then be invited to a big Democratic reception by the Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, and then be invited to the White House for a reception. An invitation to the White House Christmas party was also sent to Dr. Douze, who the government had confiscated his passport, another branch of the government had taken his passport, yet this man was at the Christmas party, and they restricted his travel after his arrest on 11 counts of Federal mail fraud and conspiracy. The Federal judge denied his request to leave the area to visit the White House, but Douze, who was arrested in 1988 for blowing up a bridge in Haiti, received the judge's permission to visit his dying mother in Haiti a few weeks after the Gore fundraiser. He has not returned from Haiti since. How does this happen? They let it. Rule number one is follow the current law. The moral equivalency crowd is saying everybody does it. No, not everybody does. Everybody does not take pictures with drug dealers who have already been convicted or fugitives or swindlers. This happens when cash and contributions guide, and as I said at the beginning, when your driving force is you have to have money to hold your power, and your goal is to get power in Washington, and then you start chasing the almighty dollar, pretty soon you make mistakes like this. What we are going to see in the hearing, in the opening statements today, as one Member of Congress said, we are applying guilt by showing fuzzy pictures, because this makes the Vice President look seedy and this Cali cartel person look seedy. Do Members know what? If I call up Vice President Gore and say, will you give me a fresh color picture of you posing with that member of the Cali Colombian cartel, I do not think he is going to give it to me. The only way I can get a picture is to get it out of a newspaper. I did not deliberately make this picture fuzzy, just like we do not make the pictures at our committee fuzzy. But the White House does not want to give us pictures of them posing with John Huang. They do not even want to have videotapes with audio on them being with John Huang. They do not want to give us pictures with John Chung. They do not want to give us pictures with the swindler who bilked new Americans coming into our country in one of the biggest credit card scams. So the picture tends to be a little fuzzy. But Members know what? Part of the problem here is not that we are making them look like violators of the law, they are. If you pose with drug dealers, there is not a whole lot you can do to clean up the picture, because you are posing with a drug dealer. It is particularly disappointing that in the background checks of this administration, that they have been so sloppy in doing that. I hope that Members will watch as we go through the hearing process and as we try to bring some of these points out. This is very difficult. I realize a lot of people think it is partisan, but our democracy is at stake. If money can buy this much influence across the board, if agencies can be corrupted, if our national security can be at risk, that is what we are trying to find out. If we do not find it, the President will get off free. If we do not find it, the Vice President will be fine. But our job as Members of the United States Congress is to look into what appears to be repeated across-the-board types of that, and we need the White House to start cooperating and the Attorney General to start cooperating. I agreed to lend the last few minutes of this special order time to my friend, the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Shadegg]. I want to thank the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Hayworth], too, for his great efforts, not only tonight but at other times, because there is another matter pending right now in conference committee on national testing, and earlier tonight the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Hayworth] and I were talking about education, as well as some of the Democratic Members. I thought that might be a fitting way to close here, too. Education and National Testing in America

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to talk about a couple of actual cases and refer to something else as people look at the opening statements today, and I want people to remember all of these editorials around the country and the universal outrage, and then watch the kind of creative excuses that people come up with here in Washington to defend why they are not speaking out. I believe that eventually we will have more and more Members on the other side, like there were Republicans, say, ``I cannot defend this any more. This is too humiliating. This is undermining the core of our system.''

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I know this will take a couple of minutes, but I want to show how overwhelming public reaction has been around the country. New Mexico, Albuquerque Journal: ``The administration could save itself considerable trouble and criticism if only it learned to be candid.'' Georgia, Augusta Chronicle: ``It's time for Congress to start drawing up articles of impeachment against Reno. She is open to charges to both conflict of interest and incompetence. It's time to get rid of the worst Attorney General in the Nation's history.'' Alabama, Birmingham News: ``Apparently, Ms. Reno believes she must have photographs of illegal transactions taking place before she can proceed with a special investigation. Perhaps the videotapes of the coffees and other fund-raising functions at the White House will give her what she's looking for.'' New York, Buffalo News: ``President Clinton can insist that no money changed hands and no policies changed at all when he schmoozed with donors in White House receptions caught on videotape. But the reality is that the public is entitled to suspect the worst.'' West Virginia, Charleston Post and Courier: ``Clearly the White House is not cooperating fully with Ms. Reno's probe. That puts her in an impossible bind. The sooner Ms. Reno hands off this investigation to an independent counsel, the better it will be for her and for the reputation of the Justice Department, which is sinking fast.'' Ohio, Cleveland Plain Dealer: ``If the failure to reveal these tapes to the congressional investigative committees isn't obstruction of justice, it's far from the `full cooperation' the President and his men keep claiming.'' Texas, Corpus Christi Caller-Times: ``The President's team is either spectacularly inept or willfully obstructionist.'' Michigan, Detroit Free Press: ``Janet Reno is part of the problem, not part of the solution.'' Indiana, my hometown, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, another Democratic paper, which many of these have been: ``You hear no claims of executive privilege this time. No excuses about controlling legal authority. No accusations that the Republicans did it, too.'' New York, Long Island Newsday: ``The tapes made Reno look clueless in denying once again the need for an independent counsel.'' New Hampshire, Manchester Union Leader: ``Of course only the Clintonoids know whether these tapes, under subpoena for six months, were tampered with, altered or edited. Only the Clintonoids know whether these are all of the tapes or whether there were others of a more incriminating nature that have since disappeared. And so it goes in the Clinton klepocracy.'' New York Times, New York: ``Justice has been conducted in a slipshod investigation.'' We already heard from Nebraska and the Omaha World Herald. Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Inquirer: ``Janet Reno needs to get her head out of the sand, tune in to the conflict-of-interest problem, and hand these allegations over to a preeminent lawyer free of political pressure.'' Oregon, Portland Press Herald: ``Only an independent special prosecutor can bring the credibility needed to determine whether the President and Vice President of the United States violated the law.'' Missouri, St. Louis Post Dispatch: ``Ms. Reno should seek a special prosecutor for the Clinton-Gore telephone solicitations and ask the prosecutor to investigate the other White House fund-raising investigations as well.'' Now, once again, these are not Republican conservative papers. Minnesota, St. Paul Pioneer Press: ``No more than Richard Nixon could `circle the wagons' during Watergate can a modern White House keep `losing' documentation of its actions and hold onto its credibility.'' California, San Diego Union Tribune: ``The Justice Department's investigation of possible White House campaign finance violations has lost all credibility.'' California, San Francisco Chronicle: ``The long-sought videotapes may show nothing incriminating, but the Clinton administration's history of stonewalling, delay and obfuscation only add to the public perception that an independent counsel is needed to finally untangle the mess and find the truth.'' California Stockton Record: ``President Nixon had to resort to the infamous Saturday Night Massacre to get the Justice Department to his political bidding, and it ultimately failed. Reno's Justice Department is just rolling over and playing dead.'' Washington Post: ``The attitude of this White House toward the truth whenever it is in trouble is the same. Don't tell it, or tell only as much of it as you absolutely must, or as helps.'' Washington Times: ``There has been so much obstructionism in document and evidence production that only someone as naive as Attorney General Janet Reno could believe that it hasn't been intentional.'' Kansas, Wichita Eagle: ``Many Americans and most Republican lawmakers doubt whether Ms. Reno, a Clinton appointee, has conducted a thorough and honest investigation. And who can blame them?" North Carolina, Winston-Salem Journal: ``The lesson the White House keeps failing to learn is that any attempt at a cover-up usually makes matters worse.'' This is overwhelming, from nearly every part of the country, and this is just a sampling, of liberal press for the most part, some conservatives, saying this is outrageous.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, clearly the Vice President of the United States first was warned by the legal counsel in a memo that has been circulated all over the country in newspapers. He was a Member of this body in the House and knew that we could not do it. Then he was a Member of the other body, the Senate, and told that he could not do it. He has no excuse. We are tired of hearing these kinds of excuses. The gentleman read earlier from the Omaha World Herald, and in Hotline today, now admittedly, these are audio only; I do not have any video, and also, I only have highlights from some of these editorials. But if I was at the White House, I would not complain about me editing. They are not in a real strong position here. But I want to show the reaction around the country and express my disappointment with, quite frankly, a lot of members in the other party for not agreeing to speak up. As my colleagues will see if they watch C-SPAN and the upcoming opening statements of the members of this committee, there were a lot of excuses and a lot of dancing around about how everybody does it, which, A, is not true; how we ought to be investigating Congress, which we have no jurisdiction over, we are an oversight committee on the White House and the executive branch. Our duty is to look into misconduct. That is what our committee's charge is to do and we are going to do that. Back in the days of the Grant administration when they looked into the Credit Mobilier scandal, they did not say well, Philmore did it; well, so-and-so did it before. They looked at the scandal that was in front of them. Back in the days of the Teapot Dome, the excuses were not, oh, other people did it. They looked into the scandal of Teapot Dome. Quite frankly, in Watergate, some, including myself, initially felt they were picking on Nixon, but we had the courage to say as it unfolded, what he did was wrong, what the Vice President did was wrong, and that we did not say, look, because Lyndon Johnson bugged Barry Goldwater's room and because Lyndon Johnson covered up, therefore, Nixon should not be kicked out of office just because Johnson did it. First off, we have not established that other people did what Clinton did. Particularly we are looking at all these scandals put together in one administration. But it is no defense, and when is the other party going to start to step forward? I want to read these newspapers and show that newspapers around the country have come to this conclusion. Where are the members of the other party?

Mr. SOUDER. This is the part that is missing.

Mr. SOUDER. They had to have some way to distinguish it from other coffees.

Mr. SOUDER. Coincidence. We are jumping to conclusions.

Mr. SOUDER. Starbuck's.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, people who put that in there never would have acknowledged it in their own computer system.

Mr. SOUDER. And to take the gentleman's analogy further, in addition to, in effect, pickpocketing people's billfolds and private things that were official and on record, this is not a matter of FBI files where they just have whether an individual has been picked up for a parking ticket or where they went to college. These are when an individual applies for a secure government job and they go try to find out what anybody says about them. So there are raw unedited transcripts of if somebody says I saw him at dinner somewhere and he was having an affair. I saw him at a gay bar one time. I heard that he beats his kids. These things are in those files and individuals do not even know they are in their files, and yet we have kids, we had all sorts of people walking around with these. The question comes, were they potential blackmail files for people who were holdover, or for people who they had to do business with outside, or for, quite frankly, staff members who used to work in the administration and came over. We do not know, and that is still unanswered. But as we moved through this, we turned up Craig Livingstone, and he was in charge of White House security and the files, along with Anthony Marceca, who had been kicked out of different campaigns for multiple questions, had had various problems in their lives. The question was who hired these people? Craig Livingstone would not say who hired him. The attorneys would not say who hired him. They said maybe Vince Foster did, which was always the convenient answer. It was always the dead guy when we tried to get an answer. But then we found out they had a data bank. And from the files investigation we turned up they had this data bank. And as we looked at the data bank, they had these piles of documents with little codes on them. And we found out that the codes were amounts of money that the people gave, and they had a code so they could know at the White House how much money these people gave. And that was the codes for coffees and Lincoln bedroom. And that is how we evolved into the coffees and the Lincoln bedroom question. So this has been an unfolding process as we go through this, and we are now seeing the last phase of this, which is the foreign money, in what appears to be at least on the surface. And we are trying to get the evidence, and that is the purpose of these hearings, of were we penetrated by foreign governments? Was national security compromised? Did they make land deals or other government decisions based on who was at the Lincoln bedroom; based on who was at a coffee? Because we have seen this pattern. And I want to relate two other things that make us extra suspicious. The American people are generous people, and they will give people the benefit of the doubt, but we have seen a repetitive pattern of stonewalling through all these investigations. And every one we get into, there is this excuse as to why they cannot give us the information of why this person has fled overseas. Sixty witnesses pleading the Fifth Amendment. Twenty-five so far have fled overseas. They always have an excuse. I also happen to have, for a variety of reasons, chaired two investigations of the INS. I, quite frankly, and bluntly, was reluctant, because the chairman was not here at that point. Mr. Zeliff, who had led much of this, decided to run for governor of New Hampshire, and I wound up chairing the subcommittee. But I was reluctant, because I was afraid that in investigating these things would be perceived as anti-Hispanic. But at some point the truth just stares us in the face. We saw the piles of documents that civil servants, many of them Democrats, were bringing in bundles of tests, citizenship tests filled out in the same pencil, in the same handwriting; there are people coming in and saying we had eight boxes of applications that never had a background check; and we watched and heard these people say that the deadline was the voter registration deadline. The deadline was not to try to get people in. We wanted legal aliens to become citizens. And out of the 1.1 million who came in, at least a million were completely legitimate. But it appears that up to 100,000 were not. We had rapists. We had all sorts of people brought in because of the pressure to get the voters registered for an election, which ties in with Morris' whole scenario. So we already have the public acknowledgment that the INS has fired people and cleaned up their process, and are working hard to do this, but the INS clearly violated the law. Now, interestingly, Mr. Zeliff and, then full committee chairman, Mr. Clinger, were pursuing another category. In this other category was the White House communications agency. I wound up at that hearing as well and chaired part of the hearing, and found it, quite frankly, one of the more boring hearings I have been to. I confess that not everything we do here is interesting, even when we pretend it is interesting. We heard GAO tell us that the White House Communications Office had major reporting problems; that it was funded under the Department of Defense, and the Department of Defense was accountable, but the political people at the White House, because usually they had a fairly low to mid level defense person over there, was being pressured by White House high ranking political people. And we, in particular, were looking at a major waste of a huge broadcast system they had purchased with a high percentage of their budget that then they could not get on one plane so they were not using it. Also came out charges of a variety of different things that they were looking at. One the charges of this office that we said could easily be abused, that GAO said could be abused, that we were holding a hearing on, one of their charges was to videotape key events at the White House. As of last night, the media started to ask questions, because we turned in fraud potential in this office a year and a half ago, and it is clear in the process not only has this committee, full committee, been requesting tapes and they only turned up yesterday edited, but these tapes, we had a hearing where we were investigating this agency and they did not come up. And then when the tapes come up, it is, ``Sorry, the audio is missing.'' Some people did not seem to have read Watergate. And that is, when there is a missing 14\1/2\ minute gap in Rosemary Woods' transcript at a very key point, people jump to logical conclusions. And when the tapes come back without the audio in the part where the allegations have been that there was fund-raising, we have doubts. One of the things I went to this chairman of this subcommittee today to follow up on is, I think we need immediate hearings in this subcommittee that is already investigated, on top of the hearings from Chairman Burton that are starting, and say, ``Okay, who filmed the stuff, the stuff that was played on C-Span the other night that was clearly edited? Where is the full tape? Did you doctor these tapes? What happened to the audio of these tapes? Who did this? Who authorized you to do this?'' This is shocking, that they went through and did this and abused a Defense Department agency, which we had already been warning about, that they had potential fraud in the way that they were setting it up. As the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Hayworth] knows, I am on the same committee with the gentleman that is looking into this issue, the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, and was there for the opening statements today. My colleague raised some serious points about this issue of the tapes. I just want to bring a little levity here because, quite frankly, there are parts of this thing that I find incredibly humorous. Let me just kind of walk through it. The tapes the gentleman has been referring to are videotapes of the so-called coffees that the White House conducted, where they invited in these individuals, most of them, coincidentally, major donors to the Democrat party and of the White House and of the President, but maintained, and had maintained for months now, that these were not fund-raisers, ``Look, these are reasonable and legitimate, and we are having nice discussions, but they were not fund-raisers.'' What I find humorous about it is a couple of different things that reveal how we got the revelation of these tapes. For example, when the White House, first in response to our committee's subpoena, searched for the names of the individuals we knew had attended those coffees, according to press reports, and I am quoting here from George Lardner, Junior's Washington Post story the day before yesterday, they searched for those individuals' names, the White House database came up empty. As a matter of fact, they could not find anything on those individuals in the White House database. So they said, what we really should do is search under the name ``coffees.'' And, in fact, they did come up with what they call, I think it is a total of 44 hits, under the name ``coffees,'' and that is how we led to the discovery of these tapes. They only bothered to wait from March, when we subpoenaed this information, until, we are in October, are we not? until October to decide, well, let us look under ``coffees.'' But the fascinating thing is that in Mr. Lardner's story, he goes beyond that and he says, guess what? Somebody had the bright idea of searching under ``coffees'' to look under ``DNC.'' What is ``DNC''? Democratic National Committee. And to look under ``fund-raiser.'' Now, I do not know why they would look under ``DNC'' or ``fund- raiser,'' because, as we all know and as the American people have already come to believe in their heart and soul, these were not DNC fund-raisers. And yet the curious thing is, when they did search that same White House computer database under ``DNC'' or ``DNC fund-raiser,'' they did not get 44 hits, they got 150 hits.

Mr. SOUDER. We honestly do not know. We know there were at least 200, then 400. It appears there were at least 800. Chuck Colson went to prison after the Nixon administration for showing one. We documented that interns had them, that multiple people had them. We know they were out there. What has not been documented yet is whether they have been abused. But merely having people's secret files, with any allegations, raw allegations, unproven allegations are in these files.

Mr. SOUDER. And it is important to note, because people may get confused sometimes in these special orders when we, some of us in particular, have been trying to point out some of these problems that have developed in basic justice in this country and abuse of the political process, it does not mean we are not doing lots of other things. I also serve on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. It was my first choice. For 4 years in the House and for 4\1/2\ years as a Senate staffer, my first focus was children and family issues. I was Republican staff director of the Children-Family Committee; worked on many of these issues, and worked on them with Senator Coats in the Senate. I have a deeply held conviction of the importance of education in the system, and I get tired of hearing we do not care about public schools. My kids have gone through public schools, I went through public schools, my wife went through public schools, and that is an important issue to us. But I am also on the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, and we have also seen a perversion of our political process. I wanted to, first, on the eve of an important day, because tomorrow the House investigation begins on the abuses in the political process, and particularly the campaign process, I would like to sketch a little background. I know the hearings that we held today, where we gave our opening statements, will probably be aired later tonight if not later this week, and then tomorrow we have our first witnesses in the House investigation, but I wanted to put a little bit of context into what we are doing and how this developed. I want to start with a little bit different spin. A man named Dick Morris, who has become relatively infamous around the United States, has written a book. While it may not be the most interesting book that has ever been written, and quite frankly is a little bit self-serving, as many of these type of books are, nevertheless gives us some very interesting insights as to how the political process can become corrupted. Let me give my colleague a brief book synopsis that really outlines how we got to what has been happening since we came into Congress. And that was, basically, in 1994, after the election that brought the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Hayworth] here, brought me here, the President was in deep trouble. Much like happened in Arkansas when he was defeated after one term as Governor, he realized he needed to change his strategy, and he brought Dick Morris back. One thing Dick Morris suggested, and he writes about it, and he writes about it proudly, was they needed to have a permanent campaign. An interesting thing happens when are going to have a permanent campaign. It means one has to have a permanent fundraising operation. And early money is hard to raise, so one has to go to some places that may or may not be quite as up front and a little different, plus there is the need for huge quantities of this money. They wanted to run ads in the district of the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Hayworth] from day one, pounding him, from the time he got elected until his reelection came up. They wanted ads running while we were in this government shutdown debate trying to spin to the American public. Quite frankly, our side sat back and waited until the election. In this process, a man named Harold Ickes, Jr., it is clear in Morris' book, and some is not as clear in the book, Ickes and Morris fought when they were in New York City growing up. Because Harold Ickes is most liberal he has been committed to the liberal cause. Dick Morris is committed to the latest poll. It is not that he does not have some convictions of his own, but his convictions are a little movable and he is willing to try to win elections first. Harold Ickes did not like that and he found himself getting cut out of the process from the White House. It is documented in other places too, but Morris more or less ignores him in the first part of the book. Then an amazing thing happens. Harold Ickes, whose memos, quite frankly, have been very important in this, because he had some with the President's initials on them and Mrs. Clinton's initials on them, Harold Ickes was suddenly brought in and Morris delineates why: Through praise. He praises him for his fund-raising efforts and how much money he has been able to bring in. And Ickes got access in the decision-making process of the White House by being the point person with the outside in how the money came into the system. This is documented by the memos he left the White House with. So Morris takes over and takes it in a polling direction. So we get things like welfare reform, that Ickes did not like, and the liberal Democrats did not like. Ickes gets back into the process through fund- raising. Interestingly, also, the Vice President of the United States is praised repeatedly in this book for his wonderful efforts in fundraising. Now, in the book there is no indications there was illegal fund- raising, but that gives us the ideas of the pressures in the system that were occurring that lead to the dramatic fund-raising abuses. And that has not really been laid out exactly why did this happen and what was different and why were there such massive amounts of money. It was because they decided to do a permanent campaign. But some of this actually started earlier. In the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, from the time we took over and we started to investigate, we heard there was this problem in the Travel Office. And we started looking at the Travel Office and we wondered, well, why is this person walking around the White House without a security clearance? Why is this person walking around? Why are the Thomasons involved in such a little thing? Because it did not seem that many dollars. And even though they owned the travel agency, why were they involved in this? And as it evolved, we discovered they were trying to get the travel budget elsewhere; that there was this person over here who was a girlfriend or boyfriend of this person and there was a Clinton distant cousin over here. And we started to see the pattern we are now seeing in full bloom a couple years later. So as we were investigating the Travel Office, we started to check on where did these security clearances come from. The next thing we know we turn up the FBI files case, because we start saying how did they get these clearances. Hey, some of these names, they do not have any business having. These people are Republicans. They have not been in this administration. John Towers is dead, as a matter of fact.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I think before moving into the general topic I am getting into tonight, I want to express my support for many of the education initiatives, although I think sometimes we get it backwards and think Washington is the fount; unless something is done out of Washington, it will not be done. I know that it was under a Republican President that Head Start was created, and Ed Ziegler of Yale University worked with then President Nixon because he felt there were some gaps. We ought to look to Washington to fill gaps, not to be the end-all, be-all of education. Sometimes I think while the motives are correct on the other side, that is, that we need to help our children, and all of us who are parents of young children, older children, are very concerned about education and it is not a partisan type of thing, but we do have some substantive disagreements over whether it should come out of Washington and be controlled out of Washington or whether it should start with the parents and back home. I am joined tonight by my friend, the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Hayworth]. I know he wanted to make some opening comments, too.

Mr. SOUDER. What a pattern.

Mr. SOUDER. Only a lot more expensive.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. I was certainly suggesting that the only difference was that there might be a third minority on the one and the other would be all Clinton appointees.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, I would like to reinforce the gentleman's remarks. I may be even more scared than you because Indiana is only 600 miles away from Washington; therefore, we are even more vulnerable than the people in Arizona. One of the things that is unusual about this Congress is that we are actually having a discussion about the role of federalism and the role of States and the Federal Government. It has been something that we have been pushing. We are at a critical point here on national testing. As an American history buff, I have gone back and forth and wondered at the time of the founding of our country, would I have been more of an anti-Federalist or a Federalist? Where would I have been on the Articles of Confederation? Would I be like Fisher Ames from New England, who was very skeptical of the Constitution and worried that it was giving up States' rights, or Patrick Henry, another hero of mine, ``Give me liberty or give me death,'' when he heard about the Articles of Confederation moving into the Constitution? He said, ``I smell a rat.'' He was worried that the Constitution was going to be abused the way it is being abused today. I on the other hand, as a business major and a business person, I want to reiterate one other thing that the gentleman from Arizona said. I attended public elementary school, junior high and high school. My wife did the same. All three of my children have done the same. We Republicans care deeply about public education. That is why we are so concerned about these national tests. As we get into this debate, and as a business major and a businessman, I have deep concerns about the quality of education graduates. A book that had a big impact on me was ``Cultural Literacy'' by Hirsch, and in that book he suggests that we are in danger in America of a vulcanization, the root word that comes over what we are seeing in Bosnia and Croatia right now, that is, overlapping groups of people who cannot communicate with each other. We are in danger of that in America. We need some commonality of language, some commonality of history. We need high school graduates who can read and write and do basic math. We need people who have the skills with which to come into industry. We are already near the point where private industry has as many teachers as the public schools, because they are so upset about the quality of education. It is not hard to understand what is driving the desire for standards among businessmen and among many people in this country. We need to have standards. The question is, whose standards? Even though I, as somebody who has certain tendencies, the gentleman from Arizona and I, who are good friends, often will debate what is the proper role of the Federal Government and State governments. And at times I tend to be a little more proactive in the area of the Federal Government than the gentleman from Arizona. We have had some interesting evenings debating this. But nobody who understands the founding of our Republic and who understands the evolution of our Republic believes that education was intended to be a Federal role. One of the things that we need to understand up here is to understand why our Founding Fathers were concerned about certain matters falling into the hands of the Federal Government. We have heard the appalling cases that the gentleman from Arizona brought out in math. You would think that math would be relatively noncontroversial. We already saw what happened with history standards.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, what the gentleman has pointed out is absolutely correct. You have devastated our hardest argument to make, which is that math even is politicized in this day and age, and can be ineffective if consolidated with power in the hands of the wrong people. I want to hasten to point out, for those who say, but if the Federal Government makes a mistake, they can change it, this national testing is moving forward. Inside the Department of Education, as they prepared the tests without any authorization from Congress, without any appropriations from Congress, in fact with over two-thirds of this House of Representatives going on record against national testing, it still is moving forward. If they passed a bad test and we wanted to try to amend that test, even in most cases, if we could get two-thirds in the House to override, the Senate would block us and certainly the President would veto it and we would have a filibuster in the Senate. In other words, once it is bad, it will probably not get corrected. Now, the problem here is that there is a history, so to speak, with this. Lynne Cheney, who we have quoted a number of times tonight, actually was in the humanities art department of the Federal Government and now admits that she made the mistake of granting the first funds for the history exams. She says, ``I was wrong.'' She watched the bias that crept into the history. She has written also how every category in our universities, and do we want to spread this to our high schools, has become politicized. College Art Association conference warning faculty members not to teach women artists such as Mary Cassatt, who has beautiful oil paintings over in our national art museums, because they frequently painted women and children and thus reinforced patriarchal thought. At the University of Wisconsin, a professor from the University of Wisconsin writing in the Harvard Educational Review, the most prestigious university in our country, at least arguably, urges her fellow professors to be open about their intention to appropriate public resources, classrooms, school supplies, teacher-professor salaries, academic requirements and degrees to further, quote, progressive agendas. Curriculum and instruction 607, in which students learn how to conduct political demonstrations and then conduct these political demonstrations in the library, mall and administrative offices of the university; for these efforts, students receive three hours credit. In a recent issue of College English, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of English, a professor from California advises university teachers to vary the political strategy they use in the classroom to suit the institution. For example, he says, in his middle class university he tries to show how the United States offers freedom of choice and a chance to get ahead and then challenges their belief in that. Then he shows them in his English class the odds against their attaining room at the top, the way their education has channeled them towards a mid-level professional and social slot and conditioned them into authoritarian conformity in English class. Then we have the Smithsonian museum in the United States which has been under attack for how they present the American West. They have been under attack for how they tried to rewrite the Japanese American section of World War II and had to have Congress intervene. They said, in an exhibition called Etiquette of the Underclass, they wrote, ``Upward mobility,'' announced materials accompanying the exhibition, ``is one of our most cherished myths.'' Now, what we are seeing is the National Council of English, we are seeing the Harvard Education Review, the College Art Association, we are seeing the Smithsonian institution, all politicizing major statements in the United States. My concern spreads past this. I read earlier this evening, and I wanted to go through this again, at Casa Roble High School into Sacramento, California, this was a values appraisal scale in a career study in a technology class. This was given to a student. It was given to me last Thursday. It is not something that was done 10 years ago. It was done August 29, 1997. It was not something that is far out. It has been done now, we found it in five States. It appears to be possibly the National Education Association that is circulating this. It is incredibly intrusive. On the one hand these questions can be innocuous and you can see how they might be valuable to a guidance counselor. On the other hand, think of the dangers of an all-powerful Federal Government getting this kind of information on our children.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, in a technology class. The reason I want to point this out is this is what we do not want to have happen in a Federal test. If it happens in a Federal test, we will never get it changed. Question number one starts off, ``I have a regular physical checkup by my doctor every year.''

Mr. SOUDER. Yes, and you can have a 10 for definitely true, 7 for mostly true, 5 for undecided, mostly false is a 3, definitely false is a zero.

Mr. SOUDER. For technology class, and it is a career study. It is to help channel kids as to what they should do. Think of this explosive information. Is this what we want public authorities knowing about our families? And if you do not think this is one of the most intrusive things you have ever heard, then perhaps you are on a different planet than I am. Number two, ``I will regularly take my children to church services.'' So they are asking these children in high school to anticipate whether they are going to take their children to church services. ``I have a close relationship with either my mother or my father.'' You will see patterns to a number of questions I am reading. Half of them are family intrusive and half of them are religious intrusive. ``I have taught Sunday school class or otherwise taken an active part in my church,'' if that is any business of the school. Number 24, I believe in a God who answers prayers. I believe that tithing, giving one-tenth of one's earnings to the church, is one's duty to God. Number 41, I pray to God about my problems. Number 43, I like to spend holidays with my family. Number 53, it is important that grace be said before meals. Number 59, I care what my parents think about the things I do. Number 63, I believe there is life after death. Number 72, I read the bible and other religious writings regularly. Number 78, I love my parents. Number 82, I believe that God created man in his own image. Number 91, if I ask God for forgiveness, my sins are forgiven. Number 95, I respect my father and mother.