Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 46 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, December 11, 2017, at noon for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague pointing out that we have done something good here.

When people talk about the tax bill that was passed, it is not everything everybody wanted, that is for sure. It is not everything Republicans wanted, but it is going to do good for most every American.

I would love to have seen just an across-the-board tax cut. I would like to have seen a tax cut that brought everybody to pay the same exact percentage. You make more, you pay more; you make less, you pay less.

For those who believe in a tithe, that kind of always worked well for the Lord. Everybody pays the same percentage, whether it is a widow's mite or hundreds of billions of dollars or the billions that Warren Buffett refuses to have his company pay even though he says he would love to pay for taxes. He ought to tell his lawyers that.

In any event, there are people who were paying 10 percent who are now not going to pay any taxes. I don't see how anybody across the aisle could keep saying it is going to be worse for the poor, because those who were paying 10 percent tax are not going to pay any tax. It is good for them. It is great for them.

I would love to see everybody have something that they pay in-- something--so that they have some investment in the income tax system. It seems to help focus people's attention on government when they see how much they are paying into the Federal Government when it is a real percentage. The bill cuts completely any income tax for those who were paying 10 percent.

For those who were paying 25 percent, they are being cut to 12 percent. It is a tremendous tax advantage for them. In fact, you see that all the way through the tax bill, the creation of which was led by Kevin Brady, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He did an incredible job bringing all the different interests together to get a great bill.

At the upper end, the 39.6 percent tax was not changed. I guess the reason the committee decided they wanted to leave the 39.6 for the wealthiest Americans in place is because that way the Democrats could not come in--I know this was the thinking: If the only tax rate we don't lower is for the wealthiest Americans, we leave that where it is, then they can't come in and say we

are cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans and putting it on the backs of the poorest Americans.

Well, they have come in and said it anyway. We might as well have given everybody a fair tax break instead of leaving the wealthiest taxes right where they were, 39.6 percent, because they still came in and said it. Schumer is still saying it in the Senate.

The truth is, when you look at the tax rates that people will pay and the exemptions being doubled, it is going to be much better for most people.

There were some things in the Senate bill I liked. I didn't realize, but I heard from people back home, we do have some seniors who do pay so much in medical expense that takes such a tremendous amount of the small income they have that they do have enough to take deductions for their medical expenses. If they are not allowed to take those medical expenses as deductions, accountants tell me many of their clients will end up being bankrupt.

The Senate left that provision in, and I am hopeful that that will be in the final bill. We don't need to be hurting our seniors who are paying so much in medical expenses even though they were assured ObamaCare would cure all ills when it came to healthcare.

If you like your insurance, you can keep it. Well, that turned out to be a lie.

If you like your doctor, you could keep your doctor. That turned out to be a lie.

If you liked the medicine you were taking, you could keep taking that medicine. It turned out to be a lie.

In fact, there were actual incentives in ObamaCare for the insurance companies not to bring in the best cancer treaters, the best heart facilities, because that means people with cancer and heart problems would sign up for those policies, and they might have to pay too much.

So it was really deviously inventive by the architect of ObamaCare to create a system that is going to be so bad it is going to fail at some point. The hope was that, when that day came, people would throw up their hands say: This is awful. I never thought I would say this, but maybe we are better off just letting the government take over every bit of healthcare.

Well, the government was already close to taking over all healthcare under ObamaCare, but as Senator Obama told people on video, it is basically government running all phases of healthcare. They give it a deceptive name: single-payer. But we can't get there in one step. It will take a couple of steps.

Well, ObamaCare was step one, and a complete government takeover of people's healthcare was step two.

Fortunately, if we can add to the House bill what was added into the Senate bill, a complete repeal of the individual mandate, then we will be on our way to bringing down premiums, to having people choose the health insurance policies they want.

Ultimately, we have got to encourage people to put their own money not in the pocket of the government, not in the pocket of the insurance company, but into their own health savings accounts and build that up. That is the hope for the future for young people: to have enough money in their account down the road that, by the time they become senior citizens, not only will they not want government intrusion, they won't need it.

Those that are chronically ill, chronically poor, and cannot work, we have got to reform welfare and return the requirements that were put in place that caused single moms for the first time in 30 years to start making much more than they had, when their income had been flat for 30 years when adjusted for inflation. I was surprised to see that on a chart--on a graph at Harvard, at a seminar up there; but sure enough, the facts spoke for themselves.

There are things we can do to help people return to work, to take care of themselves, make their own decisions, and I think this tax bill will help do that, especially if we put in the repeal of the individual mandate, as surprised as I am to keep hearing about how this tax bill is going to hurt the poor in America.

When the people who are paying 10 percent tax don't pay any tax, the people who were paying 25 percent start paying 12 percent tax, it is just really hard to accept someone saying that they are going to be paying more tax to help the rich when the rich did not get a tax reduction from the 39.6 percent.

I do want to take up a critically important decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. There is an article from Ian Mason today: ``President Donald Trump's travel ban is once again to largely go back into effect after the Supreme Court of the United States stayed two lower courts' injunctions Monday.

``The orders come in response to filings by the Department of Justice Friday, asking the Supreme Court to stay the preliminary injunctions in the two main travel ban cases, Hawaii v. Trump in the Ninth Circuit and International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump in the Fourth Circuit. These cases have been proceeding up and down the Federal court system for months.''

I do think, in the Judiciary Committee, it is time that we start bringing in some of these renegade judges who were not content to wear black robes and be judges, but took on the role of being legislators and being elected executives. They took all three branches into themselves, because basically what power the President didn't have to fully invoke the travel ban, Congress had given him any extra that he needed. He had full authority to do what he did.

Anybody can see that people could come in from countries where radical Islam was destroying the countries, and there were messages from the leaders of those radical Islamic groups who said: We are getting our soldiers into these groups of refugees that are going into Western civilization so that we can destroy them.

I mean, they weren't even hiding what they were doing, although they didn't tell us which individuals were their soldiers.

We had heard previously about vetting of individuals. We heard testimony in our committee that at least people coming from Iraq, when they applied to be refugees, they had some background we could compare and contrast what they were saying about their reasons to come in. We even had fingerprints on IDs. We had their criminal records from Iraq. We had their government records from Iraq. But as they came from Syria, some other countries, when Yemen was in chaos, we did not have the government records. We didn't have fingerprints. We didn't have anything.

We were told by those charged with the obligation of vetting these individuals: We will vet them, but we have got absolutely nothing to vet them with, so they will end up coming in, because we have got nothing to say that what they are saying is not true, even when they are radical Islamists who want to kill Americans and destroy our way of life.

What President Trump did was exceedingly reasonable, yet we had a Deputy Attorney General, Sally Yates, step forward and say: I am going to take on the role of President and justice and legislator and tell you I am not going to defend this law because I have judged it not to be up to my standards.

Well, she was wrong. She was wrong then and she is wrong today as she talks about issues even after her judgment is shown to be so flawed, as the Supreme Court has.

I know the travel ban was changed somewhat, but still, from what the Supreme Court has indicated, the President had the power to do what he did to protect Americans, despite what ``Justice'' Sally Yates said, without her black robe on, when she defied orders and defied the Constitution and refused to carry out her duties.

So that is a bit of good news.

Sarah Carter has another great story today that she got out. It can be found on hannity.com: ``FBI Supervisor Booted From Mueller Probe Interviewed Mike Flynn.''

The article says: ``A supervisory special agent who is now under scrutiny after being removed from Robert Mueller's special counsel's office for alleged bias against President Trump also oversaw the Bureau's interviews of embattled former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, this reporter has learned. Flynn recently pled guilty to one count of lying to the FBI last week.

``FBI agent Peter Strzok was one of two FBI agents who interviewed Flynn, which took place on January 24 at the White House, said several sources. The other FBI special agent who interviewed Flynn is described by sources as a field supervisor in the `Russian Squad, at the FBI's Washington field office,' according to a former intelligence official with knowledge of the interview.

``Strzok was removed from his role in the special counsel's office after it was discovered he had made disparaging comments about President Trump in text messages between him and his alleged lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, according to The New York Times and Washington Post, which first reported the stories. Strzok is also under investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General for his role in Hillary Clinton's email server and the ongoing investigation into Russia's election meddling. On Saturday, the House Intelligence Committee's chairman, Devin Nunes, chided the Justice Department and the FBI for not disclosing why Strzok had been removed from the special counsel 3 months ago, according to a statement given by the chairman.

``The former U.S. intelligence official told this reporter, `with the recent revelation that Strzok was removed from the special counsel investigation for making anti-Trump text messages, it seems likely that the accuracy and veracity of the 302 of Flynn's interview as a whole should be reviewed and called into question.' ''

Now, the 302 is the section 302 report summary by the FBI agent of what was said by the witness.

So we have a biased witness at the FBI who is not recording what Mike Flynn said word for word. He is writing down in his notes his biased, skewed opinion of what Mike Flynn said. We know it is biased, it is skewed.

Since Mike Flynn worked faithfully for so many years under--and survived--the purges over and over of Commander in Chief Obama and very, very briefly worked for Donald Trump, it would appear that Mike Flynn should have had more credibility than this Strzok character who hated Donald Trump so much.

I have heard talk that Mike Flynn could have fought this, but he basically had been bankrupted by the Department of Justice. He could not afford the attorney's fees anymore and, as sometimes happens, they threatened to go after his son. So he agreed to plea on this one count, since apparently the biased, prejudiced, partisan FBI agent Strzok had something different in his notes, his summary of what Mike Flynn said than what Mike Flynn said he said. So he pled out from under the terrible legal fees and this task force that seems to have unlimited authority, that doesn't seem to be reined in by Mr. Rosenstein that appointed Mueller.

Then we found out, well, heck no, of course not, because Rosenstein and Mueller were involved in getting files sealed; the facts of which, from what we understand, should have prevented the sale of American uranium from ever going forward.

So it only makes sense, gee, to convince Jeff Sessions to recuse himself. He says he talked to the career guys, like Rosenstein. He considered Rosenstein a career guy. Then he appoints his buddy who helped him in the Russian investigation over a number of years, which established that Russia was trying to corner the market, that they were bribing and they were committing crimes trying to get American uranium. For heaven's sake, if all of that came out, then Hillary Clinton wouldn't have been able to get her buddies to approve that sale so that Russia could end up with so much of our uranium.

Of course, if Russia didn't end up with so much of our uranium, do you really think $145 million from Uranium One--from the stockholders who ended up with the uranium and all the money that flowed with it, do you really think they would have given that to the Clinton Foundation? Because let's face it, they haven't given a dime since.

If they were all that charged up with all the good the Clinton Foundation was doing, doesn't it make sense they would have kept giving after Hillary Clinton was no longer the Secretary of State and when there was still hope of her being President? Even though that is gone, gee, wouldn't they have still contributed if it was all about the good the Clinton Foundation was doing?

Instead of a quid pro quo, if you get us this uranium, we will make you rich. You will hit the Russian lottery, the megamillions lottery for the Clintons. And hit the Russian lottery they did.

``A former FBI agent said the investigation into Strzok and the reported text messages between him and Page shows a `bias that cannot be ignored particularly if he had anything to do with Flynn's interview and his role in it.'

``The former U.S. intelligence official questioned, `how logical is it that Flynn is being charged for lying to an agent whose character and neutrality was called into question by the special counsel.'

``According to an anonymous source in The Washington Post, Strzok and Page had exchanged a number of texts that `expressed anti-Trump sentiments and other comments that appeared to favor Clinton.'''

That was apparently between Strzok and his lover. So it is not because he is a man full of hate; apparently, he is a man full of love.

``McCabe told Flynn: `Some agents were heading over to the White House, but Flynn thought it was part of the routine work the FBI had been doing and said they would be cleared at the gate,' the source said.

``'It wasn't until after they were already in Flynn's office that he realized he was being formally interviewed. He didn't have an attorney with him,' they added.''

``According to another source with direct knowledge of the January 24 interview, McCabe had contacted Flynn by phone directly at the White House. White House officials had spent the `earlier part of the week with the FBI overseeing training and security measures associated with their roles so it was no surprise to Flynn that McCabe had called.'''

Snuck up on him. Apparently that is supposed to be a lesson: the FBI calls, you never know if it is somebody who hates you and hates the people you work for.

An article by Daniel Flynn of Breitbart: ``The former Assistant Director of the FBI wonders who investigates the investigators in the wake of former Trump administration National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleading guilty to lying to the FBI and agreeing to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's probe.

``'Bob Mueller should have never been offered nor accepted the job as special counsel as he has a huge conflict of interest,' Jim Kallstrom tells Breitbart News. `He should have recused himself.'''

It sounds like what I have been saying for many months now.

``Not only do observers describe Mueller and the man he recommended to replace him as FBI Director, James Comey, as close or even best friends, but the special counsel pursues an investigation heavily involving the Bureau he once led. How one maintains detachment in leading a team that includes numerous anti-Trump partisans in a probe involving one's close friend and the former Bureau for which Mueller served as Director goes unexplained.

``Other problems Kallstrom sees include the means by which investigators obtained information and what constituted probable cause to obtain it.

``'The Obama administration apparently had the advantage of using electronic surveillance, collecting information on the Trump campaign,' Kallstrom explains. `That collection, in my view, may be found to be unlawful.'

``At the very least, one administration conducting surveillance on the opposition party looking to replace it strikes as unusual if not unprecedented. In 1972, for instance, President Richard Nixon's political team relied on former agents of the FBI and CIA to gather intelligence on the Democratic Party.

``If the surveillance and investigatory methods prove unlawful, Kallstrom notes that this puts Mueller in an awkward position of looking into its close friend and perhaps the Bureau that both men once led.

``'If they used the phony dossier as the predicate for the FISA order they obtained, that could be a huge problem,' Kallstrom tells Breitbart News.

`If they knew the information was phony, that is a felony. If they did not know it was phony, they were incompetent.'

``The `dossier,' which Americans belatedly discovered as an opposition research investigation funded by Hillary Clinton's campaign and other partisan sources, served as a justification in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to obtain a wiretap to Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled the opposition research dubbed an intelligence dossier in the media, admits that he neither traveled to Russia nor spoke to many of the sources for the anti-Trump document that the Clinton campaign funded and the FBI used in its investigation.

``'This whole matter with the dossier and the investigations that ensued, including FISA surveillance and the unmasking of hundreds of names, in my view, will prove to be violations of the rules set down by the Congress for unmasking, or worse, will be found to be violations of Federal law,' Kallstrom concludes. `The Justice Department should find out if the FBI paid for this phony dossier and should inspect the affidavit that was given to FISA court to determine the accuracy of their probable cause.'''

Hopefully, that is what is being done at this time, but, as I understand it, the pro-Hillary Clinton people still at the Justice Department have not been forthcoming with the information. That remains to be seen.

Other articles are talking about the anti-Trump text messages showing a pattern of bias on Mueller's team, by Chuck Ross today in the Daily Caller.

Jonathan Easley with The Hill: ``FreedomWatch Sues to Remove Mueller.''

Thank goodness for FreedomWatch doing so.

The article says: ``A conservative group filed suit on Monday seeking to remove special counsel Robert Mueller from the Justice Department's investigation into Russian meddling.

``Conservative lawyer Larry Klayman, the founder of the watchdog group FreedomWatch, filed a complaint in U.S. District Court that seeks to force the Justice Department to investigate leaks from the special counsel, as well as `the obvious conflicts of interest among staff.'

``The complaint against Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray states that `it is a criminal offense to leak grand jury information' and seeks Mueller's removal.

``'Robert Mueller is not a ``man of integrity'' as the Washington, D.C., Democrat and Republican political establishment like to spin,' Klayman said in a statement. `He is just another pol who is representing his establishment benefactors in both political parties who want to see the Presidency of Donald Trump destroyed.'

``There is deep anger at Mueller on the right and growing calls for him to recuse himself from the special counsel investigation into whether Trump campaign officials had improper contacts with Moscow during the 2016 election.

``Klayman is hanging his legal effort on the notion that Mueller is too close to former FBI Director James Comey and allegations that his team has leaked damaging stories about those he's investigating to the press. The complaint also argues that Mueller has politicized the probe by hiring Democrats for his investigative team.

``Conservatives have also argued that Mueller's probe has extended beyond his mandate of investigating Russian meddling.

``More recently, conservative media and others on the right have drawn attention to Mueller's time as FBI Director, questioning why he didn't alert regulators that a subsidiary of a foreign uranium mining company was under investigation before a controversial deal for the sale of the company to a Russia-owned firm was approved.

``'He must be held accountable to the law and should not be able to do as he pleases to further his and his friends', like former FBI Director James Comey's, political agenda,' Klayman said. `We are hopeful that the court will order Justice to do its job and conduct an expeditious and impartial investigation and then order Mueller to step down as special counsel. There are others, perhaps who practice outside of the Washington, D.C., swamp, who could step in and do an honest and conflict-free investigation of so-called Russian collusion.'''

Quite interesting, but this article today from Samantha Schmidt, Washington Post, is quite ironic. ``James Comey, Sally Yates and Eric Holder Defend FBI After Trump's Twitter Attack.''

Now, this is the same Eric Holder who lied to us repeatedly in our Judiciary Committee hearings. He obfuscated, concealed evidence, refused to disclose evidence, was found in contempt, but he still has the unmitigated gall to step forward as if he is a paragon of virtue and can stand up for Mueller's character, I guess.

Comey also has taken to tweeting out Bible verses. I think that is wonderful. I applaud him reading the Bible. I wish he had been relying on the Bible a little more when he was FBI Director before he started preparing the statement that would indicate there was nothing to prosecute Hillary Clinton over before she was actually investigated and before he gave immunity to people, before he let her lawyer, who was a witness, sit in on conversations before he was part of exonerating her, even though the evidence that he recited made clear an offense had been committed.

There were stories that the only reason he came out before the election and said he was reopening the investigation was so that he could keep FBI agents who had found all these tens of thousands of emails on Anthony Weiner's computer, Huma Abedin's--they said that this surely justifies because here are emails that she said didn't exist.

So he goes public and says they reopened. If that is true, they kept those FBI agents from coming forward, resigning, or saying that he was doing what it appears now, with more evidence, that he was apparently doing, exonerating Hillary Clinton, though evidence was there to go further.

I remember telling some media back then, well, we will know whether this is a serious reopening of the investigation, words like that. If he comes back in a week and says, ``Oh, no,'' before the election, ``nothing here,'' then clearly he would not have had enough time to go through all the emails. And they hadn't, but he came forward and exonerated her anyway.

The New York Post had an article yesterday, the editorial board: ``Another Anti-Trump `Smoking Gun' Turns Out to Be Nothing.''

``Once again, a supposed big break in the drive to destroy President Trump over `collusion' with the Russians during the 2016 campaign stands exposed as nothing more than bad reporting. Plus, the professionalism of the FBI looks compromised by anti-Trump bias.''

As it does by the comments by people like Yates, Holder, and Comey.

It says: ``The media went berserk Friday on news that former Trump confidante Mike Flynn had copped a plea deal with special counsel Bob Mueller. All the usual suspects launched an orgy of speculation on what beans Flynn `must' have spilled.

``It all went into overdrive as ABC's Brian Ross reported that Flynn had been instructed to reach out to Moscow during the campaign: This seemed to be the long-awaited proof of collusion with Vladimir Putin against Hillary Clinton.

``Except that Ross retracted the claim hours later: The reach-out was only after election day, when any President-elect is expected to start connecting with other world leaders, U.S.-friendly or not.''

That is the whole sad thing about Mike Flynn. It was not a crime for him to reach out to the Russians after the election. The claim was that there was some big collusion to bring down Hillary Clinton, when it appears we really don't know who hacked into the DNC server. It certainly could have been an inside job involving the Awan brothers, or at least Imran Awan. Pretty sad days.

The Hill reports dismissed FBI agent changed Comey's language on Clinton emails to ``extremely careless.'' Olivia Beavers, today, reported:

``The former FBI official, who was recently fired from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia team over messages critical of President Trump, reportedly edited a key phrase that removed possible legal implications in

former FBI Director James Comey's statement about his decision on the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

``Peter Strzok, who served as a counterintelligence expert at the Bureau, changed the description of Clinton's actions in Comey's statement, CNN reported Monday, citing U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

``One source told the news outlet that electronic records reveal that Strzok changed the language from `grossly negligent' to `extremely careless,' scrubbing a key word that could have had legal ramifications for Clinton. An individual who mishandled classified material could be prosecuted under Federal law for `gross negligence.' ''

Pretty tragic.

The article goes on to say:

``Strzok, who served as the No. 2 official leading the probe into the Clinton email server, has been thrust into the center of controversy after news of his dismissal from Comey's team.

``A group of people were part of the drafting process, using a red pen on Comey's statement before he publicly came forward, another U.S. official familiar with the matter told CNN.

``Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley questioned the revised language change after receiving FBI records last month before CNN reported Strzok's edits.

``Mueller and his team are broadly investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, including whether Trump campaign aides colluded with the Russians.''

And, boy, ``broadly investigating'' is an understatement.

``In July 2016, Comey said that Clinton's use of a private email server while Secretary of State was `extremely careless,' but he added that `no reasonable prosecutor' would charge her.''

Mr. Speaker--I want to finish on this note--Salem, Oregon; FOX News; Jonathan Easley reporting:

``A Mexican man, who was deported from the United States more than a dozen times was sentenced Friday in Oregon to 35 years in prison after pleading guilty to sodomy, kidnapping, sex abuse, and other charges in separate attacks on two women.

``Sergio Jose Martinez told victims' relatives he would see them in hell after sentence was pronounced Friday in a Portland courtroom.''

And I would interject, there is a decent chance they may not be at the same place he is in the next life.

``Just a day earlier, another man who had also been deported multiple times for being in America illegally, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, was found not guilty by a jury in San Francisco in the shooting death of a woman. That case that touched off a national immigration debate.''

I just want to finish by saying that there is a lot of talk about amnesty, DACA, all these different things, but, Mr. Speaker, the truth is: until the border is secured, we should not even be talking about amnesty, about any kind of legality for people who are here illegally, because it creates another swarm across our border. And if we are going to do this, we are going to have to keep doing it every few years because the people are going to keep coming.

We must build a wall where it is needed, and we must secure the border. When that is done, we can work these other things out. But until the border is secured, we should not even be talking about it.

People, like these criminals, these rapists, shouldn't even have been in this country. People are dead who should be alive. People have had their lives murderously tortured through horrendous sexual assaults. So many lives have been harmed or ended.

Let's secure the border, let's do what it takes, and then we can work the other things out.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 51 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, December 5, 2017, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, as folks head back to their districts--and I will be doing so shortly--it is important to take a look at some things that have been rather important here in our country.

The Department of Justice does need an investigation into the matters that have been raised and clearly were not handled properly regarding the Russian Uranium One program and the sale of a significant percentage of United States uranium, ultimately, to Russia.

There appears to be collusion, for sure. It is still staggering to think that the person who accepted the role as special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, would accept that, knowing that he and the person that selected him as special prosecutor, Mr. Rosenstein, were involved in the Russian investigation that went on for a number of years and involved a person working undercover and clearly established for Director Mueller, as head of the FBI, and for Mr. Rosenstein, the U.S. Attorney, that Russia was trying to corner the market by acquiring American uranium.

Yet, while you had a man like Jeff Sessions trying to go out of his way to ensure that nobody could say he acted inappropriately--I think it was done prematurely, but he recused himself--not wanting to be a burden to the President.

As much as Attorney General Jeff Sessions was trying to be fair and avoid even the appearance of questions about him handling the Russian investigation, you had Robert Mueller and the Deputy Attorney General acting--or appeared to be--even more inappropriately than Jeff Sessions was acting, beyond the pale of honor, as they are two people involved in the investigation of Russia acquiring American uranium, even though it wasn't just Hillary Clinton that signed off on it. It was also Eric Holder and some others.

All that needed to be investigated, but not by the people who covered up the prior Russia investigation and saw to the sealing of many of the documents involving that investigation. In fact, Mr. Rosenstein's name was actually on the motion to seal matters involved in that investigation.

It seemed pretty clear that if you are going to go to the trouble of sealing an investigation like that, and the extraordinary measure of getting the person who is acting undercover, force him, threaten him, get him to sign a nondisclosure agreement under threat, seems to me that wasn't an arm's-length transaction. That was done under coercion by the most powerful law enforcement people in the country at the time, threatening to bring down the full weight of the United States Government on the man who was working for them, helping them find the evidence that showed how Russia was acting so inappropriately and illegally trying to get hold of our uranium.

Just when you think, ``Well, just can't be much more in the way of surprises,'' The Daily Caller's Richard Pollock has a story on November 30: ``DOD Inspector General Opens Probe Into Alleged Retaliation by Obama Holdover.''

It says: ``The Pentagon's Inspector General has launched a preliminary investigation into charges that James H. Baker, the Director of the Defense Department's Office of Net Assessment, ONA, is retaliating against a whistleblower who warned of `rigged' contracts to outside consultants, The Daily Caller News Foundation has confirmed.

``The DCNF verified through two independent sources that the Acting IG, Glenn A. Fine, initiated a formal `Whistleblower Reprisal Investigation' September 28 to look into allegations that Baker unleashed various reprisals against Adam Lovinger, a senior ONA official. Lovinger warned about potential sweetheart deals to politically connected outside contractors, including one with a woman Chelsea Clinton has referred to as her `best friend.'

``The IG is investigating Baker's actions under Presidential Policy Directive-19, an October 2012 directive designed to protect members of the intelligence community who report waste, fraud, and abuse. The directive pointedly states that it `prohibits retaliation against employees for reporting waste, fraud, and abuse.'

``Baker is an Obama holdover appointed by Secretary Ashton Carter in May 2015, who remains the ONA Director 11 months into the Trump administration.''

I might insert here: This has got to be so frustrating to the President of the United States as the Senate Democrats continue to hold up efforts to get nominations confirmed so that he can start implementing the policies that he was elected to carry out. They are thwarting him by continuing to have Obama holdovers, even though that term apparently, we are told, offends our National Security Advisor McMaster--a guy who apparently can't stand the President and is thwarting his efforts at every turn he can.

But the guy is an Obama holdover. He should not be making calls, yet he is staying around, according to this information, to carry out vendettas against someone who was a whistleblower complaining of sweetheart deals to people, including Ms. Clinton's best friend.

Richard Pollock from The Daily Caller goes on to say: ``Lovinger specifically protested $11.2 million in ONA contracts awarded over a decade to the Long Term Strategic Group, a company owned by Jacqueline Newmyer, a childhood friend of Chelsea Clinton. Clinton and Newmyer first met each other while attending Sidwell Friends School, an exclusive private Quaker school in the Nation's Capital. They were in each others' weddings, and, in 2011, Chelsea referred to Newmyer as her best friend.

``Lovinger's attorney, Sean M. Bigley, accuses Baker of continuing the . . . contract''--with Chelsea Clinton's friend--``in the hopes it could help him in a Clinton Presidency.

`` `We submit that Baker's interest was his awareness of the LTSG- Clinton connection; his presumptive desire to exploit that to his advantage in the event of a Clinton election win; and the fact that contractors like LTSG served as a lucrative landing pad for ONA retirees,' Bigley charged in a September 13 letter to Rear Admiral Kevin Sweeney, chief of staff for Defense Secretary James Mattis.

``The IG's decision to launch a preliminary investigation occurred as former high-profile national security officials are beginning to publicly weigh in about Baker's allegedly retaliatory actions.

``Richard Perle, Ronald Reagan's former Assistant Secretary of Defense, told the DCNF of Lovinger, `He has been treated so badly. It's a disgrace.' ''

He is talking about the whistleblower who pointed out this unseemly relationship and unfair awarding of contracts to the Clinton friend.

Richard Pollock from The Daily Caller goes on to say: ``Perle called Baker `a shallow and manipulative character that should have gone with the change in administration.' ''

Baker being the Obama holdover.

In any event, it is just incredible when you think there surely can't be any more shoes to drop about improprieties from the last administration. They just keep coming.

But as a former prosecutor, former judge, former chief justice, what occurred in a decision by the jury in the Kate Steinle homicide is really extraordinary. You know, when I was handling cases as a felony judge, I know sometimes juries surprised me. But in this case, for a jury to find that he wasn't--this person, this illegal alien who had been deported five times and who should have been deported the sixth, except San Francisco was protecting him, to the detriment of its residents, the jury comes back and says he wasn't even negligent in firing the gun that killed Kate Steinle. I mean, that is just staggering beyond words.

But when a verdict is seen that just goes against what the evidence shows clearly, I mean, it could have easily found that, yes, they don't find him to be credible; but, of course, you had the judge--number one, you had the judge protecting him, going way beyond what would seem normal to many judges in order to protect this guy.

His story was apparently that--well, actually he had several stories. So anytime a jury is presented with several different stories about how something happened coming from the same individual who is on trial, normally, is my experience in noticing, that if a jury finds that you lied to them about one thing, they seem to find it easier to find you guilty of what you are charged with. That often happens.

Even sometimes when I might have been surprised that they could find someone guilty of the more serious charge, when there is a lesser included, like there was in this case--but it went back to where the jury felt like he had

lied to us on this, so he is probably guilty of the crime. I mean, I am just talking from a practicality standpoint the way sometimes jurors look at things.

But in this case, it didn't bother the judge. And from what the jury was allowed to hear, that the judge didn't obstruct, it should have been clear this was not an honest individual and that there is likely a very good chance he would lie to avoid a murder conviction, and that is why the different stories about how he came to shoot Kate Steinle as she walked along arm-in-arm with her father. Just incredible.

This story from John Diaz of the San Francisco Chronicle says: ``As they awaited the verdict in the trial of Kate Steinle's accused killer, her parents and brother had one overriding wish. It had nothing to do with the severity of the defendant's conviction.

``Above all, they wanted it to mark the end of a public profile they neither sought nor enjoyed. Each media interview, each exploitation of Kate's name for political gain, each still shot of her smile on television only amplified the anguish of their loss. Yet they also wanted to convey their appreciation for the many strangers who, having heard their story, offered solace and assistance.

`` `We just want to get this over with and move on with our lives and think about Kate on our terms. Nothing's been on our terms. It's been on everyone else's terms,' said Jim Steinle, who was strolling with his 32-year-old daughter on a crowded San Francisco pier when she was shot and killed July 1, 2015. He, his wife, Liz Sullivan, and their son, Brad Steinle, sat down with the Chronicle recently at their longtime East Bay home for an exclusive interview they planned to be their last.

`` `We have never had a second of anger--not a moment,' Jim said. `Frustration, maybe, and sadness for sure, but no anger and no retaliation or vindictiveness or anything like that. We're not that kind of people. Even if this guy gets 100 years in prison, it doesn't solve anything; it doesn't help anything. We would just like people to know . . . that's the Steinles' feelings.'

``They had decided not to attend court to hear the jury's decision.

``On Thursday, the verdict arrived: Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was acquitted of all murder and manslaughter charges. He was convicted merely of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

`` `We're just shocked--saddened and shocked . . . that's about it,' Jim said. `There's no other way you can coin it. Justice was rendered, but it was not served.'

``Brad said he was `not surprised,' considering the `epic failure' that led Garcia Zarate to be released on the streets and end up with a loaded handgun on the pier that day.''

``I'm stunned that they couldn't even get him on using the weapon,'' Brad said.

It really is staggering. The jury could not find him guilty of even a negligent-type homicide.

Okay, you could have reasonable doubt, apparently. I don't think most people would. But, in San Francisco, all they hear about from the media and elected officials is how the illegal aliens are the victims and not so much someone like Kate Steinle as a true victim. That sets a jury up to make an inappropriate finding.

The Washington Examiner reports today, Anna Giaritelli:

``Thousands of Twitter users on Friday were urging people to #boycottsanfrancisco after a jury there decided Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, a five-time deported Mexican man charged with shooting and killing Kate Steinle, was not guilty.

``The Boycott San Francisco hashtag began trending on Twitter Friday morning as people vowed not to travel there or buy goods or services produced in the city.''

Mr. Speaker, I don't normally advocate any type of boycott, and I really don't here. My thought is that people need to consider their own safety. When they are in dangerous places in the world, our State Department will issue a travel warning to Americans: Be careful. Try to avoid this area. It is not safe. It is dangerous.

And I think that the Nation should have gotten a picture that in San Francisco they are far more concerned about making sure that illegal alien felons have a place for a hangout--a hideout. The Hole-in-the- Wall Gang would have been, apparently, very welcome there if they had only been illegal aliens, instead of simple outlaws.

It is as if they want a monument in the Bay with a sign reading: Give us your outlaws, so long as they come in illegally.

I have an article, also in the Washington Examiner by Anna Giaritelli. The headline is: ``Trump: Kate Steinle verdict more reason to `Build the Wall!' '' The President is exactly right; he is exactly right.

I go back to the case of the gentleman who was, obviously, in the country illegally. I recall he had had nine DWIs. On a third DWI in Texas, it can be raised up to a felony. That is how he ended up in my court, but not on the third DWI. He had had many DWIs. It was not brought to the DA's attention, because we had a terrific DA, but it just wasn't brought to his attention that this guy already had so many DWIs.

The immigration authorities hadn't done anything, until, finally, he was driving drunk, hit another car, and did serious injury to people in the car. They were very loving, caring people. But he was clearly an alcoholic.

So I sent him to prison, considering the safety of people in Texas. This guy was out there driving drunk that many times. It was a wonder he hadn't killed somebody. He certainly would kill somebody if he was not stopped. And, since he had not been deported, I felt, considering the need for deterrence, for punishment, for public safety, all that dictated that I needed to send him to prison; so I did.

I was shocked that, within about 6 months, he was in my court again. I recognized him, and I asked him what he was doing back in my court. He said that he was charged with another DWI as a felony. I said: But I ordered him to prison. How does he end up, just in a matter of a few months, being back in my court for another felony?

And he explained that, about 3 months after I sent him to prison, he was picked up by the immigration authorities at the prison, taken to the border, ordered to walk across the border, and he did. And he said that he waited until they drove away, and then he walked back across the border and ended up back in Smith County, Texas.

So, on that occasion, I thought: Man, they are going to only deport the man if I send him to prison. And we don't have a wall. President Clinton certainly was not enforcing the border sufficiently during those years, so I thought: I still have to protect people here; so I will send him to a lockdown felony substance abuse facility where he is in a lockdown, he can't go anywhere, a confined place, with others who are either drug addicts or alcoholics.

I got a report 3 or 4 months after he went into the felony punishment for substance abuse defendants that the immigration authorities at the time picked him up and took him to the border. And if it happened the way that he was deported the time before, as he told me, they told him to walk across the border, he did, he waited until the border officials, the immigration officials, left, and then he came right back across the border immediately.

The only thing I don't know is where he ended up, if he continued to follow the trend and continued coming back into the country. A law enforcement officer said: Well, one thing for sure, he knows he doesn't want to come back to your court because he is going to get locked up one way or another. So, in all likelihood, after the immigration officials drove away, he probably came back and went to somebody else's county where he heard they didn't have a judge like me who would enforce the law.

But it put people at risk, and Americans have known that. And Candidate Trump promised to do something about it, and he sure is trying, but he needs Congress' help.

I still don't have any doubt that, at some point, we are going to get concessions from Mexico that will pay for the wall, but it needs to be done for our own safety, our own benefit. And even though there are those who say that is an outrageous thing to do to Mexico, it actually is the kindest, best thing we could ever do for Mexico.

Those who have been there--my wife and I honeymooned in Mexico--it is a

beautiful, beautiful place, a wonderful place. We have vacationed there, certainly not in recent years. But it is incredible, the beauty that lies in different places in Mexico.

And we know--from people there and from people who have come from Mexico into the United States: many of them I have gotten to know and love, people I went t church with, people who came legally--these are hardworking, God-fearing folks. And although it might be an over generalization, still the fact is that most of the people who emigrate to the United States from Mexico whom I have ever gotten to know--and it is a lot--they love God, they love their family, and they are hardworking.

I also have to think an abundance of those three feelings are what made America the greatest, freest, most opportune country in the history of the world.

I was reading again last night about Solomon's reign in Israel. Israel didn't even have the individual assets during that incredible wise man's reign--well, wise until he started having so many wives. That will take anybody's wisdom away from them. But an incredible place to have lived, with all of the advantages that were found in Israel, back during Solomon's reign.

But they didn't have individual opportunity, individual assets, individual freedoms, like we have in America. And some people get to thinking--because they don't know the history of the world--they get to thinking that: Gee, even if things don't work out and we lose our freedom here in America, another America will pop up somewhere: a country that loves freedom to the extent that its own citizens will travel to other places in the world and fight and die for other people's freedom. I mean, there has just never been a place like the United States of America.

And I have mentioned him before, and I will mention him again. The gentleman from west Africa named Ebenezer, an older gentleman, who, with other west Africans, met with me before I left. My wife had been there with Mercy Ships. And, ultimately, at the end of our reception together, he pointed out and said: America has been getting weak, and we were excited when you elected your first Black President, but we have seen America get weaker and weaker. And you need to know and tell people in Washington that when America gets weak, we suffer. He said: You know, we are Christians. We all know where we are going when we die. But our only chance of having peace in this life is if America is strong.

There has not been another country, that I can find, in the history of the world that fought for, not imperialism, as some ignorant of history have said about the United States. Obviously--it should be obvious--not imperialism, because people in Germany and France speak German and they speak French, and people in Japan speak Japanese.

I mean, we were not out for imperialism, we were out for freedom. We liberated Kuwait under George H. W. Bush. We didn't demand that they become colonies of the United States. They are an independent nation.

In Bosnia, in so many places, we have spilled American blood for the freedom and benefit of others. There has never been a nation like this that had so many individual assets and opportunities. But whether or not they will continue has a lot to do with what this body does.

A wall between us and Mexico--where it is appropriate, where it is needed--would be the best thing that we could do for Mexico because they have the natural resources, they have a better location for trade than the United States. They have hardworking, God-fearing people. So why are they not one of the top ten economies in the world?

It is clear the answer is corruption.

Why is there so much corruption in Mexico? Because of the drug cartels and the drug money, the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars--billions, with a B, of dollars--that has gone to the drug cartels through the purchases of drugs, and, of course, they have gotten into bringing people across the border illegally.

Border patrolmen have told me on many occasions I have been down there during the night that there is not an inch of the border between Mexico and the United States that is not under the auspices of some drug cartel.

Some drug cartels, I was told, allow some Mexican gangs to carry out their jurisdiction and enforce their jurisdiction on that part of the border they control, but what the border patrolmen would tell me is that there is no one who comes across the border illegally in that drug cartel's sector who does not pay or does not do something to get the permission of the drug cartel to come in; because they are all told, when they are brought in illegally, that for those who still owe money and have agreed to work in the city where you are ordered to go by the drug cartel, if you fail to keep paying the drug cartels the money you owe them, you keep selling drugs to repay the money or engage in prostitution to repay the money, if you fail to do that: We have people all over the U.S. They will come and they will kill you.

This stuff is going on in the United States.

When Woodrow Wilson was President, certainly not my favorite President, but even Woodrow Wilson, after a Mexican gang led by Pancho Villa came across the U.S. border one time too many and killed a bunch of American families, Woodrow Wilson said enough is enough. They didn't have the wherewithal to build a wall where they needed it back then, so he sent American troops. Something new called the National Guard was also utilized.

I have asked for the official number of U.S. troops that Woodrow Wilson, as President, sent to the border to enforce the border, and I have gotten anywhere from 15,000 to 150,000. I continue to get different figures. It may have been 75,000. Regardless, Woodrow Wilson sent American troops to stop people from illegally entering the country. He also sent a general after Pancho Villa.

In the last administration, I have heard it said that no one has done more than the Obama administration to protect our border.

I know no one said that intentionally misleading. They just were not aware that Woodrow Wilson sent potentially tens of thousands of American troops to the border so that nobody came across into the United States illegally to kill Americans the way Pancho Villa had done that invoked President Wilson into sending the troops.

President Trump doesn't want to have to send so many precious American lives to stand around the border protecting us. Why should they, when, in so many places, all we need is to build a wall and have it enforced the way Israel enforces its wall.

The irony about the Israeli wall, as I have visited and been shown around their so-called wall, 75 percent of the Israeli wall that has saved an abundance of children's lives who were being killed by Palestinian radical Islamists--they could walk across, right into a basketball court or a schoolyard, blow themselves up, killing as many children as they could; walk into a restaurant where innocent people were sitting, having pleasant times together, many families, and blow themselves up to kill as many Israelis as possible. They did a remarkable job of cutting the violence by building a wall, 75 percent of which is a fence. The difference is, though, that their fence is monitored 24/7, and nobody comes across without them noticing and having people on the spot before the person can actually get across.

We could do that. If Israel can do that, we could do that.

Although there are Mexican leaders who have appeared to have been outraged, they have to know deep in their heart that, if we build a wall and stop the flow of American money, billions of American dollars into Mexico's drug cartels, they can't fund the corruption; they can't keep killing any police official that gets in their way, putting their heads on pikes to set an example for others that you don't mess with the drug cartels in Mexico.

If we bring that flow of billions of dollars to a tiny trickle, then Mexico can begin to experience the kind of success that they should be experiencing. We could be the best neighbor Mexico could ever have if we just help them by building a wall, stopping anything from crossing the border illegally, including drugs, and you would have people wanting to go to Mexico and live permanently from America if they could trust the law enforcement situation there, which they really can't right now.

I know there are plenty of Americans who have bought property there, but the restrictions on Americans buying property in Mexico is so significant, if we applied the same terms on Mexicans seeking to buy property in America, the whole of Mexico would be absolutely outraged that we were treating them the way they treat us.

As this article in the Washington Examiner points out that President Trump said it, and he is accurate in saying it, the Kate Steinle verdict is one more reason to build the wall. I hope and I pray we won't have to wait until more people are killed, as is occurring regularly, by illegal aliens.

It doesn't even have to be deaths. I mean, constituents of mine have been harmed by people who come into this country illegally, driving without a driver's license or driving without insurance, hitting cars, whether they do injury to the occupant or not.

I mentioned before, a girl weeping. She is in high school. She has to work. An illegal alien rammed her car, had no insurance, and she and her mom, single mom, could only afford the insurance for others, liability insurance; they couldn't afford the insurance to cover themselves, so she couldn't replace her car. If she can't replace her car, she cries that: I can't work, and my mother and I can't live.

How can you let people come in illegally and do such harm to Americans and wreck our lives? He even drove away in his car without a license, without insurance. He drove away in his car after he totaled hers.

It is time that we did the job we took an oath to do. If we enforce the Constitution, the laws of the land, then Americans will be protected and we become stronger.

Because of the idealistic nature of this Nation, it has assured the freedom of more and more people: first the people in our own Nation-- the Constitution eventually came to represent what it said, all people were to be treated equally--and now to the point that, for 100 years, we have been in wars off and on that ensured freedom for others as well.

It is time to build the wall.

In the meantime, hopefully, we are about to have a major tax reform bill. I would like to have seen a flat tax across the board. You make more, you pay more. The more you make, the more you pay. That is not what we have done, but it is a reform.

It will mean that even more poorer Americans pay no income tax, and the poorer working poor, fewer of them will pay any income tax, and people will pay less tax.

The only rate that is not lowered in the tax proposal the House and Senate had was the wealthiest Americans. That was left at 39.6 percent.

Some of us think we should have had a smooth, even percentage cut across the board for everybody. How could you argue that that was not fairness? Republican leaders thought: No. We will leave the highest rate on the wealthiest Americans. We will leave that percentage right where it is so we can't be accused of taxing the poor to help the rich.

Now, some will take the actual numbers of the amount of money that will be saved and say: See, people who are making more are saving more.

Well, yeah. People who pay a lot more in income tax will save a little bit, but not nearly the percentage that people who are the working poor will save percentagewise.

The best thing for the American economy will be the cut in corporate taxes. The corporate tax has been a gimmick by both parties for so many years, telling people: Oh, no. These rich, greedy corporations, we will make them pay.

Well, that is hiding the ball, because the fact is no corporation can stay in business unless they pass on the cost of the corporate tax to their customers, their clients, for their goods and services. They have to pass on that cost or they can't stay in business. They just can't.

We have the highest corporate tax of any industrialized nation in the world. China is a little less than half of our 35 percent. That is why President Trump was pushing so hard, as were many of us: Let's at least take it to 15 percent.

Whatever the percentage is, unless it is zero, it is a tariff on Americans' goods and services. How insane for a country to put a tariff on its own goods and services so that it makes us less competitive in the world market.

If you took away the 35 percent tariff called the corporate tax on American-made goods, we could compete globally; but because we put such a huge tariff on our own goods, 35 percent, then our goods are far too often not competitive in the world market.

If we make our own products competitive anywhere, people around the world, if American prices were more competitive, they would love to buy American products.

When some of us went to China, talked to CEOs about why they moved there, I heard the number one answer being the corporate tax.

I loved hearing them say: Now, our best quality control was in America.

We have got better quality control. We have got better quality of workers. I love hearing that around the world. Yeah, the best workers are in America, best quality control for our products is in America, lowest margin of error among our plants is in America. We make good stuff. Those who take pride in what they do, that is an American way.

People would love to buy them, but not when our 35 percent tariff we put on our own corporate-made goods are not able to compete as they would if we removed it.

But at least at the 15 percent the President and some of us were pushing for--we would have undercut China's income tax for corporations, and just even a point or two undercutting China's income tax or corporate income tax would have brought so many manufacturing jobs back to America.

I know there are elitists in America who say: Well, yeah, but those manufacturing jobs, those are not for classy countries like America. No, we have evolved upward into a service economy. We provide elegant services. We are not into manufacturing goods. We leave that to more developing nations.

But the historical fact is clear: any powerful nation that cannot manufacture what it needs in a time of war will not be a powerful nation past the next war.

Just as Jesus assured there will always be wars and rumors of war, we have to be aware. As long as we are in this world, we have to protect our country, protect ourselves, and it doesn't matter if you are a Christian or not a Christian. Those who are Christian sometimes say: Oh, yeah, but Jesus said we have got to love our neighbors as ourselves. Blessed are the meek, his Sermon on the Mount and all.

That is absolutely the way Christians are supposed to live, but when they are acting as the government, we are to be mindful of Romans, Romans 13. The government is to be an encourager of good conduct. We are not supposed to design programs to lure people away from their productivity, lure them away from their potential and that wonderful, awesome feeling of multiple employers wanting you to come work for them.

Too many young people have never experienced that. I really believe, with a major tax cut like we have passed in the House, there will be more and more young people that will know that feeling. It is such a gratifying feeling when multiple firms want you to work for them. You can decide whether you want to be on your own, start your own business, or go to work for someone. It is just an awesome feeling.

The economy has struggled so, never hit 3 percent growth in any year in the last 8 years, and now we have had 2 months back-to-back where we hit over 3 percent growth. If we can do that, we are going to bring in more Federal revenue, even with the lower taxes. It is going to be great for America. People are going to see what it is like to have more companies wanting you.

We do need to come to grips with the number of people we are allowing in this country, both illegally and legally. No country in the world allows a million people to come into its country legally like the United States does. We allow that many legally.

I happen to be helping a fellow Texan who emigrated from Mexico, has been here on visas legally for 15 years. She is trying to get her citizenship. She has done everything she can legally, but it gets really frustrating for someone from Mexico who is following the rules,

following the law, doing everything according to American law.

That is the kind of person we want to come here, someone who has respect for the law.

We are helping her try to get her citizenship, but, unfortunately, that part of our government is only now looking at applications from September of last year. Hoping not to have to get yet another visa, surely this greatest Nation in the world could move faster on applications for citizenship and visas. Surely we could at least work as fast as Third World nations that don't have computers. Apparently, in some cases, we don't.

We owe it to all of those who have sought to come into America legally and to all of those who were born here, at least born here and are American citizens. The children of diplomats who are born in the United States are not U.S. citizens.

Originally, when the 14th Amendment passed--and you can go back and look at the debate, back at the time--the advocates for the 14th Amendment were saying obviously there will be people who have children born in America whose children will not be citizens. They contemplated that would be diplomats from foreign countries who are in this country legally as diplomats of foreign countries. Their children would not be citizens, and they are not.

They also contemplated that, if you snuck into this country illegally, certainly your children would not be citizens. That would be insane. Yet what they thought would be insane is the way things have been interpreted for far too long.

We ought to be able to say who can come into the country legally and approve anybody who comes in, whether legally or illegally, for citizenship on our own terms. That is the way it needs to be if we are going to perpetuate this amazing blessing of a country.

I didn't deserve to be born here, but I was. And if we are going to continue to be a light on the hill that so many hundreds of millions of people around the world want to come to, then we can't let hundreds of millions of people come here or it would overwhelm the country and it would no longer be a place anybody wanted to come. At that point, the greatest hope for peace in the world, the United States, would cease to be the United States we have come to know and love.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, we had a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. Anybody who was in America, in the United States, has a lot to be thankful for. People are counting on us across the country to make sure we don't mess the country up because we have done a great deal of damage from Washington, much of it done by bureaucrats.

But the only way they can do it is when Congress relegates and delegates obligations that we should have to bureaucrats, especially unaccountable bureaucrats like those at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

It is time to get power back to where there is accountability. And there is a better chance of having accountability right here in Congress than there is in some agency, some bureau that thumbs its nose at the executive, legislative, and judicial branches and says: We are above the Constitution. We are above everything else in the country. We do what we want to, and nobody can say otherwise.

Well, they are finding out at the CFPB that that is not the case. Everybody in America has some accountability somewhere.

It makes me smile to hear friends from across the aisle talking about running up a deficit because I remember that talk in 2006, and we were properly excoriated on the Republican side of the aisle for running up a deficit of around $160 billion more than we brought in. We were castigated. We were beat up in all kinds of ways, and Democrats were right.

Who would have ever dreamed that the people who were belittling Republicans for allowing a $160 billion deficit would soon be so very proud since they had the majority in the House, the Senate, the Presidency, just a couple of short years later, they would have a $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion deficit?

We would be treated to the first 4 and the first 8 years in our Nation's history under a President during which the economy never grew up to 3 percent. It never grew up to 3 percent. It did not, the whole time the Democrats had the majority in the House and the Senate, those 4 years they had the majority in the House and Senate.

That time when they had the House, the Senate, and the White House, they managed to run up the debt higher than anyone has ever come close to before. But the good news for those who have forgotten that the talk of $160 billion deficit being so outrageous before

they ran up a $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion deficit, those who don't remember those days can be reminded of those now as we begin to hear the rhetoric about the current proposed appropriation.

We passed all 12 appropriations here in the House. We did our work. It is time the Senate did their work. Now we are being told: Oh, well, you have got to get over all that stuff you did. All of that hard work, all the cuts to Planned Parenthood, all the things you did standing on principle down there in the House, you have got to forget about that because we don't work like that down in the Senate. We are just going to be lucky to fund the projects we are interested in. We have no interest in taking up the hard work that the House of Representatives did.

But it is time the Senate tried that. I think if they will look into the appropriation bills the House passed, they will find out we actually did some very good, solid, amazing work.

For some reason, before we ensure that the Second Amendment applies everywhere across the country that the Constitution meant for it to apply, we are going to take up a background check bill tomorrow. The abbreviation is NICS, which gathers information on people's backgrounds who want to buy a gun. Despite all of the inaccurate information that is often touted about the lack of background checks, of how you can order online or at gun shows, these kind of things, there are background checks when you order online.

It is really unfair to the gun stores who didn't actually make the sale, but anybody who orders a gun online still has to have the background check, and they still have to go in and pick it up at a store and meet the requirements of the law and the background check.

We have heard many times about how the background checks have prevented 3 million Americans who should not have guns from getting guns, but that is not true nor accurate. Apparently, the last year that the Obama administration decided to bless us with actual information about background checks, they reported that about 73,000 Americans were prevented from getting a gun on the first check under the law as it exists. There are five different checks. And because the first check does not take all of the information that someone buying a gun has to fill out, not the date of birth, not Social Security number, not any of the information that is replete on the document being filled out, none of that is used.

They take a phonetic--well, the pronunciation of the name and use the phonetic pronunciation to do a background check. That is why they have so many millions of hits since this has been going on is because if someone's name just sounds a bit like somebody else's, it comes up as a hit and an initial denial.

But then at each stage, each one of those five checks, more and more are found to not be the person who should be prevented from having a gun. In the last year--we have data--I was talking to John Lott about this earlier this afternoon, but in 2010, there were 73,000 denials, approximately, of the ability to buy a gun.

As they went through each of those five checks, they found out that so many actually were not the person who should have been blocked from buying a gun. When the Obama administration got down to the bare facts, they found that out of about 73,000 initial denials, there were only 42 cases that were referred to be prosecuted for potential prosecution.

If I recall correctly, the Obama administration only prosecuted about a fourth of what the Bush administration prosecuted. So out of the 42-- and I don't mean 42,000 out of 73,000, I mean 42.0 out of 73,000--the Obama administration only decided to get 13 convictions.

Mr. Speaker, there were 73,000 initial denials. It tells you the system doesn't work very well at all. It doesn't make sense that we would have a system that would use all of the information that somebody provides to look for hits of somebody who should not be able to buy a gun. Use the date of birth. Use the Social Security number. Use the information there to check to see if someone is ineligible to buy a gun.

Then we can get serious about better gun enforcement, especially since we now have a Department of Justice--except for the special prosecutor that is interested in just them, just us kind of justice-- except for that special prosecutor's group, we do have a Department of Justice that truly is interested in doing justice.

So when it comes to background checks, yes, we will continue to have them, but I hope we make some needed changes in the law, and I also hope that we are able to pass a bill this week out of committee, get it to the floor, pass it out of here, and hopefully the Senate will do their job on it. But that would allow reciprocity for people who are allowed to carry a gun in one jurisdiction to be able to carry that gun across the country. It is something we are working on.

Mr. Speaker, I was so greatly encouraged seeing an article about Poland. Those people have always been such an independent-minded people, even though they have been yanked to and fro. Whether it is Russia, Prussia, Germany, they have had a difficult time--Austria. They have had a tough time. But they have always been independent-minded. As President Reagan and as the former Polish Pope noted, and as President Trump has noted, Poland, generally speaking, understands what people who go through the 12-step program understand. There is a higher power.

But by the grace of God, we would not have this incredible little experiment in self-government. We would never have lasted as long as we have. There are miracles where the divine hand of God truly stepped in during the Revolutionary War, during the early days as a nation when we could have, and probably should have, fallen, one after another. As the Founders would say, divine providence protected this little experiment, and it is in trouble right now.

There are so many people who have been taught across the country that America is an embarrassment and owes the world an apology.

Bill Ayers and all of those who were hippies--not all of them, but so many of them who were hippies--found that, as terrorists like Bill Ayers was, they didn't get the results they were seeking by blowing up things or people. They got a lot more done by moving into universities, becoming tenured professors, and teaching future teachers an improper history and an inaccurate history of these United States so that now we have, we are told, half the people coming out of college thinking socialism would be a better way of living.

They don't understand. They have never thought it through. They don't look at what has really happened because they haven't been taught true history. They don't understand. They don't know that every time socialism--progressivism if you would rather call it that as so many in this body do--always failed and always will fail to the end of the age as long as there is jealousy, greed, avarice, and even common sense.

As I have mentioned here on the floor, the Russian farmer who said, ``I make the same number of rubles here in the shade, if I am in the shade here or if I am out there in the sun, so I am in the shade,'' that explained why socialism does not, will not, and cannot ever work. It always fails.

The only way you can have it is where people share across from those according to their ability to those according to their need. What a lie. It didn't come from those according to their ability. Once socialism sets in, so does malaise. There is no incentive to work harder and harder except if you can get politically entrenched sufficiently, then those in political power. As a Russian college student told me back when I was a college student over there in the Soviet Union: In America, you can advance yourself by making more money and working harder. Here in the Soviet Union, we can only advance ourselves by stepping on others and trying to get political power by stepping on others.

This is a better system, even with all its flaws. Churchill said that capitalism is the worst form of government except for all the others. But it allows people to succeed or fail as they are driven to do. It is called freedom. We have had it. We have been losing it.

When the Democratic House and majority set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they set up an

agency, a bureau, that didn't have to answer to Congress. They could violate the Constitution's Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment. They didn't care. They are all powerful. In fact, they are so full of themselves that they think no one can hold them accountable and they can do whatever they want. They don't need money from Congress. They get it from the Federal Reserve. They are a perpetual bureau that is not answerable to the President, to the Congress--not to anybody. They are finding out today that is not the case, but they sure thought it was.

When I was a felony judge, if the government wanted someone's bank records, they had to either get that person's permission or they had to come to a judge like me; and with either live or affidavit testimony sworn under oath, they had to prove that a crime was probably committed, that this particular person probably committed the crime, and that these bank records were needed because of the probable cause that existed from the evidence. I would consider the evidence and then decide if probable cause existed. If it did, I would sign the warrant, and the government only then could get the bank records.

Not so with the CFPB. They are in the protection racket. It is right there in their name, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It is a protection racket like the mob used to be in. They got their money from the Federal Reserve, and they are here to protect us all.

So they gather up people's banking records and debit and credit card activities. Why? Because they are there to protect us from greedy, evil banks.

Some have said: Wait a minute, though. How about you just leave my privacy alone, and if a bank messes me around, then I will come tell you? You don't need to get all of my private records.

But since the CFPB has the unmitigated gall and arrogance to think they are totally unaccountable, they don't care what the Constitution says or what some court says. They don't need a warrant. They get whatever records they want to. Why? Because they are in the protection racket, out to protect us. You do what they say or they ruin you.

What a racket, not accountable to anybody. That has got to change. The President is doing what he can to change that. Thank God and thank President Trump, both. We have got a chance of reining in an unconstitutionally acting body. Fortunately, there is at least one judge who recognized that, and hopefully there will be more.

Those in Poland are amazing. As I continue to meet people who have lived in areas like Poland under the Soviet boot or who were alive during the ravages of World War II, those people here in the United States seem to understand more what is at stake right now than most any natural-born American. They know what it is like not to have freedom. They know what it is like to have a government watch every move and tell you what you can or you cannot do and sometimes punish on a whim just to keep citizens terrified of the totalitarian government, a totalitarian government that has to exist in order for socialism, communism, and progressivism to exist.

In fact, when I was in college, I was doing research and saw back in the days, I believe it was around 1960, `61, in that time, that the Premier of the Soviet Union, Khruschchev, understood that, under the idea of communism or progressivism, everyone would share and share alike; and the ultimate form of that progressivism or communism or socialism would be, when there was no need for government, everyone just shared and shared alike from those according to their ability, according to their need. Everyone shared.

Of course, in the Soviet Union in 1960, `61, under Premier Khruschchev, it was indeed a very totalitarian country, not as bad as it had been under Stalin, but those millions and millions of Ukrainians who lost their lives when Stalin saw to their starvation, those who lost loved ones during that period of starvation at the hands of Stalin, they understand what freedom is and what it isn't. They understand the only way a progressive or communist or socialist can exist is you have got to have that totalitarian government forcing or taking money or goods away from those who earn them and work for them-- created them--and giving them to those who did not.

So Khruschchev realized that, in the ultimate form of communism and progressivism, there is no government. So he appointed a committee or commission to study the issue and figure out how we eventually achieve that perfect state where there is no government and everyone is sharing and sharing alike. How do we get to that place?

They were always big on having 5-year plans in the former Soviet Union, so he thought perhaps this commission, this group of learned people, could set up the plan for how they could move forward each year until there was that state of perfection, there was no government, but just people sharing and working, working together, sharing together, sharing with those who had not and could not.

But as I learned from studying, Khruschchev eventually had to disband the commission. They realized there is no way you ever reach that perfect state of progressivism or socialism or communism. You can't ever achieve that in this world. There will always have to be a totalitarian government that has taken away people's freedom and tells them what they are allowed to do. That has been the direction of this government for years now: Let's lure people in to total dependence on the government, and then we get to tell them where they will live and what they will do.

Do you think that is a stretch? Look at what happened when the Democratic House and Senate voted to take over all college loans. That is a lot of power. When the Federal Government takes over all college loans, it enables the Federal Government to get into an area of governance that the Soviet Union did. The friends I came to know that summer I was there, the government told them whether they were going to be allowed to go to college. They told them what they would study in college. They told them where they were going to go work when they finish college. They told them what they were going to do in that place that the government directed them to go.

Heck, there were 15 states in the former Soviet Union. You couldn't even cross the states without having a visa to go between the states. I was shocked by that.

But if you are going to have progressivism or socialism or communism, the share-and-share-alike mentality, spreading the wealth--as our former President liked to say: If you are going to take from the sweat of someone else's brow and give it to someone who did not earn it, you are going to have to have a totalitarian government.

When the Federal Government here in the United States took over all college loans, it put itself in a position of being able to say: Okay. We know, historically, what the Soviet Union did, and we like that kind of power, so here is what we are going to do.

You do this job or that job or go to this place and we will start forgiving that huge amount of debt you owe for your college loans that we are in charge of. That is power.

When the Federal Government takes over flood insurance, it gives the Federal Government the power to tell people where they can or can't live. Thank goodness we finally were allowed to reform the flood insurance. That is why--probably, the biggest reason--some of us didn't vote for the second swath of money for the disasters this fall.

There were no reforms that we were promised that would be there, like for the lady who said she had to rebuild her home in the same place 21 different times. There were so many homes the Federal Government has paid for since we took over flood insurance because, apparently, you had to build where your home flooded, even though you wanted to move elsewhere so your home wouldn't flood again. If you wanted the money, you had to rebuild right there.

That is what one lady was explaining. She didn't want to still be there, but she couldn't sell her lot with a destroyed, flooded home on it for enough money to build anywhere else. So she had to keep rebuilding where her home kept flooding.

We needed a reform so people could move and we wouldn't have to keep paying for people's homes over and over again in the same place. If they want to pay for private insurance and

live in the same place, fine. The Federal Government shouldn't be forcing people to build in the same place and keep them there as financial prisoners.

At least in the House, we finally passed some reforms recently. That was a good thing, and I am grateful we did.

Through all of these decades, for the last 100 years, the people of Poland understood what freedom is and they understood when they didn't have it.

I can recall back in the seventies being on a train coming--I believe it was--from Gradna, on the border between Poland and the Soviet Union, coming across Poland, which was considered to be one of the satellite nations over Soviet domination.

An American made the mistake of saying in the presence of a Polish gentleman: This land looks just the way it had for the last couple of days.

The man became outraged. He said: No, no. In the Soviet Union there are huge farms and you can't tell what is cultivated and what isn't because they are not farmed very well. You look out here at the farms in Poland and they are much smaller because we own our own farms and work our own farms.

He got very upset. I thought it was kind of a beautiful thing, how proud he was of his country, and the difference between a progressive or socialist-style government that rewards sluggishness. He pointed there in Poland to a place where their hard work actually showed.

We keep heading in the direction of the countries that have failed as they have tried this progressivism that always fails. It doesn't make sense to keep trying it. It never works. It didn't work in the New Testament. It didn't work for the pilgrims. It will work in Heaven, in a perfect world, in paradise, with no jealousy and everyone pulling the same direction, loving, caring. But in this world, it will not ever work.

In Poland--I was reading yesterday--their government leaders have come to the conclusion that life was better when they followed a Biblical example and had 1 day of the week where people rested and they were with their families. They went to church and they worshipped God. They found that is not a bad idea.

Now there are people in Poland in leadership positions who are saying: We have had 7-day workweeks, but families have suffered significantly. Maybe we should look back at that Biblical example of having 1 day of rest, 1 day together to worship; a day to be with family, a day to rest, and to love each other.

It seems like sometimes we get moving so fast that we forget the best things in life. It looks like that is what some of the Polish leaders are now saying.

They have also made clear to the EU that, just as President Trump has here, as leaders of a nation, a leader owes to that nation the protection that they were elected or hired to provide and survive. Survival is supposed to be what the leaders are ensuring. Flourishing.

As a result of the policies we have seen change in the last 11 months, we now have had 2 months--1 month was a record for the last 8 years--but now we have had 2 months, as I understand it, where growth has gone over 3.4 percent in the economy. We can keep that up and continue to grow. We are going to have plenty of money to pay this country's bills.

In fact, the only way we will ever get out from under the massive debt we are about to leave and impart to our children and grandchildren is if we grow the economy sufficiently to grow our way out of that indebtedness.

I believe the Laffer Curve is true. It is a truth economically. If you tax up to a certain point, then at some point, the more you tax, the more you overburden the work, and there gets to be less and the economy is brought down, you end up yielding less as a percentage of what you were bringing in.

As Arthur Laffer explained to President Reagan and his aids, if the goal is to maximize Federal revenue, you want to hit that percentage of tax that encourages work and growth to the greatest extent, and then you will bring even more money in.

The trouble is, like in Ireland, when they dropped their corporate tax rate so low--apparently, in the eighties, tax rates were dropped-- revenue starts flowing in better and better and Congress started spending. They did the same thing in Ireland. Record revenue comes in, even bigger record spending took place. We can't be doing that.

There is an article here today in The Washington Times by Dave Boyer: ``Pence, commemorating Israel's birth, says Trump `actively' seeks to move U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.''

We have had Presidents saying for years that they would move the embassy to the true capital of Israel. It has been the capital of Israel since King David moved it there about 3,000 years ago.

I know that there are some that are very upset and say: No, no, you cannot move the Israeli capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Well, Jerusalem is the capital. But perhaps a compromise might be that, since we know when King David became ruler over all of Israel, he first went to Hebron--I have been there a few times. I have stood there at what is strongly believed to be the tomb of King David's father, Jesse. They think they found the small synagogue he created. It looks like that is what it was.

Hebron is where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are all buried. In fact, Abraham made a big deal. He wanted to pay for the land where he and his family would be buried so that there would never be any question that it was their land where they were buried.

The town of Hebron is where King David first went and ruled over Israel for 7 years and 6 months. After 7\1/2\ years, he then moved the capital to Jerusalem. So I would be fine if we wanted to compromise and say: Okay, you need time to get used to the idea, then let's move the capital from Tel Aviv to Hebron and make that the capital of Israel for 7\1/2\ years, like King David did.

Then, following King David's example, after 7\1/2\ years with Hebron as the capital, move it to Jerusalem. That would give people time to get used to the idea.

I do want to make a comment. The Senate--at least some, but not all Senators--is dragging its feet on getting something passed in the way of tax reform. I was totally shocked to hear that some Senators were saying they wanted to have the corporate tax rate cut, put off, for a year. That seems crazy.

As someone who has been to China and met with different CEOs and asking, ``Why did you move all these manufacturing jobs from America to China,'' I thought the answer would be labor unions, it would be over regulation.

Well, those were all problems for them, they said. But I loved hearing repeatedly corporate leaders saying: Our best quality control, our best workers were in America.

I loved hearing that. They seemed sincere. The reason we moved to China is because of the corporate tax rate being about half of what it is in China as compared to what it is in the United States.

They said: So we have saved so much money by more than cutting our tax rate in half.

What a corporate tax is, as Steve Moore said, which is such a great way to explain what it is: We like to say we are making the greedy corporations pay.

No. Actually, you are making their customers and clients pay.

If a corporation does not, whether it is subchapter S or a C corporation, pass those taxes on to their customers, their clients, they can't stay in business. So it is a part of the price of their goods and services.

I have advocated doing away with it. You will have so much more people working, so many more people making so much more money. The income taxes from the individuals will make up for it. It will be a beautiful thing. It is not a zero sum game. Everybody can do better and better and better.

It would be a beautiful thing to see the economy expand like that, and it could. We could get those jobs back. But a corporate tax, the corporate tax here in America is the highest tariff any nation puts on its own goods or services, anything made in corporate America. It is a tariff on our own goods.

Why do we do that? We could be so much more competitive around the world if the government didn't put this burden on corporations.

I was hoping that President Trump's figure of 15 percent that undercuts the Chinese at least a little bit would be even more incentive to bring back manufacturing jobs to America, because any nation, any powerful nation that does not produce what they need in a time of war--because there will always be wars--is not going to remain a powerful nation beyond the next war.

We need to be producing steel and rubber and all the things we need. We need to produce them right here in the United States. There is no reason we can't, but we drive those jobs away because of the corporate income tax.

President Trump had the right idea, 15 percent. He compromised, so it is at 20 percent. Thank goodness he didn't let them work him up any beyond that, but there are some in the Senate trying to work beyond that--huge mistake.

This economy can explode. It is already the top 3 percent, and it can keep climbing. Dr. Laffer tells me that after the final part of the 30 percent tax cut kicked in, in 1983, they hit over 7 percent growth in the economy. That is just unheard of.

There were people saying, in the Obama administration, you know, we will probably never ever hit 3 percent again. It may just be an impossibility. No, it is not. You get rid of the corporate tax or at least get it down to where we are not putting such an enormous tariff on our own goods and services, and that economy can grow like that again, and we can get our manufacturing jobs back.

An article here, Todd Starnes--he and I were both honored recently with an award that people like Tom Landry, Cal Thomas, and others have received for being Christians and speaking up for our faith, our beliefs. Todd Starnes, today, has this story: ``Thank you, Mr. Trump, for bringing `Merry Christmas' back to the White House,'' and I certainly echo those feelings.

It is amazing, this story from Maxim Lott, FOX News: ``Media twist tax plan studies to claim it hammers middle class.''

I have been hearing people here on this floor talking about how the tax proposal that we passed here in the House was going to hammer the middle class. Actually, the corporate tax cut alone will get the economy going so strong everybody is going to benefit. But I wish we had just had an across-the-board flat tax created: you make more, you pay more; you make less, you pay less. That is where I wanted to go. That is true reform.

But politics being what it is, because the Republican leadership did not want to have to fight a battle that, ``Oh, we're just helping the rich,'' the highest tax rate is the only one we didn't change. The idea was, well, if the only tax rate we don't bring down is the 39.6 percent tax rate that the richest Americans have to pay, then the Democrats won't be beating us up. They won't be able to beat us up for raising taxes on the poor and middle class to help the rich.

Well, they were wrong. Despite the fact that there will be more people now under the Republican tax plan that has passed here in the House--the Senate will just adopt it--there will be more people who will not be paying taxes. I kind of wish all of us, every American, had a little skin in the game. If they are making money, then they pay something. That is where a flat tax comes in. If you just make $10, you only pay $1. If you make $100, you pay $10. If you make $1 million, you pay $100,000. That is fair.

But anyway, we passed our bill. It gives a tax break to the poorest Americans. It is going to help the economy grow, but we have got to get it done. I am hoping and literally praying that the Senate keeps their elimination of the individual mandate from ObamaCare so that people have the freedom to get policies that are best for them and not something forced on them by the government.

And, yes, we know there will be unfair media that will do nothing but complain about millions who no longer have health insurance. Well, I can tell you, there are millions who are paying taxes now to the government because they can't afford an insurance policy that won't ever pay them because the deductible is too high, and they don't want to keep paying our income tax because they can't afford the ObamaCare policies.

There are people who are paying for ObamaCare policies where the deductibles are so high, they will never get any benefit. Yes, there is apparently a segment, a small minority who--maybe as much as 20, 25 percent--who, like in the Soviet Union, are getting their money from where somebody else has earned it, having that money pay for their insurance, some of that coming from people who can't even afford their own insurance. So they are paying higher income tax so this other group of Americans take their money from those working poor and pay for their insurance. What is fair about that?

Forcing the working poor in America to pay higher income tax or pay for policies where they will never get anything back because the deductible is too high; also, that some people who will vote Democrat will get their insurance for free, that is not the way America became the greatest Nation that it was and can be again.

And, yes, North Korea fired an ICBM today in the last 24 hours, and I am very grateful to President Trump for taking it seriously. I am so glad he is there. I am glad we don't have the same people who gave North Korea the ability to have nuclear bombs during the Clinton administration.

How foolish was it to basically say: Oh, look, North Korea, we will give you what you need to make nuclear weapons if you will just agree not to ever use those materials for nuclear weapons. And, of course, the North Korean leader said: Sure, you do all that, all I got to do is sign. Sure, you give me all I need for nuclear weapons, I will sign saying I will never create nuclear weapons. And what do they do? They make nuclear weapons because that is what they do. That is what those leaders do. The people of North Korea deserve better. And Iran is the same way. They can't be trusted.

So we need a firm leader who understands enough is enough, and I am glad President Trump is that leader.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 9 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, November 29, 2017, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, this has been a big day.

There are so many people who have suffered in this country, especially since the passing of ObamaCare. It is difficult to call it the Affordable Care Act. There is a small percentage that supposedly has done better.

Usually, when my friends across the aisle and most of the media talk about how much better off Americans are under ObamaCare, they ignore the real results, and, instead, they point and say: There are so many people--millions of people now--who have insurance now that didn't have it before.

Well, the reason they could say that was because ObamaCare forced people to buy insurance. We went through this with some family members, helping them make the calculation: should they pay the penalty through additional income tax, or should they buy insurance that they will never, ever be able to use?

On some occasions, you are better off paying the extra tax, which means the government wanted your money a lot worse--well, not worse than the individual--but the government has the power to steal from people and call it legal, and then it is legal.

There was a massive amount of legalized stealing under ObamaCare that took place. This bill we passed today would end so much of the stealing from individuals that the government has been doing legally since ObamaCare passed.

But, yes, there will be millions of people, I would suspect, that when we legally end the individual mandate, they are not going to continue to pay for insurance, huge amounts every month that they can't afford--people making $25,000, $30,000, or so, who couldn't afford to pay for health insurance who were required to do that.

Do you want to pay higher income tax? Are you going to pay for health insurance that you are never going to be able to use? The premiums cost you more than you can afford, the deductible is so high. Clearly, you are young. You are never going to use it. The odds are 99.99 percent you will never use it. But the government forced them to pay more taxes or pay more for insurance they couldn't use.

The good news for those people is that now you will be able to--well, once this becomes the law, and it does need to pass the Senate. The Senate has a little different version, and there are a few things in the Senate version I like better than ours, but there are a lot of things in our bill that I like better than the Senate.

If the Senate will go ahead and do their job like they did not do on repealing at least part of ObamaCare, they will do their job on this, the American people are going to benefit. We are going to see the economy take a big jolt forward and upward, more jobs coming to America.

Nobody gets everything they want. I believe what the President really wanted was going to be best for the country. If we could hold to a 15 percent corporate tax, I wanted to see that across the board for S corporations, C corporations. But as the President knew--I know he knew because we talked about it more than once--that 15 percent would undercut the corporate tax that China has. If we undercut the corporate tax that China has, then it means we were going to be getting manufacturing jobs back to America.

We have had so many manufacturing plants pick up and move to other places--mainly China, Mexico, other places. We need to be manufacturing here.

I know there are those elitists who have been educated with degrees far beyond their intellectual capacity to absorb. They got the degrees, but they didn't get the wisdom. And some have ventured to say: No, we don't need to be a manufacturing country. We have evolved above being these lowly manufacturers. That is for developing countries, not a wonderful country like ours is.

Obviously, they spent too much time in other places than studying history. This is something else I have talked about with the President--he knows it just from his business acumen; I know it from studying history--that any nation that is a powerful nation in the world that cannot manufacture the things that that country needs in a time of war will cease to be a great nation after the next war. And be assured, there will be wars.

Jesus, the wisest to ever walk this planet, said there will always be wars and rumors of war. And that is true because this planet has evil: people who will do evil, countries that will do evil, people who get jealous when some other country has more freedom, more assets. And there is going to be evil in this world as long as this world exists.

We saw that down in Sutherland Springs. Some lunatics--again, many of them educated well beyond their ability to be wise--had popped off and said, well, if prayer worked, those people would never have been shot in a church where they were praying and worshipping.

As long as people are in this world, there is going to be evil--not that God wants evil to prevail. He doesn't. He doesn't want that any should stumble. But as a parent knows, you could force your child to say, ``I love you'' or to throw their little arms around your neck, hug you, and say, ``I love you.'' You could force them to do that. It doesn't mean a whole lot. But when you give people the free will to choose to love you, to choose to follow your rules, it is overwhelming to a parent when a child freely chooses to do that.

So we have freedom of choice. Some choose to do evil. Some want governments to be all powerful because, in their lack of wisdom, they think that the government needs to be in control of everything and everybody.

The late Justice Scalia, who could make me laugh--he loved good jokes and stories like I do. There have been a lot of unpleasant memories, a lot of unpleasant fights, a lot of fights that I haven't won, but I stood up for what I believed was right.

When I would get around Justice Scalia, having lunch together or breakfast together, we would get to telling stories and jokes, and he was so clever. It was often hard to find a joke or a story he had not heard, but it was just fun to be around him.

But in one of those, I think it was a lunch that time, he said: You know, back when I was working for the Attorney General--and I don't remember which Attorney General it was back in the 1970s--he said: We had a weekly meeting, and one morning the Attorney General came in, and he said: Well, I was at a cocktail party last night, and for the first time I heard a definition that explained the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

He said: I actually think it is pretty good. I think it is very descriptive.

He said: What I learned was Democrats are people who want to control everybody and everything, and Republicans are people who don't want them to.

Well, I found that rather amusing. Actually, that is pretty accurate. Some people on the Republican side of the aisle go: Why don't we plot and plan as well as the Democrats do? They are always trying to figure out how they get power, how they get over on this and that, and we just want people to live and let live. We want as little government as necessary to keep order but allow people to succeed with no ceiling, no limit.

But to succeed, you also have to have the opportunity to fail, just like Edison did. In the hundreds of things he tried, finding a filament, the element that would heat up and not burn in two to make a light bulb, he knew it would work. Somebody asked him about all those failures, and he said, no, each time he tried something that didn't work, it wasn't a failure. He just learned that that is one less thing that might work.

But Fisher, who came up with the space pen--I love those space pens. The email still goes around that says that Americans spent $4 million to develop a pen that would work in outer space, government money. Russians just use pencils. Not a dime of government money was used.

With an intellect like Fisher, he knew there had to be a way that you could develop a pen that would write in gravity and with no gravity, underwater, above the air--or above the Earth's atmosphere, so he came up with it. But he knew he was going to have to pressurize a pen, and this is such a cartridge.

So he sealed it, put about 30 pounds of pressure. But the trick was finding an ink that didn't explode out when you put 30 pounds of pressure on it or that was not so thick that it wouldn't work when you tried to write. Eventually, he was able to do that.

Lots of failures, but you have got to allow people a chance to fail if they are going to have a chance to succeed. If the government puts its thumb on the scales, it is not real success, it is not real failure, and, eventually, those cards are going to come falling down.

Well, what we have done today with our tax bill, it is a huge step because I know, Mr. Speaker, most folks here are well aware, it is hard to get a majority agreement on much of anything, but we did today. We had a significant majority that agreed. It isn't perfect. Nothing any human ever does will be, but it moves the ball down the road.

One of the things I love about my friend from Texas, Kevin Brady, is I would hear from people back home--and talk to Kevin. He is open to talking not just to Texans. He will talk to everybody. And I found that with so many members on the Ways and Means Committee. My friend David Schweikert was always available to answer questions, and he was doing his homework thoroughly.

One of the things that has deeply troubled many Americans, and especially seniors, either seniors in poor health or younger Americans who had severe health problems, is, in the ObamaCare bill that was so unaffordable, it changed the deductibility of medical expenses.

Before, it was, if you had medical expenses, you had a really bad time of it, then our hearts go out to you and we want your life to be a little easier when you are going through so much difficulty with bad health, so the deductibles were any medical expense over 5 percent of your adjusted gross income.

In order to come up with the billions and billions of dollars that ObamaCare, I would submit, wasted, they had to cut out some of the deductions like that, so they ended up raising the threshold from 5 percent to 7\1/2\, 10 percent. So it has been 10 percent. You had to have more than 10 percent of your adjusted gross income in order to deduct it, but we still had a lot of, especially, seniors who had more than that.

I had accountants from home send me information about seniors, particularly seniors who had been paying a great deal of medical expense because, no, Medicare didn't take care of them.

And of course we know AARP jumped on the bandwagon for ObamaCare--not because it was going to be good for the seniors. In fact, it was extremely violent to the finances of seniors and to their health, as well. But AARP was more interested in the massive amount of money they could add to their coffers, even though they are considered a nonprofit. So they jumped on board, and, of course, companies that sold other policies had to pay a 2 percent tax on each policy.

AARP got the sweetheart deal. Their policy they embraced didn't have to pay the 2 percent tax. And I haven't seen the provision, but I am told there was a provision that exempted their executive so they didn't have the normal cap on their executive income.

So the people at the top of AARP, they did great. Seniors really got harmed, losing $716 billion in cuts to Medicare. But for all those seniors who got harmed, couldn't get the surgery, couldn't get the medical help they need, just keep in mind, AARP was able to sell a lot more policies and make a lot more money even though it did a lot of harm to some seniors. Just remember, AARP came out great out of that.

But nonetheless, for those of us who were very sympathetic to seniors having hundreds of billions of dollars cut from Medicare, they heard the President say: Now, this isn't going to affect you seniors at all. It is only going to cut some of the profits from healthcare providers-- basically, what was said.

But many of my seniors in east Texas figured out: Wait a minute. If you are not going to pay the healthcare provider for my medicine, for my surgery, for what I need, then I am not going to be able to get the procedure, the surgery, the healthcare that I need if it is not going to be paid for.

So I have had many seniors talk to me about surgeries being delayed or that they couldn't get the same thing they had before ObamaCare passed.

So we haven't repealed ObamaCare, but in this bill, we repealed the ObamaCare mandate, the individual mandate. That means that some people who were forced to pay a higher income tax--they didn't get one of these ridiculous insurance policies--they are going to have that much money in their own pocket. If they were paying for a policy that they knew was never going to help them out, they won't have to buy that.

And, of course, the Democrats, for all the Main Street media, will say, ``Oh, look at how many people don't have insurance,'' when the truth is so many of those people chose not to buy insurance because they knew it was a terrible deal.

I still want to see a reform of healthcare, a real reform of healthcare, but that would mean getting away from either insurance companies or the government being between us and our doctors, our healthcare providers. The way you do that is that you make it so attractive to put money in your own health savings account--and I expect us to pass something to make it much easier and much more attractive. It is not in this bill. This was a tax bill--but I am still hopeful that we are going to do a reform of healthcare and repeal, at least most of ObamaCare. I had that hope. And I hoped that today was a start, not only toward getting tax reform and getting tax relief for Americans and seeing the economy get going again, but also put back in motion true repeal of ObamaCare and getting healthcare laws in place that will be good for Americans.

But how can you have competitive prices in healthcare if nobody knows what these procedures or medicines cost? You see, you get a notice from the healthcare provider--your insurance company--that something costs $12,000, but you don't know that the insurance company satisfied that $12,000 payment demand with an $800 or $900 payment. But if you knew that if you were paying cash out of your health savings account, a $12,000 procedure would only cost $800, you wouldn't be so big on paying $2,000 a month to a health insurance company.

And these health insurance companies still don't see that, under ObamaCare, their days are numbered. It was designed to fail. And America gets so mad at health insurance companies because it was built into ObamaCare. Not only were they going to have record profits, like some of them did last year, but they were going to get bailouts on top of their record profits.

It was going to make America so mad at the insurance companies that even conservatives would say: Well, I never thought I would say this, but anything has to be better than what we have with these insurance companies. Why don't we have the government just take over everything?

Then, voila, we then have VA healthcare for all Americans, except much worst than the VA provides, because everybody is forced to be in it.

I was amazed, as an exchange student in the Soviet Union, to see the type of medical care that was in the Soviet Union in the seventies. I just thanked

God that we didn't have that kind of socialized medicine, and we were so much more advanced.

But it was clear that physicians, back in the Soviet Union in the seventies--I am sure there were some that were really dedicated, but, for most, it was an 8-to-4-, 9-to-5-type job--the fewer people they could see, the better they liked it. But that meant a lot of people waited in long lines, didn't get seen, had to come back and come back, and they didn't get the procedures that they needed.

Or, like in Canada, a fellow, named Tyler, told me that his dad died of a heart attack after he had been on the list to get bypass surgery for 2 years.

I said: Two years? It really took that long?

He said: Well, they kept moving people in front of him.

I said: Well, now wait a minute. I understand it is a crime to pay or do anything to get yourself moved up the list.

He said: Oh, yeah, that is the way I understand it, too. But we had a board that would pick and choose among the American citizens who would go in front, and they kept putting people in front of my dad, who finally had the heart attack and died because the board kept putting people in front of him.

That goes back to what Sarah Palin said. She called it a death panel. She was speaking with hyperbole, but the truth is--whether you want to call it a death panel or not--they were making decisions over who would get what; that would mean they lived or died in some occasions, or it meant whether they were going to live in pain or live in comfort. These were government boards making these decisions, just like they used to do in the Soviet Union before it fell.

So I see this tax bill today as not only a step in the right direction to get people more money in their own pockets they can use to make the economy grow, but I see it also as a step in the right direction toward reforming healthcare again because we eliminate the individual mandate.

I still would like to see these further reforms, like I am talking about. I put in a bill, I filed years ago, that healthcare providers would have to post, at least at their facility, but certainly online, if they were online--and now it ought to be a requirement--post exactly what you charge an individual paying cash, an individual with Blue Cross, or Aetna, or whatever it is. Let people know exactly what things cost. Don't send a $15,000 bill for going into the hospital that you know you are going to accept $1,000 as payment in full from an insurance company. If you are going to accept $1,000 for a $15,000 bill, then say it costs $1,000.

If we could require everybody to post exactly what things cost, they wouldn't be in such an all-fired hurry to make sure that they had insurance, other than catastrophic, really catastrophic insurance. Because instead of paying $2,000 a month to an insurance company-- $24,000 a year--well, they would be better off paying $1,500 as payment in full for $15,000 in charges.

We still have a good ways to go, but you don't get anywhere until you take that first step, and today was a giant step, in my opinion.

I didn't realize, until I saw this notice from the Farm Bureau, but the headline says: ``House Poised to Take up Farm Bureau-Supported Tax Bill.'' It was good to see that.

Another article from Heritage Action: ``House tax plan propels reform forward.''

FOX News has an article, by Newt Gingrich: ``House and Senate tax plans have more in common than you think.'' That makes some excellent points.

It is good news all the way around. It is a step in the right direction.

I am hopeful that some of the things we disagree on, we are going to be able to work out with the Senate. One of those things, like I mentioned, the Senate, as I understand it, their bill currently has an allowance for deductions of medical expense beyond 10 percent. Hopefully, we can eventually do better than that and get it back from where ObamaCare put it, maybe back to 5 percent, at some point.

But we have seniors on fixed incomes, and Medicare doesn't cover what they are needing in the way of healthcare, and they are being overwhelmed by medical expense. Once again, I think if we can get some reforms in--it doesn't have to be a total reform of healthcare, but just get some things in there--even if we can't get the total repeal because of the Senate's recalcitrance, at least let's get some reforms to get people the help they need.

I would also like to address the issue of the Roy Moore allegations. Having prosecuted sexual assault crimes, I have even been forced against my will--but you get an order, and you follow the order to defend sexual assault crimes--in one case finding that a trumped-up case against my African-American client was totally bogus, trumped-up, and we were able to prove irrefutably as such.

But sexual assault allegations are a very dangerous thing. We have in America what we call statute of limitations on most crimes. The reason we have statute of limitations on most crimes is because if you are going to be accused of something, it needs to be made in a timely manner, so that if you are going to accuse somebody of committing a crime, they have a chance to find witnesses.

One of the very reasons that there are statutes of limitations on crimes like sexual assault is that if you wait 38 years to accuse somebody of a sexual assault, it is almost impossible to prove exactly where you were. And I have heard some people in the Senate say: Oh, well, there are just so much specifics coming out that it just seems irrefutable.

Well, usually people's memories wane over the period of three to four decades on times and exact places. And I know, from my days as a judge, sent many rapists and sexual assaulters to prison for many years, including life, I was particularly hard on people who committed sexual assault crimes because they violate so much more than just a physical violation. It is an abominable crime.

But we have limitations. So if somebody makes an allegation against you that you did such and such at 2 in the afternoon on such and such afternoon, and it was at this particular location, and these people were not around, I mean, if you put a bunch of specifics in there, within a year, then the individual being charged can go back to his calendar, or her calendar, and see: Okay, on that day, oh, I wasn't even in that city, I was over here in this city, I was in court across town, I was not even where that happened. So I can bring in and show-- not just raise a reasonable doubt--but show absolutely for sure that never happened. That is why we have limitations.

I would just encourage people that when they hear alleged factual allegations that occurred decades previously, no matter how many specifics are thrown in, reserve judgment, and give it a chance to get all of the facts in.

That is why, in every single case I have tried as a judge--and there were thousands of felony cases that came before my court--but in every single case I tried, after the prosecution finished, I then turned to the defense for their chance to submit evidence. It is why, after every witness testified for the prosecution, I turned to the defense attorney and gave them a chance to cross examine.

And there were times I heard charges that, in my mind, were so outrageous, but I knew we have a system in place to protect innocent people from spurious allegations, and we have to go through the process, including an appeal, after the trial. And I have reviewed many appeals as an appellate chief justice.

You have got to let the process play out. And any time somebody comes running in and wants somebody tried in the court of public opinion, and they are only going to give them 3 or 4 weeks, then immediately that should be suspect. Not that it can't be proved out as true, but it should immediately be suspect because these people tried to game the system. They didn't want to give enough time for the ones allegedly committing an offense to prepare a defense.

They didn't want to give adequate time to investigate, even after 38 years. How do you go back 38 years later and say: Gee, where was I? I don't have a calendar that goes back that far. I don't know if I was in town, if I was out of the country. I don't know where I was. Gee, it seems like around that

time. Maybe I was here or there. I don't know.

The odds of being able to mount a proper defense three or four decades after something allegedly happened is just almost impossible.

So all you can do to defend yourself--and I am speaking hypothetically. If somebody, hypothetically, made outrageous allegations against you, and, you know, I know I never did that, how do I prove it?

Well, you are not going to be able to find witnesses to say where you were at that specific moment in time because you don't even remember where you were. How will you find a witness that will back you up?

And if you do find a witness who can say, ``Oh, I remember that very second,'' 38 years later, ``this is where he was,'' then that witness becomes suspect because you just don't remember like that.

So I hope, Mr. Speaker, that people will allow an election to go forward with the parties the people have chosen and give time for all the facts to come out.

I like Roy Moore, and I appreciate the man of faith that he is. I think the election needs to go forward just as it is. I think we should not intervene in Congress, and we should let the people of Alabama decide, based on proven facts, not on some last-minute attack.

We should give time for all of the facts to come out, not just the facts that have been set up over the last several months, in all likelihood, in preparation for being able to blindside a candidate, so you have all the facts and you can keep slipping stuff out day after day; because it could very well end up just like Ted Stevens' case, where at least one FBI agent and a prosecutor created a case that not only had reasonable doubt about it, but it was absolutely false.

Senator Ted Stevens was not the most lovable guy. He was kind of a crotchety guy when I was around him. It wasn't very often. They accused him of not filing notice about a hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars gift improvement onto a home he had.

The FBI--at least some in the FBI, as was borne out by the affidavit by an FBI officer who actually had a conscience, not like his superior FBI agent lead investigator. They fabricated evidence. They hid evidence. The evidence that they had gotten when they served warrants, went to his home, took every piece of paper, every bank record, everything he had, computers, all this, raided the bank, got all their information, got any notes and things, he didn't have the evidence to defend himself because the FBI got it all.

A guy named Robert Mueller was the head of the FBI. This was probably the biggest case that went through the FBI while he was Director, at least one of them. He saw to it that the FBI agent that blew the whistle and pointed out that they have evidence that shows that Ted Stevens not only did not get a free hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars, $600,000-, $700,000-addition to his house, that he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars more than that. Apparently, there was some communication between the contractor and Senator Stevens saying: You are overpaying. Quit overpaying.

Senator Stevens said: No. No. I am strong-willed in the Senate, so I have always got people looking to try to make something up, so I have to overpay.

The man overpaid.

The FBI, under Mueller, fabricated a case. They tried it the week before the election, and there was a reason for that. They tried it the week before the election. They got a conviction. He lost the election, I think it was by 1,200 votes or so.

After he had lost the election, there was no way to rewind that clock. He was out of the Senate. The Democrats got the seat. They sure didn't care that they won the seat based on a lie, a fraudulent case brought by the U.S. Government. They didn't care. They were glad to have the seat.

It is kind of like Senator Harry Reid said after he made false accusations against Mitt Romney that he hadn't paid any taxes, and when he was asked about it later after Mr. Romney lost the election, his response was basically: Well, it worked, didn't it?

He had no remorse for destroying a man's reputation falsely without any evidence or with manufactured evidence, lies. No remorse, just: It worked, because we got the seat.

And I have a feeling that, when the smoke clears and we find all of the evidence that is left after 38 years, we are going to find that there was a problem not as much with Roy Moore as there was with the accusers, but we need to wait and see. Nobody needs to be rushed to trial.

We have a system of government that prevents somebody from being punished by the government, but the fact is the government is being used to try to punish Roy Moore.

Let's say, hypothetically, you were an establishment leader in the Senate and you have been pushing for amnesty. You didn't want illegal immigration stopped, because there are donors that give a lot of money that want illegal immigration to continue. You wanted amnesty, and you know in the Attorney General's Office you have a guy there, regardless of things you disagree on, who has really cracked down on illegal immigration.

You know you have got a guy that just won the primary in a State, and you spent tens of millions of dollars trying to destroy the guy in the primary and it didn't work. He won. So it looks like he is about to win the election, the general election, even though you are in his same party.

I am just thinking hypothetically. Certainly none of this would be true, surely, but, wow, what a great deal if somebody made accusations, true or not true, against the guy that you tried to destroy with millions of dollars, that, you know, if he is elected, he is going to come in. He is not going to be your best frien because you called him everything in the book; you tried to destroy him.

So, wow, even though he is in your own party, maybe you would be better off if you had a Democrat you feel like you could work with that was more establishment than the guy that you tried to destroy, that, if he would have gotten along with you--probably not now because you went after him so strongly--what if you could have that guy taken out with allegations, whether true or not, and then you could kill a number of birds.

You know that Steve Bannon has said he is going to war after you. Wow. And Bannon went all in to support this guy in his primary and this election, so if his candidate gets destroyed, you have just destroyed his ability to raise money.

And then on top of that, if you could talk the unsuspecting President into talking his Attorney General into leaving that post to try to go to the Senate, wow, you get rid of the guy that has gotten tough on illegal immigration, you get rid of the guy that has been raising money and going against the establishment, and you get rid of the guy that you tried to destroy with tens of millions of dollars even though he was in your own party--I am just saying, hypothetically.

Maybe it would make for a good fiction novel someday, and maybe there is somebody out there writing that novel, but I am just saying, what if. Wow. What a novel piece of fiction that might be some day. Maybe we would see it in a movie someday. Maybe the Senator would even be from the South.

I also know, having been a district judge, I signed everything original. I know there are some judges that don't sign their orders; they just let somebody stamp.

I made clear the day I became a district judge that nobody is stamping my signature on anything; if it is a stamp, it is going to be clear that it is a stamp, that anything that has got to be originally signed, I am going to sign it.

Now, as I understand it, Judge Moore signed things originally, but on other things, on copies--we would put a stamped signature and note that it was a copy. But his, they either stamped or his assistant wrote his signature, and because the assistant's name had initials D.A., put ``D.A.'' out beside his name to denote that he didn't originally sign this. This was the assistant on his behalf. So litigants would normally get a copy and not the original, of course, unless you make multiple originals.

I wondered when I saw in the yearbook the picture of the signature, I thought: DA? I didn't think he was ever a DA.

Well, he wasn't. He was assistant DA. He was a district judge. He was a chief

justice of the supreme court there in Alabama. He was never the DA.

It is interesting, if someone believed that a guy molested their minor daughter and that person later had a divorce pending in that guy's court, I know I would certainly ask for a different court. There is no way I would let a judge who molested my child have any jurisdiction over my divorce. If I had never brought out about the alleged molestation before, I would certainly do it then. People would need to know that the judge in that court, and particularly the judge on my divorce, was a child molester. They would need to know.

If you don't let people know at that point, you are basically an accomplice. You are allowing this assaulter out there to continue whatever he may be doing to others. You need to come forward and report it. It is not a crime not to report it, but it needs to be reported, and certainly if that person goes on the bench.

It must have been quite a realization for Judge Moore when he saw that ``D.A.'' and realized: Somebody has forged what they thought was my signature, when it was really my assistant, and that is why the assistant put ``D.A.'' out there, to denote that I didn't sign that.

Wow. That must have been quite a feeling for the judge.

There is a story from Joel Pollak on November 16, ``Gloria Allred's Blunder on Roy Moore's Yearbook Challenge,'' that talks about that.

There is another story by John Nolte, also November 16, ``Journalist Leann Tweeden Accuses Senator Al Franken of Fondling, Kissing Her Without Consent.'' I don't know where that is going to lead. I don't know whether the same people will demand his ouster or not. Maybe we need to wait and see if the photograph is forged or if it was photoshopped, something like that.

There is just so much going on, but the bottom line is, today, we have taken a big step toward making America great again. It is not the 15 percent tax I had hoped it would be. In fact, people have got to understand that my friend, Steve Moore, who used to be the senior economics editor for The Wall Street Journal, helped President Trump as an economic adviser. Steve told me a number of times that he likes my definition of corporate tax better than any.

But my definition describes what a corporate tax really is, especially the U.S. corporate tax: 35 percent. It is the largest tariff any modern country has ever put on its own goods or services, because, let's face it, when we put a corporate tax on a company, and 35 percent, they are going to have to put that on their products. If they don't collect that tax on top of the cost of the product, they are going to go out of business. That has got to be added to the cost of the goods or services.

When you look at all the businesses and all the huge manufacturing plants in America that have closed down, and you look at what they were doing before they closed down and you deduct that 35 percent corporate tax or, I would submit, tariff, they could have been selling their product competitively not just in America, but probably in places all over the world. Instead of having to close their doors, they could have kept producing and expanding, but for that huge tariff that was put on their own goods.

Most countries are smart enough not to put a tariff on what their own companies make before they ship them out. But we have been doing that.

So why have we been doing that?

Because it was a great way, people in Congress thought, to raise revenue.

You tell people this mean, evil corporation was paying this tax. We really put it over on this corporation. We made them pay all this tax.

No. What you did was add 35 percent to the cost of their products that they had to figure in somehow to cover that, in addition to what it cost to manufacture; and you have made them noncompetitive, here or abroad, and that is why they had to close.

That is why I love the idea of either eliminating the tariff or at least getting it down to 15 percent so we undercut the 17 or so percent that China has. If we undercut their tariff on their own goods, goods produced in China, then those manufacturers are coming back.

I have been amazed that reporters have asked, when I would talk about this publicly: But how are you going to make up for all of that lost income?

They didn't understand, yeah, you are not collecting it as corporate tax, but now you are collecting directly from the people. So it is not a hidden, insidious tax. There are more jobs, and they are paying more money, and the economy is growing and hiring more people. There are more jobs, more income, and more income tax, and it is better for everybody.

But the forces of greed around this country and around this town like to try to convince people they are really sticking it to somebody else, when the truth is that the individuals are going to end up paying it, wherever it is, or the company is not going to stay in business. I would rather them stay in business, add jobs, and give raises.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time I have remaining?

So in the last 10 minutes I have here, this will be the last session before Thanksgiving Day. I am greatly disturbed that we have so many young people in America who can't explain what Thanksgiving Day is, why it was originally started, who thanks was given to. Many thought it was to the Indians, but it was not.

This is a declaration, May 2, 1778, to troops at Valley Forge: ``The Commander in Chief directs that divine service be performed ever Sunday at 11 o'clock in those brigade to which there are chaplains--those which have none to attend the places of worship nearest to them. It is expected that officers of all ranks will, by their attendance, set an example to their men.

``While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of patriot, it should be our highest glory to laud the more distinguished character of Muslim''--I am sorry. It says, ``Christian.''

George Washington said that the highest glory of a patriot soldier would be the more distinguished character of a Christian. It was an order he gave.

So I know people are saying this is totally appropriate now, and they wonder why evil seems to keep growing in America. But as we look where we came from and we look at what prior leaders did to defeat the forces of evil that are here in this world--and will be as long as it is here in this form--it seems like there is a correlation between when the country is praying to God and asking for his protection and blessing, and when evil seems to be growing.

Thomas Jefferson, in 1781, noted, and it is engraved in his memorial: ``The God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God, that they are not to be violated but with his wrath?

``Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.''

That is Thomas Jefferson.

John Quincy Adams, on September 26, 1810, wrote a letter to his son, the U.S. Minister at Saint Petersburg: ``So great is my veneration for the Bible, and so strong my belief that, when duly read and meditated on, it is of all books in the world that which contributes most to make men good, wise, and happy.''

Former President nominated Supreme Court by James Madison, and this on March 30, 1863, by Abraham Lincoln, a great Republican. Lincoln said: ``It is the duty o nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are only blessed whose God is the Lord.''

This is Lincoln's written word: ``We have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us. And we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were

produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to God that made us.

``It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.''

That was a national proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. Thank God that a majority of Americans participated in that and prayed to God.

In his second inaugural, he is talking about North and South. It is inscribed on the inside north wall of the Lincoln Memorial. About half to two-thirds of the way through there, in the middle, he is talking about North and South. He said: ``Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. `Woe unto the world because of offenses. . . .' Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said `the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' ''

I want to finish with this from John F. Kennedy. He was talking at the lighting of the Christmas tree; but at a time of Thanksgiving, it is certainly appropriate. He said: ``With the lighting of this tree, which is an old ceremony in Washington and one which has been among the most important responsibilities of a good many Presidents of the United States, we initiate, in a formal way, the Christmas season. We mark the festival of Christmas, which is the most sacred and hopeful day in our civilization.

``For nearly 2,000 years, the message of Christmas, the message of peace and good will towards all men, has been the guiding star of our endeavors.

``This morning, I had a meeting at the White House, which included some of our representatives from far-off countries in Africa and Asia. They were returning to their posts for the Christmas holidays. Talking with them, I was struck by the fact that, in the far-off continents, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, as well as Christians, pause from their labors on the 25th day of December to celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Peace.

``There could be no more striking proof that Christmas is truly the universal holiday of men. It is the day when all of us dedicate our thoughts to others; when all are reminded that mercy and compassion are the enduring virtues; when all show, by small deeds and large, and by acts, that it is more blessed to give than to receive. It is the day when we remind ourselves that man can and must live in peace with his neighbors, and it is the peacemakers who are truly blessed.

``In this year of 1962, we greet each other at Christmas with some special sense of blessing of the peace.''

Mr. Speaker, this period of Thanksgiving that we will have in the next week will, hopefully, be a time when we will come back together more as a nation; when we will bind our hearts in prayer and Thanksgiving and ask for God's protection, as our greatest Presidents did. And I know those prayers will be answered.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 3 o'clock and 14 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, November 17, 2017, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, it is with great joy that I welcome Dr. Glynn Stone to the House of Representatives today to serve as our guest chaplain.

Dr. Stone serves at Mobberly Baptist Church in Longview as senior pastor, where he takes part in influencing others for Christ. He is husband to wife, Angie, and together, they have the joy of raising three awesome sons.

Dr. Stone's call to ministry began when he was 16 years old, serving in churches throughout the Tennessee Valley. Under Dr. Stone's influence at Mobberly Baptist, several churches have been planted across the country as well as numerous mission trips across the world.

Apart from his pastoral services, Dr. Stone has had the privilege of teaching at several colleges and universities, including Southwestern Seminary, Dallas Baptist University, and Shorter College.

Knowing Dr. Stone as a friend and as a confidant is an honor and a privilege. His dedication to the church of Jesus Christ is something to be greatly admired, just as the vast number of our Founders did. He is a blessing to the multitude of people whom God has touched through him and his years of service to our Lord.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to start out echoing what my friend, Congressman Rick Nolan, was saying: We should not be about the rich getting richer.

There are different strategies to try to accomplish fairness in a free country. If it is truly free, people are going to have to have the opportunity to fail as well as succeed. The only other alternative is the government kills any incentives to be more productive and just says: We are going to flatline everybody across the board, no matter how much you produce.

We have seen, over and over throughout history, that never works. Income redistribution never works. You kill the incentives. And, as I was told back in the summer of 1973, in an exchange program at the Soviet Union, by a bunch of farmers who were sitting in the shade mid- morning in the middle of the summer, I asked--and I tried to use my best Russian: When do you work out in the field? I couldn't tell what was cultivated and what wasn't. It all looked terrible.

They all laughed. I thought maybe I had translated something wrong. But one of the farmers, in Russian, said: I make the same number of rubles if I am out there in the field, or in the Sun, or here in the shade, so I am here in the shade. That is why socialism doesn't work.

So there have been many different strategies that have been utilized

throughout this Nation's history, and throughout the history of the world, to try to create--sometimes it is not an effort to create fairness in this country. It has normally been, thank God. But under the Obama administration's efforts to redistribute income, it brought about, for the first time in our Nation's history, that the top 1 percent of our Nation made 95 percent of the income.

I just was staggered. But that happened under the Obama administration. And, obviously, that tells us that the strategy for encouraging success, financial success, was an abysmal failure. Under the 8 years of Commander in Chief Obama, as he commanded over the economy, he made sure--I don't think it was intentional--but his efforts made sure that the very richest in the country became much richer and the rest of the country suffered.

And those on food stamps skyrocketed to the highest level ever. I think over 50 million. We had 95 million Americans, for the first time in our history, who got so tired of applying for jobs, unsuccessfully, they quit even applying.

And so how does the Obama administration respond? They responded by not counting those 95 million in the unemployed numbers because they were no longer looking for jobs. The economy, it really hasn't recovered. People have been flatlined, or less, when adjusted for the little inflation we have had.

So it is time to try something different than the Obama efforts that put 95 percent of the Nation's income in the top 1 percent's pockets. We are already seeing that change, and I am hoping that our efforts, especially in creating tax cuts, will cause the economy to just skyrocket, the way it did after the 30 percent tax cut kicked in under President Reagan by 1983.

I do want to touch on something that came out in the last week. This article from The Hill says: ``Early Comey draft accused Clinton of gross negligence on emails.'' It turns out--we find out now--that FBI Director Comey started drafting months before Hillary Clinton was interviewed, and months before discussion with Cheryl Mills and the other potential targets of the criminal investigation over the destruction of Hillary Clinton's emails.

It should have been obstruction of justice. That is not gross negligence when you tell somebody to go destroy your phone with a hammer, and you have them use BleachBit to take out everything in your phone or in your computer. That is not gross negligence, that is intentional obstruction of justice, when you know that there is a subpoena after the things you are destroying.

But FBI Director Comey decided to play politics instead of law and order. Maybe that would make a good new series on television or Netflix--not ``House of Cards,'' but ``House of Injustice''--where we play politics with justice, instead of trying to do justice, trying to fulfill the oath to pursue justice.

In any event, he had ``gross negligence,'' as the term he attributed to Hillary Clinton, in that first draft. But, apparently, when he realized that gross negligence would be a crime, he eliminated what would clearly have been a complete accusation of a crime having been committed by Hillary Clinton.

So, interesting, just more information coming out about why James Comey should not--well, he should be considered someone worthy of investigation himself. He admitted to leaking information in order to manipulate the Justice Department, not by being up front and recommending a special counsel--oh, no. He wanted to create a special counsel, just like he did when he told John Ashcroft to recuse himself.

Ashcroft, obviously, not knowing what Comey had in mind, but he was going to appoint his child's godfather to be special counsel--Patrick Fitzgerald--and let him go on a witch hunt trying to get Karl Rove or Vice President Cheney--unsuccessful. So he manipulates and creates a case against Scooter Libby, so he could at least have a scalp to show for the millions and millions of dollars that were wasted.

But from Comey's standpoint, his child's godfather made a lot of money, and Comey got to lash out at the Bush administration, so probably from their standpoint it worked out real well.

But it also points to the fact that since James Comey has been involved up to his eyeballs in what is going on as FBI Director, whoever were to be special counsel, if anyone, they would need to be someone who is not close friends with James Comey. And, as Comey apparently pointed out to the Washingtonian, when they were doing a big article on him back in 2013, basically, Bob Mueller--if the world were on fire, Bob Mueller would be the one standing there with him to defend him at the end.

So, clearly, Mueller, if he were interested in ethics, would have refused--and actually interested in following the law himself--he would have refused to be appointed special counsel. But we now know that since Mueller, as FBI Director, was involved in the investigation of Russia's efforts to gain United States uranium, to try to corner the market on uranium, and they were apparently committing crimes in their efforts paying bribes, whatever is necessary, to try to acquire United States uranium, the investigation went on apparently for 3 or 4 years, as an undercover person.

Well, Mueller and the U.S. attorney in charge of the investigation, named Rod Rosenstein, actually the guy who appointed Mueller to be special counsel, they ended up ensuring that the records of that long- term investigation would be sealed, and they even went to court and got a court order to seal it.

And whose name was on the motion to seal those documents? Rod Rosenstein. He did have a deputy sign on his behalf, but Rod Rosenstein was sealing the records so people couldn't know that Russia was committing crimes while they were trying to acquire U.S. uranium.

If people saw that the FBI and the Justice Department knew that Russia was committing crimes, paying bribes trying to acquire U.S. uranium, then they would have been complicit with the effort to approve the sale of uranium to a country that was committing crimes to get it. If they had not approved that, then it is doubtful that the Clintons would have struck the megamillions Russian lottery the way they did, and their foundation.

So the last two people in the country that should have been involved in an investigation into potential Russian collusion should be a person named Rod Rosenstein and another person named Robert Mueller.

I have great respect for his valiant service to our country in Vietnam. This isn't about Vietnam. This is about manipulating the justice system. It is about sealing an ongoing investigation that showed crimes being committed to put our national security at risk, and not speaking up against the sale of 20, 25 percent or so of America's uranium to an entity that would provide it to Russia.

We now know that that uranium did not stay in the United States, as some had said. Well, when you are going to sell uranium to people who have been paying bribes, acting illegally, is it any surprise that if they are willing to violate the law, that they would be willing to violate the terms of an agreement or other laws regarding that uranium?

So I am still hoping--and, yes, I believe in prayer, so I am hoping and praying that justice will be done, that those who should not be investigating will step out of the picture or be forced to step out of the picture, and we can have a fair investigation into potential crimes.

Another very important piece of information that has come out about the shooter in the Sutherland Springs massacre has been this scream, this cry for more gun control, and that is immediately after we had a radical Islamist terrorist screaming ``Allahu Akbar.'' Even on FOX they said that means ``praise be to God.'' No. It means ``praise be to Allah.''

If you want to look for ``praise be to God,'' you can look for somebody to actually say in English, ``Praise be to God;'' or you could look on top of the Washington Monument, where American leaders had inscriptions on all four sides of the metal capstone on top of the Washington Monument; but on the side facing the U.S. Capitol, they had inscribed in Latin, ``Laus Deo,'' meaning ``praise be to God;'' not ``praise be to Allah,'' but ``praise be to God.''

The reason they had ``Praise be to God'' facing the Capitol is that this is east of the Washington Monument, and what they aspired to have was the first rays of God's sun every morning striking ``Praise be to God,'' enlightening those words before anything else in our Nation's Capital was lit; ``Praise be to God,'' then the rest of the Capital City would be lit. That is why it is there.

It turns out that the New York killer, the radical Islamist, he came to the U.S. under the diversity visa lottery program that was started because apparently some Senators and a few Democratic House Members believed that we were having too many Hispanics come in and we were not having enough Irish come in. So they created this program so immigrants like Irish, who were not being properly represented in the numbers, could have a chance to come into the U.S. the way so many Hispanics were.

Well, I didn't think we cared about national origin that we needed a special program to give some other countries a chance that Hispanic countries would not have, but apparently some thought that was going to be appropriate.

It is high time to get rid of the program. We have known for years terrorists have been trying to win the lottery, and terrorists have won the lottery.

My friend, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte, had a terrific op-ed in The Hill, entitled: ``Visa lottery program is too much of a gamble for our nation and needs to end.''

Republicans in the House voted to end the diversity visa lottery back in 2005. The Senate wouldn't take it up. Senators were still there that helped start the program, like Senator Schumer. Then Democrats had the majority for the next 4 years after 2006. They certainly weren't going to end the diversity visa lottery program. They are the ones who wanted it.

Then, in 2012, in the session after we got the majority back, we voted again to end the lottery, but the Senate, again, wouldn't take it up.

In the last session, we didn't get it voted out, but I am grateful to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte, for pushing, as he has, and I am hoping we can get that bill to the floor that will allow us to end it.

In that op-ed, Chairman Goodlatte says: ``The visa lottery, which was enacted 10 years prior to 9/11, is foolish in the age in which we live. Those in the world who wish us harm can easily engage in this statistical gamble with nothing to lose. The Office of the Inspector General at the State Department has found that it poses significant national security risks. In fact, Saipov``--the New York City radical Islamic terrorist--'' is the fifth person who has been accused or convicted in connection with terrorism plots to have come here through the visa lottery.

``In another instance, Hesham Hadayet, an Egyptian terrorist who killed two and wounded several others at Los Angeles International Airport on July 4, 2002, was a lawful permanent resident who received his green card through the program''--the diversity visa lottery program--``since his wife was a visa lottery winner.''

So this Egyptian terrorist was a lottery winner, or his wife was, and the two people who he killed in L.A. Airport and those he wounded were the losers of that lottery.

Chairman Goodlatte goes on to say: ``Additionally, in August of 2002, Pakistan national Imran Mandhai pleaded guilty to conspiring to wage jihad by plotting to destroy electrical power stations, the Israeli consulate, and other south Florida targets. He entered the United States with his parents, who had won the visa lottery, in 1998.

``Similarly, in August 2002, two diversity lottery winners from Morocco--Ahmed Hannan and Karim Koubriti--were indicted as members of an alleged terrorist `sleeper' cell in Michigan. In June 2003, a jury convicted Koubriti of conspiring to provide material support or resources to terrorists, and Hannan of possessing false documents.''

So visa lottery applicants, some of them--many of them submit several applications under different names in order to increase their chances of winning the visa lottery.

Chairman Goodlatte continues: ``And marriage fraud is rampant in the program. `Pop-up' spouses often appear in between the time that the applicant registers for the lottery and the time when the applicant is interviewed by the State Department. These `spouses' pay the applicant in order to be part of the applicant's green card winnings.''

Winnings from the visa lottery.

Chairman Goodlatte continues: ``The United States has the most generous immigration system in the world, admitting more than 1 million legal immigrants each year.''

There is no country in the world that allows that many people to come into their country legally. We are far from being the largest country either geographically or population-wise, yet we are the most generous country in the world in allowing people into our country legally.

Chairman Goodlatte goes on: ``Eliminating the visa lottery does not negate our Nation's generosity, but makes our immigration system smarter and safer for the age in which we live. Our immigration policy should be based primarily on our national needs, security, and economics, as opposed to an arbitrary system. The visa lottery is too much of a gamble for our Nation to make with today's ongoing threat of terrorism and must come to an end.''

There is no other country in the world that is so stupid regarding its own national security and national interests that it allows a lottery to determine who would get a visa to come into their country. It, hopefully, will be ending soon.

That is why there was this article in The Daily Caller: ``GOP Senators Distance Themselves from Diversity Visa Program They Helped Create.''

There are some who helped create the diversity visa lottery program in the Senate who are saying: You know what? Maybe it is time to get rid of it.

I hope we will.

Yesterday, though, in the House Judiciary Committee, we did have a bill come up. It is being urged by law enforcement, Federal law enforcement, by the Justice Department, FBI, the National Security Administration, CIA, our intelligence folks. They are saying: We have got to have this 702 program reauthorized that will end on December 31 of this year.

Well, we know that the system has been abused. We were assured when I was here early on in Congress that: Gee, just reauthorize this, because there are no Americans who are going to be harmed by allowing these warrantless wiretapping situations. The only way an American could be caught up in this wiretapping would be if they are talking to a known foreign terrorist or a member of a known foreign terrorist organization.

So that gave me some security. And back then--some years back when we were authorizing the program, I said to my friends that were against the program because they were afraid an American would be caught up: Well, if they are afraid of being caught up in this wiretapping or this tapping into phone calls, then just make sure that their foreign terrorist friends call them on somebody else's phone.

That was glibly said. Little did I know that it is not just known foreign terrorists and it is not members of known terrorist organizations; it has gotten so far afield that even if a Member of Congress has an innocent visit with a diplomat or an ambassador from a foreign country, that can be--and apparently, we are told, has been-- used to listen in and monitor conversations. But we were assured there is a great safeguard, because if an American is picked up under this monitoring of foreign terrorists, then the American name will be masked so nobody will know who it was.

So through the Fourth Amendment, we will protect them from having a warrantless search of a conversation without a warrant from a judge, which requires that they are proving probable cause to believe that the individual is involved in a crime, has committed a crime. And then with that probable cause being proved--as a judge, I signed felony warrants for searches, for seizures, for arrests, but you had to have probable cause.

But you had to have probable cause. This allows them to grab those conversations without probable cause.

So with all that we have begun to learn, and especially when we found out how liberal the Obama administration was with unmasking American

names and that we had people who have shown themselves to be extremely political in their decisions and activities, even being willing to go on Sunday morning television shows six times in 1 day and lie intentionally to the American public about the Benghazi matter, that that same political person would be unmasking American names right and left, and although I know there is one Republican who said, ``Oh, I talked to her, and I'm convinced that she's fine,'' well, I am not. We need that being thoroughly investigated, as well as the other unmaskings being properly and thoroughly investigated by people who are not so gullible.

This is serious stuff. When we in Congress allowed this loophole around the Fourth Amendment requirement for warrants in order to seize or obtain evidence, we anticipated that it would be carefully and strictly adhered to. And then we see the unmasking has been so liberally done, and there certainly seems to be a prima facie indication, when you look at who unmasked and the people who were unmasked, that you have one political party in power investigating their political opponent for political gain. And, once again, thank God it didn't end up the way they hoped.

But this is still quite serious, and that is why I applauded my friend, another fellow felony judge in our background. Former Judge Ted Poe and Zoe Lofgren from California, Democrat, had a good amendment in my opinion, and it was going to require that before law enforcement-- once they obtained these American names and numbers, well, law enforcement, apparently, once they have obtained these American names and numbers and phone numbers and conversations, and obtained them without probable cause in compliance with the Fourth Amendment, there are countless numbers of queries being made into the database on that individual or on the phone number just doing phishing expeditions, and then, if they find something, seeing if they can use that information to help prosecute them on another matter. Those are truly phishing expeditions. They should not be allowed without a warrant.

Okay. We will say you obtained the information legally, even though you did it in violation of the Fourth Amendment. But if you are going to go back and research that database, you should have probable cause before you start being allowed to basically listen in on conversations or follow up on all kinds of activity that was gathered without any probable cause.

This is what the government does that the Founders were afraid of. They didn't know that there would be cell phones some day or the highly technically proficient ability to communicate we have now. But they knew that mankind would not change. It has not changed. There has always been evil. There will always be evil in this world, and we have to guard against becoming part of the problem when we are in the government.

The Founders' safeguards, all of those amendments, basically, were safeguards, whether it was the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Tenth, I mean, those are critically important--Sixth Amendment. Those are all important to preserving our rights. So I was saddened that that amendment failed: 12 voting for it, 21 voting against it.

I appreciate the chairman and the ranking member, Mr. Conyers, agreeing to an amendment that Mr. Cicilline made, my Democratic friend. And, in fact, I had an identical amendment I was going to make, except mine added two other safeguards, two other laws.

My friend and neighbor--office neighbor, that is--agreed to accept my friendly amendment, to add those other two laws, to ensure that when the U.S. Government went after and examined and queried this 702 material--the warrantless wiretapping, as The Hill calls it--that these laws would apply to those queries to hopefully increase the concern by those making the queries that they could be punished.

But this article goes on and says: ``The current law allows Federal investigators to search collected data belonging to American citizens, an authority critics say circumvents Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

``The Liberty Act would require criminal investigators to obtain a court order before viewing the content of any American's communications collected under the NSA program--but would not require a warrant to search the database in the first place.''

So the Liberty Act it is referring to actually was used as the amendment to that bill.

Anyway, I know Mr. Conyers is quoted in the article, saying: ``We have been assured in explicit terms that if we adopt this amendment today''--talking about the Poe-Lofgren amendment--``leadership will not permit this bill to proceed to the House floor.''

And that was also a concern mentioned by our friend from New York, Jerry Nadler.

But I would submit that we should not be afraid of Republican leadership doing the wrong thing. At least, it doesn't hurt, I guess, to have a healthy fear because that certainly has happened. But we still ought to be pushing to do everything we can to ensure that the U.S. Constitution is properly followed and we don't continue to have loopholes around it.

So that is an ongoing fight, and the Senate has got to take it up. But there are concerns that the Senate is just going to rubberstamp what the NSA wants. They are not going to have any of the safeguards that we put in the bill as it is already, which I still don't feel is enough, and that is why I voted against it, as did the man who sits next to me in the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan. Andy Biggs voted against it as well.

So there were a number of us who voted against the bill because the proper protections, in our opinion, are not there. We have just got to continue to advocate for that.

I also want to mention a bit of fake news that came from the Huffington Post.

I have met Ms. Huffington. She could not have been more congenial. When I was at ABC, going to be on the Stephanopoulos show Sunday morning, she was a delight to talk to, but the stuff coming out of her publication sometimes is rather astounding.

We had a debate in the Natural Resources Committee. We were voting on some bills, and a comment I made that was not necessarily central to the discussion but I thought might be interesting--I mean, if they would look at my full comments and comments I have made and continue to make, as I have said before, British Petroleum should never have been allowed to keep operating their drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico called Deepwater Horizon. They had hundreds of egregious safety violations when other companies had one or two.

The only reason we can find that the Obama administration allowed British Petroleum to continue to drill with such egregious safety violations, with such complete, utter disregard for the safety and well-being of those on the platform and of wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico and those bordering the Gulf of Mexico, all we can find is they were about to come out and endorse the President's cap-and-trade program, something that Speaker Pelosi desperately wanted.

I had read an article that indicated they even had BP representatives in the office of Senator John Kerry trying to work out when they would do the big rollout of this big oil company that was going to support cap-and-trade. Basically, they would have an inside deal and would have made billions of dollars that other oil companies would not have made because they didn't have the inside track like the Obama administration was going to give BP.

But that is when the Deepwater Horizon blew, from what I understood, and so that is why the Obama administration was so slow to respond. They kept hoping this was going to go away and it wasn't going to be as serious, because BP was assuring them: Oh, it's not that bad. We have got it under control.

They didn't have it under control. They should never have been allowed to have been drilling when that blowout occurred. It did have an adverse effect on the Gulf. It did have a very adverse effect on so many things.

But the comment that the Huffington Post wanted to create some fake news, latched onto, is I was really upset and concerned about the damage that BP had caused.

I have to go back and look. It wasn't that long after this happened, but I

drove hundreds of miles along the beach, and I kept getting out with my high-def camera expecting to be able to find a lot of oil on the beaches. I know I had read and seen there was a spot south of New Orleans, and, apparently, I didn't start close enough to that.

I understood it was really ruining the beaches of Florida, and I went along the Miracle Coast and along the Mississippi and Alabama coast there. Everywhere I went, I would maybe find a few drops of oil like we have on our Texas beaches quite often, but it is just a drop or two here or there. I was going: Where's all the oil?

Everybody said: Well, it is, like, 5, 10 miles up the coast.

So I kept going up, looking for this big oil spill on the beach. And I knew there were people who were undertaking heroic efforts, you know. I had seen those on the news. I had talked to people who were doing it.

Kevin Costner had a great idea, it appeared, for sopping up the oil to keep it from getting to the coast. So there were Herculean efforts being made to stop the oil. But there should have been more oil on the beach.

So they want to make it sound like I am just oblivious to any oil ever coming ashore because I did say what is absolutely true, that it is amazing the way nature seems to take care of problems, and we know that because there is ongoing oil seepage every day.

I don't want oil on our beaches. I hate oil on the beaches.

Really, it is infuriating when you are walking along the beach and you step on an oil bubble and then you have to spend a bunch of time trying to get that oil off your foot, even a small drop. But you could go to southern California, off the coast, and find drops of oil here and there from natural seepage.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, you can go to their website, and they talk about natural oil seeps. They said: ``A 2003 report from the National Research Council estimates that, on average, approximately 160,000 tonnes''--and it is spelled t-o-n-n-e-s; apparently metric tons--``of petroleum enter North American waters through natural seeps each year.''

Apparently, 1 ton is about 7.33 barrels per ton, or 307.86 U.S. gallons per metric ton. So if you multiplied 307--or 308, if you want to round it; multiply 160,000 tons by 308, then you could get an idea of how many gallons of oil seep out just through cracks in the Earth's surface and come up through the waters.

They are hard to find, although sometimes you can see them from satellites or from aircraft. You can see the oil shimmering on top of the water since it is lighter than water. It floats up through the seawater and comes to the surface.

Anyway, just more fake news trying to create a big deal where there wasn't any. But you can go online to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. They have a good article on the natural oil seeps. It says: ``As much as one-half of the oil that enters the coastal environment comes from natural seeps of oil and natural gas. These geologic features are known to occur in clusters around the world, such as off the southern coast of California and in the Gulf of Mexico, but are still relatively unstudied. In recent years, advances in remote sensing have enabled more accurate detection and estimates of natural oil flows into the ocean.

``In locations where seeps are found, oil flows slowly up through networks of cracks, forming springs of hydrocarbon similar to the La Brae tar pits on land. Lighter compounds rise buoyantly to the water's surface and evaporate or become entrained in ocean currents; others fall the seafloor and collect over hundreds or thousands of years.''

So if you multiply 308 times 160 tons, and then multiply that times thousands of years, you will get an idea as to how much natural seepage there has been of crude oil into the ocean.

But at least the Huffington Post article points out that--and this was from the Deepwater Horizon blowout--``About 24 percent is believed to have evaporated or dissolved. The remaining 35 percent was `naturally dispersed' or persisted in the environment.'' And it says only ``41 percent was directly or chemically recovered, burned or skimmed.''

So they only got 41 percent. That is pretty good. It is not good enough. We need to be better at doing that. But it really is amazing how nature seems to respond to catastrophes, but we are supposed to tend the garden, and that means we do the best we can to keep the garden clean.

Mr. Speaker, I want to return to the issue about the shooting down in Sutherland Springs. The President, I think, appropriately pointed out when he was asked about it. He said: I think that mental health is your problem here.

People are screaming for more gun control. Yet every time it seems that more gun control is pled for, our people that mean well stand up and scream: Oh, you got to do something. I don't care if it is wrong. Just do something.

Well, it may be well-intended, but that is extremely foolish. You can do more harm by doing something even if it is wrong. It is often tragedies that lead to the worst legislation because people in Congress feel like we have got to do something. We have got to do something quick, even if it is wrong, so that the American people think we are dealing with it.

Jefferson was not at the Constitutional Convention, but I understand he suggested that potentially a good amendment would be that you could not pass a bill here in Congress until it had been on file for a year.

Obviously, that has never made its way into the law, but some of our worst legislation comes too quick as an overreaction to some tragedy, some failure when we don't have adequate time to see what would be the best thing to do.

As it turns out in the Texas shooting, the gun laws were entirely adequate to prevent that from happening, but for those who put their faith in the government keeping us protected, which our Founders did not do--that is why we have a Second Amendment--you have to look no further than this tragic massacre to understand the government is not likely going to be there to protect you.

It turns out the shooter, a man full of evil, was convicted of a crime that should have prevented him from even having a gun. Yet the Air Force failed to get the conviction into the databank so that when searches were done, background checks didn't pick it up.

So when the government fails, the Founders expected that by having a Second Amendment where, not the military of the United States, but actually militia groups that form up, they would be able to have weapons. Those were rank and file citizens who were not hired by the government. They were simple citizens of the United States who would respond to suppress any outrage that the government might try to impose.

That is what happened when Patrick Henry got 5,000 people to come out when the British Government, that was the law of the land, started going through their homes and taking whatever they wanted.

They responded with guns, citizens coming out of their homes. No, I am not advocating for those who want to create more fake news. I am not advocating for a revolution. We have, fortunately, a Constitution in place that they didn't have in 1775, that allows us to fix things without having to have a revolution.

But the answer is not more gun control laws. This guy was full of evil. He had mental health problems. The system should have prevented him from having a gun. The laws that were in place should have prevented that, and I am grateful that the State of Texas did its part.

He applied for a concealed carry permit, and even though the Air Force conviction wasn't there, there was enough evidence to prevent him from getting a concealed carry permit in the State of Texas. But the other laws, where the Federal Government is supposed to protect us, failed to work because the government often fails to do its job.

The thing that really, to me, became an outrage--and it is something that our Founders feared perhaps more than anything else when they were trying to set up a good governing document--was persecution of Christians. That is why so many people came to this country in its earliest days.

Christians were being persecuted, as has happened for over 2,000 years. They thought if they came to America and

they could have a country where they could be free to practice their Christian beliefs without government prosecuting and persecuting them, that it would be just a little slice of heaven on Earth, as much as you could get while there is still so much evil in the world.

Now, as this country, led by its Supreme Court, others like the ACLU, and Freedom From Religion groups, they--we have already been told, you can't mention God. You can't pray. You can't mention your religion. Well, that is certainly not what was the feeling of those who were the predominant Founders and those who made the best improvements in America.

It was a Great Awakening, a huge revival in America. Before the mid- 1700s, so much of the country turned to God, had Christian beliefs, Biblical beliefs, and their children--children like Sam Adams--grew up having such profound faith in God, profound faith in the Bible.

I was looking down the hall in what is right below the rotunda and one of the signs up there mentioned Sam Adams. Sam Adams was called the Father of the American Revolution. He was a product of the Great Awakening in the 1700s.

He was so moral. I guess many people knew that he knew how to make good beer. But he also had profound belief in the Bible, in God, in nature's God, and that is what drove him to push for a country where there could be equality; where people could practice their religious beliefs, whether they were atheists, Buddhists, Confucianists, Orthodox Jews, Muslim, only so long as they did not believe that their religion should overtake and supplant the U.S. Constitution, which is what radical Islamists believe.

We have now come to a place where Christians are being so vilified and belittled and besmirched that this country is beginning to look like the places that the Christians that fled to America had to leave to avoid persecution.

So we get these Twitter comments that say--an article from the Huffington Post, naturally--playing up the ridicule of Christians.

One tweet from Rosanne Cash says: ``They were in a church that was full of prayers. They need a government that will enable commonsense gun laws.''

Karen Tulmulty said: ``Thoughts and prayers for people who were mowed down in a church sounds especially hollow.''

Michael McKean said: ``They were in church. They had the prayers shot right out of them. Maybe try something else.''

Keith Olbermann said: `` `Thoughts and prayers' again . . . idiot? These people were in CHURCH. They WERE praying.''

Katie Mack said: ``At this point, `thoughts and prayers' just means `shut up and take it.'''

Wil Wheaton said: ``The murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything, they would still be alive, you worthless sack of'' S-dot- dot-dot.

Chris Evangelista: ``They were already in a church . . . it's almost like prayers do absolutely nothing and actual reform is needed.''

Marina Sirtis said: ``To all those asking for thoughts and prayers for the victims . . . it seems that your direct line to God is not working.''

Josh Gad: ``Terror attack that kills six gets travel bans same day. Deadliest mass shooting and deadliest church shooting ever get prayers and too soon to talk.''

Roxane Gay: ``After a mass shooting in a church, the phrase `thoughts and prayers' from the mouths of useless politicians becomes even more asinine.''

Robert McNamara: ``We need more than prayers. . . . Today's victims were at church praying. We need sensible gun regulation and a ban on AR-15 weapons.''

By the way, if there were a ban on AR-15s, then the shooter would have been allowed to continue shooting, and he probably would have killed everybody in the church because the guy that stopped him, thank God, had an AR-15 that he used to shoot him and get the carnage to stop.

Sara Bonaccori says: ``Clearly your prayers aren't working if a mass shooting can take place in a church. Maybe we can try a legislative solution now?''

Mr. Speaker, it just goes on and on belittling Christians and belittling people who believe in the power of prayer.

Then we had an article from The Hill today. Representative Jared Huffman in a news interview says that he thinks there is too much religion in politics. Huffman told The Washington Post that he has for years not answered questionnaires that ask him about religious beliefs instead putting: unspecified or none of your business. I don't believe in religious tests.

I don't either. Although if somebody says they are a Christian and they come before our committee and they keep making a big deal about how I am a Christian, then, as we know even in court, credibility is always an issue. If you say under oath you are one thing and it turns out you are not, then you are not really a Christian, you don't have Christian beliefs, and that is worth knowing.

You say you are a Christian? What does that mean? I will not hesitate to ask that if it is going to reflect not on their religious beliefs. I am not going to hold those against anybody. But if you say you are one thing and you are lying, that is important to find out.

Anyway, more of the same. There is a great article in National Review by David French, dated November 6: ``In the Face of Evil, Prayer Is the Most Rational and Effective Response.''

He points out that: ``While I disagree with atheists, my quarrel right now isn't with their disbelief, it's with their choosing this moment to not only mock Christians but to also display their ignorance of basic Christian theology.

``You see, the presence of evil--especially the increasing presence of evil--demands a prayerful response. Scripture is full of examples of God's people crying out to Him in great distress. Jesus cried out to God in His great distress. Time and again God responds in ways that bring healing and restoration to broken people and broken nations. He always responds in some way--often not the way we ask or demand.''

If He were to intervene and stop all evil, then it means we become robots; we don't have free choice. We become basically robots. As any parent knows, you can order your child to love you or to hug you, but there is nothing that means more to your heart and soul than a sweet, little child running up to you voluntarily, throwing their arms around you, and saying, ``I love you, Daddy'' from the heart.

If we have a Heavenly parent, doesn't it make sense that that Heavenly parent would want us free to choose to love the Heavenly parent?

The article says: ``Progressives always respond to mass shootings with a series of proposals that wouldn't have stopped the mass shooting.''

Mr. Speaker, it is happening again. It is happening again. This shooter in Sutherland Springs, Texas, could not have lawfully possessed his weapons, but he ignored existing gun laws. So who follows the laws if you pass laws to take away guns? The honest people, the ones who are victims in a shooting like this. That is who follows.

There are laws in Texas that enable a church to be a gun-free zone, and apparently too many people assume every church is gun-free. If someone had had a gun in that church, there would not have been 25 people killed.

So, Mr. Speaker, my thoughts and prayers are with the country, and I hope and pray others will join.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, Mr. Biggs. I appreciate your hosting this hour because this is critical stuff here. This is the kind of thing that makes or breaks an experiment in self-government because there is an attempted coup taking place.

We have heard over and over about, oh, gee, Mr. Mueller will come to a fair and just conclusion. Well, the only fair and just conclusion that Bob Mueller could come to would be that he should never have accepted the position of special counsel, that he had conflicts so deep that accepting the role of special counsel could not be ethical and appropriate. You wonder, why would he take it?

Well, when you find out that, as FBI Director, he and U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein were involved in the deep cover investigation into Russia's effort to corner the market using American uranium, and that Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder and others in the administration approved the sale to a group, the stockholders of which donated, as I understand, $145 million or so to the Clinton Foundation, in effect, the Clintons hit the Russian megalottery--the megamillions lottery from Russia.

As I understand, $145 million or so to the Clinton Foundation, in effect, the Clintons hit the Russian mega lottery; the megamillions lottery from Russia, and just a little tease was the half-a-million- dollar fee for just giving one little, short speech by Bill Clinton.

But if we look back at what has gone on, just look at some of the facts, it was shocking that FBI Director Comey did not have Cheryl Mills interviewed. She was Clinton's former Chief of Staff at the State Department. Now we are finding out, well, I guess, gee, if Comey was going to draft a statement saying that there was not sufficient evidence to prosecute Hillary Clinton before he ever talked to Cheryl Mills or talked to Hillary Clinton or followed up on the most critical evidence, then clearly it makes sense why Director Comey would not want to make Cheryl Mills' interview recorded, and would make an agreement with Cheryl Mills and the other potential defendants in the case that, gee, if they just got a look at their laptops, they promised they wouldn't use anything in the laptop to prosecute them, and the FBI would then, under Comey's direction, would actually participate in the obstruction and destruction of evidence so that nobody could ever use it against any of them.

Now, originally, we thought that might only be Hillary Clinton. But as we find out, gee, Mr. Mueller, Mr. Comey, and Mr. Rosenstein were in this up to their eyeballs when it came to the Russian investigation regarding uranium. If they were doing their jobs, they should never, ever have allowed that sale of American uranium to go to a company that they knew would end up in Russian hands.

So if you look at Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, John Bentel, Bryan Pagliano, and Paul Combetta, these are people who were potential targets. And what does Director Comey do?

He makes sure that they walk. Because if they were properly interviewed, like good prosecutors or good investigators normally do, you start there and you say: You help us with what happened and what you were told by the person above you, and then we won't prosecute you to the full extent of the law.

That is how deals are made. That is how you get to a Mr. Big in a racketeer organized confederation.

Mr. Comey and the FBI apparently relied on the Fusion GPS investigation knowing where it came from and knowing who paid for it. This is incredible.

If you go back to the Washingtonian article of 2013, it makes pretty clear that Comey and Mueller were basically joined at the hip.

In fact, a quote back in 2013 says: ``The stressed Comey had few people he could turn to for advice; almost no one was allowed to know the program existed, and disclosing the program's existence to someone outside that circle could send him to prison. In fact, there was only one person in government whom he could confide in and trust: Bob Mueller.''

``Comey thought, `A freight train is heading down the tracks, about to derail me, my family, and my career.' He glanced to his left at his fellow passenger, thinking, `At least Bob Mueller will be standing on the tracks with me.' ''

``The crisis over, Comey and Mueller shared a dark laugh.''

Well, it is not quite so amusing when you look at the stakes and whether or not this little experiment in self-government will continue. For example, we know that Comey admitted in testimony before Congress before the Senate that he had leaked information in order to get a special counsel appointed. That was his dear friend who would stand beside him through thick and thin, Bob Mueller. This brought memories of when Mr. Comey urged his boss, John Ashcroft, to recuse himself and let them appoint a special counsel. So Ashcroft trusted Comey. He probably shouldn't have, but he did.

Then Comey saw to it that his child's godfather, Patrick Fitzgerald, would be the prosecutor. Much like Mueller, he got massive amounts of money and a great powerful staff so they could go after Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney. They were embarrassed there was no case there, so they made up one on Scooter Libby, and he became the fall guy.

But we know from the leak that Comey admitted that he used an ex-U.S. Attorney, identified as Columbia University professor Daniel Richman, to leak to The New York Times the contents of the memo Comey wrote.

If you look at the FBI contract with agents and with people employed by the FBI, it makes it very clear that memo that Comey prepared about his conversation with the President was not supposed to ever be provided to the press. That is FBI property, and he violated the law in leaking it.

But if you look, then-professor Daniel Richman got that to The New York Times author Michael Schmidt, who later wrote the Comey memo story in which Comey told Congress he directed Richman to leak.

Well, if you go back through and you start looking for this common thread, Michael Schmidt writing stories for The New York Times about leaks, then you find a number of cases where it appears likely. Whether it is March 1, March 4, March 5, March 6, it appears likely that this was James Comey leaking again.

The only question is: Did he commit a crime in one or all of those events?

The answer is: We will never know as long as Bob Mueller is special counsel. He needs to have the decency to say that it was a mistake for me to take this on, it was a mistake when Comey testified there was no evidence of any collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians, it was a mistake for him to leak out that night that now he is investigating the President for obstruction of justice.

Why would he do that?

So he wouldn't get fired, because there was no purpose in his investigation.

Why would he indict people when he did?

Because even The Wall Street Journal and others around this town began to say: Do you know what? Mueller really should resign.

He had to get those indictments out quick so people would not keep calling for his resignation. Well, some of us are. We have got to clean this town up, and it will start with the resignation of Mr. Mueller and a proper investigation of all of this underlying case involving Comey, Lynch, the Clintons, Russia, and Rod Rosenstein who oversaw the Russia case before he decided to seal it.

Madam Speaker, it is certainly an honor and pleasure to follow my dear friend from Iowa with whom I got to share a little time last

weekend, be out in God's nature and just enjoy the best Iowa has to offer, and Steve King is one of those best things.

Well, we have heard a great deal about the New York terrorist, although I believe Governor Cuomo told us there are no terrorist ties initially, before he had any time to know anything, really. But that seems to be kind of the way most mayors where these terrorist attacks occur respond. They immediately declare, ``This is not terrorist. No terrorist ties.'' And then, lo and behold, we find out, eventually, there certainly are.

One of the problems that has been created during the last 8 years and a little bit during the last part of the Bush administration is the development discussion of countering violent extremism. But I do want to touch on something about the diversity visa lottery program.

My first year in Congress, in 2005, we eliminated the diversity visa lottery program--at least voted in the House to eliminate it--but the Senate would not take it up, wouldn't take it up. We had a Republican majority in the House and Senate, and the Senate wouldn't take it up.

Then, in November of 2006, we lost the majority in both Houses. And, of course, the Democratic majority in both Houses loved the diversity visa lottery program. In fact, I have a floor speech from Senator Chuck Schumer where he extols the virtues of the diversity visa lottery program. Here are some highlights.

Senator Schumer said--this is May 24, 2006: ``As a Member of the House, I helped create this program, which my colleague, Senator Kennedy, created in the Senate in 1990.''

He said: ``In fact, my city of New York has dramatically benefited from this program, and diverse countries such as Ireland, Poland, and Nigeria have had large numbers of immigrants to be able to come, set roots, and help the diversity of New York and of America.

``So this is an excellent program. Nobody has said it has done a bad job.''

Those were his comments in 2006.

Well, I am here to say it has done a bad job. So now nobody can say that nobody has said it has done a bad job, because I am saying it has done a bad job.

No matter how noble the original idea was, you should never trust the country's security to a lottery. That is insanity.

Of course, in a speech back in 2006, then Congressman Schumer, now Senator Schumer, said--or, actually, he was a Senator in 2006. But Senator Schumer said: ``I think America should admit many more of those people but not at the expense of this small, successful program that guarantees that other countries, such as the Irelands, the Polands, and the Nigerias that are unable to have immigrants come in for family reasons, can get people to come into this country.''

Senator Schumer also said, about the diversity visa lottery program: ``But one of the things great about America is, again, we allow people from all over the world to come here.

``So I plead with my colleagues, keep the diversity visa program.''

He said: ``As I ride my bike around New York City on the weekends, I see what immigrants do for America. This program has dramatically helped. Neighborhoods such as Woodlawn and Greenpoint have been revitalized by new Irish and Polish immigrants. Neighborhoods such as East Flatbush and Harlem have been revitalized by West African immigrants. We don't have to stop this program.''

Well, again, it is insanity to trust our national security to a lottery, and that is what the diversity visa lottery program does.

We have had terrorists, and we have known it for a number of years, that have been getting their names into the lottery so that hopefully they would win the lottery and come to America to kill Americans.

I understand that there was a stepped-up effort in the last couple of years to vet people a little better, but the trouble here is, as then- Director Comey of the FBI testified before our Judiciary Committee, we have got nothing to vet these people against, so many of them, from Syria, from Yemen.

He said in Iraq, we had all of the government records. It turns out, even with all the government records, they let in two terrorists. We had fingerprints of theirs on IEDs that killed Americans, and they let them in, and eventually realized they had made a mistake. So they said we are going to step up our vetting after they realized they had admitted known terrorists into the United States that created IEDs to kill and maim Americans.

They could say we were stepping up the vetting program, but when there is no information--this is what Comey said. With Iraq, we had the government records, we had fingerprints, we took fingerprints off IEDs.

Syria, Yemen, we have got nothing. The government there doesn't give us their records. We have nothing to work from. In Syria, for a while, ISIS had taken over one of the printing facilities where they could print the passports. So we had no information to work from. We didn't know what was true and what wasn't.

So, once again, we were trusting our national security and the lives of Americans to a fatal game of Russian roulette, but it was from the Middle East, it was from Uzbekistan, it was from places where people have been radicalized.

I have got the numbers here. In fact, let's see, diversity visa program statistics, as I understand, the New York terrorist, the ISIS supporter who killed eight people, wounded so many others, in 2011, we had 5,091 from Uzbekistan. There were none from Poland, and in the top ten, there were certainly none from Ireland.

We had, in 2012, 4,800 from Uzbekistan; and even better news, we had 4,453 from Iran. For those who are not keeping track, the Iranian Government has not given us information that we can count on about people in Iran who want to come to America, and we know Iran is the largest national supporter of terrorism in the world. So we don't have much of anything to vet these people on, but, you know, Senator Schumer said it is a great program, and nobody said anything against it as he rides his bicycle around.

Well, fortunately he wasn't riding his bicycle around in front of the terrorist that was allowed in on the program he thinks was so grand. And, frankly, I am grateful he was not on his bicycle in front of that terrorist killer that his program let in.

In 2013, Uzbekistan, we had 5,101 come in from Uzbekistan. We did have 2,038 come from Poland that year.

In 2014, another 6,027 that we could not adequately vet coming from Iran. Some of them we could with relatives, but many of those people simply could not be vetted. We don't know if they were sent here by the Iranian Government to kill Americans or not.

In 2015, we have another 4,992 from Iran; Uzbekistan, we had another 4,368.

So we don't have the numbers from 2016 yet, unfortunately, but hopefully that gives some idea of what we are dealing with.

We also need to understand that government officials tell us: You know, we had no indication this guy was a terrorist.

There were even people from the government, the Feds, who were saying: Gee, you know, this was not a known person.

This New York terrorist, not a known person to the Federal authorities.

Well, it turns out, in 2015, they interviewed him. He had terrorist ties.

The thing people need to understand is--and I have been saying this for years, I have grilled Director Mueller on this issue. I was contacted by one media outlet that says: Why are you just bringing this up now about the purge of training materials?

My goodness. I have been talking about this for years, I have been made fun of about this for years, but I have been right about it for years, Michele Bachmann and I.

It should not have been classified what they took out of the FBI materials, but they classified it so we couldn't show America how stupid some of their purging was, how senseless, how, as some of our agents told me, we are blinding ourselves of the ability to see our enemy.

So I grilled Mueller some years ago over the fact that they got a heads-up twice that the older Tsarnaev brother was radicalized, he was a terrorist, he

was a threat to American lives. They didn't do anything; the CIA didn't do anything.

The FBI finally sends some agents out. They interviewed the older Tsarnaev, but they didn't know what to ask. They don't know what the signs are of someone who is radicalized, because they have had beat down their throats for so long, and this was the Obama administration, they had the FBI's Guiding Principles document on training. And this was the document that the FBI used to say: Oh, no. We have got to be politically correct. We can't teach people about how to find and spot a radical Islamist.

So there was a purge of FBI training materials.

There is a fantastic Judicial Watch special report, it can be found on their website, dated December 5 of 2013, ``U.S. Government Purges of Law Enforcement Training Material Deemed `Offensive' to Muslims.''

Who was complaining? Well, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, and they just happened to have known contacts who were named as coconspirators supporting terrorism in the Holy Land Foundation prosecution.

What did Mueller's FBI do under Mueller's specific direction? They created an outreach program. They called them their community outreach partner for these people who judges said: No. There is plenty of evidence to show that these people have ties supporting terrorism. No. We are not going to eliminate their names.

The Dallas Federal Court said that; the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans said that. It didn't make it to the Supreme Court, but two courts said: Yeah, there is plenty of evidence to see there are plenty of ties here, evidence of their ties to known terrorists.

So it wasn't until 2008, after years of having this evidence, that Director Mueller sent kind of an apologetic letter to CAIR, Council on American-Islamic Relations, saying: You know, we better suspend our community partnership for a while.

It is just unbelievable, but it was the political correctness during the Obama administration that has gotten people killed, because they purged our training material. And God bless Ken Jensen, FBI agent. He had prepared the 700-page training materials that Mueller ordered destroyed.

Somebody needed to study that material before they went out and talked to Tsarnaev. If they had, they would have recognized this guy has probably radicalized, and we better be on the alert. They could have saved lives at the Boston Marathon if Mueller had not prevented them from knowing how to do their job. And he is special counsel.

By the way, Madam Speaker, the former Director of the FBI who blinded the FBI of their ability to see terrorists, why do we think he came out with the indictments exactly when he did? Well, I can tell you why, because he is as easy to read as anybody in the world. He came out with those indictments when he did because he had people starting to call for his resignation, starting to demand that he be removed, demanding that he recuse himself. Even The Wall Street Journal, that has been very sympathetic, they pointed out it was time for him to go. What did he do? He immediately comes out with indictments to show: No, no, no. You can't demand that I go. I am too relevant.

You look at those indictments, and I am for punishing anybody who has committed a crime, but there was no need for a special counsel to come up with what he did. The FBI could have done that. The Department of Justice could have done that. We didn't need Mueller and 20 lawyers, all of these Hillary Clinton sycophants, in there to come up with this. The DOJ could have done this. It was just a ridiculous couple of indictments to be spending all these millions of dollars for.

We also know that same kind of conduct occurred when Comey came to the Hill and testified there is no trace of evidence of collusion between President Trump and the Russians.

Well, Mueller had to be puckering up, because he knew: Uh-oh. Now there is testimony from the FBI Director that there is no basis for me to be special counsel and to have hired all these people. Wow. So the President could be in line to fire me, because now we have testimony from the FBI Director there is no basis for this investigation. Shut her down.

So that night, they leak out he is investigating President Trump for obstruction of justice. Excuse me? We all know what that so-called evidence was. They will never, ever get a conviction, because it was not obstruction of justice.

Obstruction of justice is when you do what Comey and Loretta Lynch did to prevent a proper investigation, and you make an agreement with potential defendants that if they will just give you their laptops and let you look at them, you will destroy all that you find, and you will never use any of that information to prosecute them, and you give them immunity from prosecution. That is not what you do if you are going to prosecute a case. No.

You get them in a bind and then you tell them: Here are the charges you are looking at unless you come clean and identify the person above you with whom you were working and what they did.

Then you work up the chain to the big fish, which is how organized criminal organizations have been prosecuted over the years. It would work in this case, but Director Comey was so busy figuring out how to explain how Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted, though the evidence was basically for a slam dunk case of conviction, that he overlooked properly pursuing the case.

We don't need Director Mueller. We need him gone, and we need a special prosecutor to get into this, clearly, since Jeff Sessions recused himself on anything involving Hillary Clinton and Russia. And we can't have Rod Rosenstein, for heaven's sake, now that we know that he and Mueller should not be involved in this special counsel situation, because they both were engaged in the coverup of the initial Russian investigation that revealed Russia was trying to corner the market on uranium, and they had to seal that, because if they hadn't sealed that and covered up that evidence and that investigation, then Hillary Clinton would not have been able to hit the Russian megamillions lottery by authorizing the sale of uranium to Uranium One that ends up in Russian hands.

Bill Clinton wouldn't have gotten $500,000. He didn't hit the megamillions, except for the 145 or so that went into the Clinton Foundation.

Mueller cannot possibly investigate this. He is in it up to his eyeballs, and so is Rosenstein. They both ought to do the decent thing. I know it is not characteristic, but they ought to do the decent thing and resign and let somebody that is not completely submerged in the original coverup investigate this whole matter.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 31 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, November 6, 2017, at noon for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Chairman, it is great to be able to speak on this. I am grateful to Mr. Westerman. We share a great deal of interests, and Mr. Thompson.

As far as the endangered species, I remember hearing about how this little spotted owl only could mate in virgin forests, and then it turns out some pair were reported to have mated in a Kmart sign. But endangered species will do best in managed forests where we clear underbrush and where we make fire lanes--where we manage the forests. The forests do better, and you stop the wildfires.

If you want to just leave it to nature, nature will destroy massive numbers of acres of land. So we have a responsibility. Even in the Garden of Eden when things were perfect, God said to tend the garden.

So I appreciate the time, and I also appreciate the chairman's willingness to address the issue of the stewardship program so counties don't get messed over.

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting, when I am watching the news or looking at a newspaper, I can see what kind of pictures are there in the news story, and having been at press conferences where print media that is extremely slanted will come up, the photographer from such media source will come up and get right in front and then start taking pictures and have their camera on nonstop, just click, click, click, second after second. So you know they have got 100, 200 pictures.

It is easy to know what they are doing. They are taking as many pictures as fast as they can. And you know that they are going to go through and they are going to take the picture in which your mouth is in the most contorted position, or where it looks like you are saying a word that would be inappropriate for an elected official to say. You know that is the picture they are going to put up, trying to make you look as stupid as possible before you ever read the article.

For some of us, it is not difficult to make us look stupid. We can't help our looks. But you just know before you ever read the article, when you look at the picture, whether it is going to be a fair and objective article, or whether it is going to be totally skewed and totally subjective.

I notice that, too, sometimes when friends across the aisle come with blown-up pictures. I can look at the pictures and tell whether it is going to be a fair and objective dissertation I am going to hear from my fellow Representatives across the aisle. But it is true of Republicans as well. I just don't see those type of skewed pictures very often at all, if at all, from the Republicans. But, anyway, it seems to be a good rule of thumb. You look at the pictures and you can tell whether it is going to be fair or it is going to be a total hit piece.

I have been very interested, though, to watch during the course of this last 9, 10 months as we come through 2017, the story nonstop from Representatives across the aisle has been about Russia, Russia, Russia. It sounds a bit like Sean Hannity, Russia, Russia, Russia, yes, but I don't mind sounding like somebody I greatly admire.

But isn't it interesting that in the revelations that have been coming out in the last few days, our friends across the aisle have not been as anxious to run down and talk about Russia?

But somebody needs to talk about it. I have been talking about it for quite some time, and for most of this year I have been pointing out that we actually need a special prosecutor, a special counsel to investigate former FBI Director Comey and to investigate the Clinton ties to Russia and the over $100 million in contributions that came from stakeholders, apparently, of Uranium One. It is just absolutely incredible.

What is amazing, though, there are bound to be so many fingers going out emanating from that deal that we have not seen or heard of. We didn't know what was going on, and now we know that the FBI headed by Director Robert Mueller, at the same time that he was purging the FBI training materials of anything that offended radical Islamists that want to kill us, at the same time he was not investigating properly tips about the older Tsarnaev being radicalized that he was going to kill people. Let's face it, when we get a tip that somebody has been radicalized as an Islamist, it means they are likely going to commit a terrorist act and try to take innocent lives, as Tsarnaev and his brother did.

The FBI didn't properly investigate. They didn't know what to ask. They didn't know how to investigate whether or not somebody had been radicalized because Robert Mueller had purged the training materials so they couldn't know what to ask, how to know if somebody has been radicalized, or they are a peace-loving Muslim, or they are radical Islamist.

Mueller prevented that from happening because he was so taken up with the idea of being friendly and neighborly, he called it his outreach program. He even testified before our Judiciary Committee years ago after I was there about--he kept wanting to make the point that the Muslim community is exactly like every other community. Again, the Muslim community is just like every other community.

He kept making that point over and over as Democrats asked him questions. And then he talked about his lovely outreach program with CAIR--the Council on American-Islamic Relations--that has ties that were named as codefendants supporting terrorism with those who were actually convicted of supporting terrorism.

Yet, even though the FBI had the evidence that convicted these supporting terrorists, and even though there was plenty of evidence that the people who he was trying to be friends with had radical terrorist ties, he continued his so-called outreach program

as people were plotting to kill Americans among those that he was trying to have meals with and be friendly with.

But I asked him the question: You keep saying that the Muslim community here in America is just like every other community, and you keep bragging about your outreach program with the Muslim community. So I would like to ask you, Director Mueller, how was your outreach program going with Jews, Catholics, Baptists, and other religious groups? How is that outreach going? How is your outreach going with the Buddhists and the Confucianists?

Anyway, that was the basic question I asked. Of course, he was taken aback and he couldn't explain because eventually we got the truth. There is no outreach program like that that the FBI had with any other religious group.

So it is kind of disingenuous, if not to say dishonest, to say that a group that requires special attention and coddling is somehow exactly like every other group in America. No, they require special attention, at least that is what Robert Mueller thought.

I don't think any religious group that believes in our Constitution and supports our Constitution requires any such special attention, as Robert Mueller was giving the outreach partner CAIR that has done so much damage to America and continues to undermine evidence to find, arrest, and convict radical Islamists.

It is normally like clockwork. As soon as a radical Islamist has committed a terrorist act, it really is like clockwork. You can count on CAIR--C-A-I-R; not the kind that actually helps people around the world, but CAIR--to be out there with the news conference saying: This guy was not one of us.

But at some point, I hope that people who are Muslims will quit listening to CAIR and will listen to the words of a much wiser individual, President el-Sisi in Egypt, who stood in a room with imams and told them: We have got to get our religion back away from the radicals, or they are going to destroy it.

That is a courageous man, and I don't find that kind of courage among the people who have these press conferences to deflect instead of helping us find and capture the radical Islamists before they kill too many people. They are out there trying to make it appear that they are not really radical Islamists; that they are something else. No, they are radical Islamists. They clearly are.

I was kind of saddened that General Kelly ended up being the chief of staff for President Trump because I thought he was starting out to do a superb job as Secretary of Homeland Security.

It turns out, as some of us had warned, that during the Obama administration, all of this blather about countering violent extremism, CVE, that found its way into legislation that this body passed: Oh, let's don't call it ``fighting radical Islamists.'' Call it, ``countering violent extremism.''

Well, some of us had figured out the game, and Michele Bachmann was one of those people. Yes, it is not countering violent extremism. It is fighting radical Islam. Thank God President Trump is now occupying the Oval Office. He understood that ISIS was not just a JV team. They are people who are radical Islamists and they would love to kill as many Americans as possible. They didn't need to have their groups denigrated. They needed to have their groups destroyed.

These were not people who were going to be rehabilitated. They were radical extremists that actually believe with all of their heart that they win a place in paradise by killing innocent people.

If you really want to go back to why there is an English translation copy of the Koran in the Library of Congress that was purchased, owned by Thomas Jefferson, it was because he was negotiating with the radical Islamists, the Barbary pirates in North Africa. He was so well- educated, so well-read, he couldn't understand why the Barbary pirates, who were radical Islamists, kept attacking American ships.

As he indicated: We are not a threat to you. We don't even have a Navy to speak of. We are not your enemy. We don't understand why you keep attacking American ships.

And he was told that, under their belief system, those Islamists believed they went to paradise if they died killing what we would consider innocent people and they consider people worthy of death; they would go to paradise.

Jefferson, as well-read as he was, he couldn't believe that there was any religion anywhere in the world that believed you could go to Heaven or paradise if you are killed while you are killing innocent, unsuspecting people who are not military. They are not a threat to the radical Islamists's life, yet they thought they were going to go to paradise and have 70-some-odd virgins or so waiting for them. He couldn't believe it. So that is when he got his own copy of the Koran, because he just couldn't believe there was a religion that believed you could go to paradise if you are killing innocent people.

Hopefully that will set the record straight with some folks who thought it showed how open-minded Thomas Jefferson was. Actually, he was quite open-minded. Some have tried to denigrate him because he had slaves. The man made plenty of mistakes, and one of them was an egregious wrong he did upon John Adams.

They had been friends for years. It was Adams who asked him to do the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was wise enough that, when he did the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, if you look at the different grievances that he set out as to why they should be independent from England, the longest paragraph of the grievance was about how King George allowed slavery to ever start in America.

At the time, Virginia had a law making it illegal to free your own slaves, so he was law-abiding. But he believed that one of the worst things that ever happened to America was King George's allowing slavery to start and exist in this country and that it was going to cause massive problems that would be very difficult to cure. He was exactly right on all fronts.

There are some even claiming that George Washington should have his name removed from schools or public places when the fact is there would be no free America without George Washington having lived at the time he did. I believe with all my heart that George Washington was the man for such a time as that. There has never been a man in all of history who led a military in a revolution, won the revolution, and then tendered his resignation, as we see down the Hall, his outreached hand. I think it is the most important scene in all of the Capitol. It is a massive mural. He is handing in his resignation. He sought no further power.

He could have been king of America or an emperor. There were a couple of coups they tried to involve him in. He stopped them. Anybody else in the world we know from history would not have done what he did. He was reluctant to take any power, yet because of his humility and his focus on creating a free and independent land, we have a free and independent land.

Yes, he had slaves, but he was dealing with a Virginia where there was a law against freeing the slaves. But even so, he put in his will that their slaves would be free upon the death of his wife. Certainly, there are better ways to have done that. He was trying to abide by the law.

We have such an incredible history with people like Washington. Some of us were attending an address by an author who had researched and done a biography on Benjamin Franklin, over at the Library of Congress, we were hearing. Someone asked him: Is there anybody you can think of in modern America who reminds you of Ben Franklin? He said: Actually, we have got many people who are witty, clever, and very inventive. Yes, Ben Franklin was an absolutely incredible man.

Of course, I am paraphrasing. But he said: It wasn't like he was George Washington. There was only one of those, just only one of those.

We had the director of The Society of the Cincinnati speak at the Library of Congress on one occasion. He was asked--since most biographers, the more they dig into the background of an individual, and he had studied Washington every year of his adult life--did he come to a point where he had less respect for Washington because of all of the details he discerned about Washington's life.

He indicated that he could honestly say that, in addition to knowing more about Washington every year of his adult life, that he had more respect, admiration, and awe of George Washington with each passing year, with every bit of information he learned. That is the kind of incredible history we have, the kind of selflessness.

People say, oh, yeah, but Washington, look at the big payoff he got. He didn't take a salary, but, boy, did he take a lot of money after the Revolution.

Actually, he didn't take a salary. He didn't take a payoff. He was reimbursed some of his out-of-pocket expenses. He had been paying for spies to work for the country. He had paid so much out of his own pocket, and he was only seeking part of what had come out of pocket knowing that, if the Revolution failed, not only would he have been killed, but, obviously, his family would not have had all that money he spent.

So I think that kind of puts in perspective, when we start looking at people who are willing to sell off America's national security for millions of dollars--well, you have to admire their appreciation for large amounts of money, but not at the price of selling our safety.

So, for all this year, I have been saying that Robert Mueller should never have accepted the role of special counsel because we knew that James Comey was such a close and dear friend of his, and Comey was a witness central to this investigation. He could not be a fair arbiter, a fair investigator. If he had been properly morally inclined, he should have said: I can't be the special counsel because I am too close--especially to Comey--to these people.

Comey, himself, testified that, before he testified up here at Congress, he talked to Mueller. There is a 2013 Washingtonian article that was just a long, glowing piece on Comey that, in effect, if the world were burning down, the one person Comey would know would be right there with him would be Robert Mueller standing with him. These guys were so close. He looked at Mueller as a mentor. They were really tight.

The question in my mind, because of that tightness, since we know Comey leaked in order to, as he said, try to get a special counsel, that Mueller encouraged him to do that: Was Mueller behind this setup to get a special counsel so he could be appointed and start making massive amounts of money and hire all of these Republican-hating Democrats, contributors to Hillary Clinton, some of them?

Wow, what a great setup for a guy who obviously held grudges against some Republicans. This is somebody who should not have been appointed, even though he was appointed to be Director of the FBI by George W. Bush.

Obviously, George W. Bush was trying hard to pick the right people and taking other advice like his father's mistake in appointing David Souter. Wow, what a disaster that appointment turned out to be. He turned out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, appearing to act as one thing when we saw his teeth as he went to the Supreme Court.

Edith Jones and David Souter came under consideration. I have been told they were both sitting in the White House as President H.W. Bush tried to figure out which one to appoint. If he had appointed Edith Jones, history would be totally different, and we would not have either Justice Kagan or Justice Sotomayor because whom he appointed would never have resigned during President Obama's Presidency. So those kinds of mistakes have long-reaching effects.

But President Bush appointed Mueller. And the more I find out, unlike the director of The Society of the Cincinnati finding out about Washington and growing in awe and admiration, the more I find out about Robert Mueller, the more concerned I am. The disclosures this week about what this man knew, what this man was involved in, and what he did--I thought he was accepting the role of special counsel because of some possible revenge motive: he had a dislike for some Republicans, loved the idea of doing what Patrick Fitzgerald did, who happened to be not just a friend of James Comey; he was the godfather of a Comey child.

Of course, we found out later that Comey recommended to Attorney General Ashcroft he should recuse himself so that he could appoint the godfather of his child, Patrick Fitzgerald, to be the special counsel. We found out this year, well, Comey leaked information--which may or may not have been a crime; it needs to be investigated--in order to get a special counsel appointed.

So he is using the same type of manipulative behavior as he did to get the godfather of his child appointed special counsel in order to get the one guy who would be with him through thick and thin, no matter how bad things got, Robert Mueller, get him appointed special counsel.

I had no idea that Robert Mueller had been involved and been Director of the FBI as they investigated Russia's efforts to corner the market on uranium and to spend millions and millions of dollars to acquire United States uranium. He is Director of the FBI. They are investigating this.

Even knowing that, it appears that he and now-Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein actually covered up their investigation so that people would not get upset with Secretary Hillary Clinton for being an approver of the deal of selling America's uranium to an enemy of the United States.

According to all the Democrats, for all this year, Russia, Russia, Russia is this big horrible enemy, and how dare anybody do business with them. It turns out that, actually, they were the ones who were involved in this terribly sordid business of selling our national security to the Russians.

The FBI had investigated. They had all of this information, and they even had an FBI informant, as Mueller knew as Director of the FBI. The informant had been working with the Russians. It was an undercover operation, perhaps the most important one the FBI had going on at that time.

They did have the operation going on under Director Mueller of creating a fictitious case against Senator Ted Stevens, Republican from Alaska, in which they created evidence. They conspired to hide evidence that completely didn't just exonerate Ted Stevens; it showed that he was law abiding. They hid that evidence, and they manufactured a case that would cost him his Senate seat.

The loss of his Senate seat ended up putting him on a small plane that crashed, and he lost his life. As far as I know, there were no ties of the plane crash to Mueller, but Mueller was the FBI Director.

Thank God that there was an FBI agent involved in that investigation and that, after Ted Stevens was convicted, he couldn't stand it. His conscience would not allow him to sit quietly by after the FBI and the U.S. Attorney--but this FBI lead agent, under Director Mueller as Director, just fabricated a case.

It turns out not only did Ted Stevens not accept hundreds of thousands of dollars of improvements to his home without paying for them, he paid more, hundreds of thousands more, than the improvements were worth. Apparently, there was even evidence that they covered up where the contractor is saying: Look, Ted, you are paying more than we are charging you.

Stevens would say: Look, I am constantly being watched. People don't like my political positions, so I have got to be so far above and beyond ethical and moral that I have got to pay more. Just accept the checks for overpayment.

The guy is overpaying, and yet they came after him knowing that this was an innocent man. They prosecuted him and convicted him.

So after the whistleblower FBI agent comes forward under Director Mueller's leadership, what happened? The informant was ordered to be kept from investigating any criminal cases, which meant he had no job at the FBI. He went ahead and did as he was being pushed to do.

He went ahead and resigned. Thank God for a man with a conscience like that.

His affidavit made clear that the lead agent had manufactured evidence and hid evidence from the defense counsel, because they had come in with warrants and taken everything: computer drives, thumb drives, documentary evidence, and gone to the bank and gotten his documents. He did not have any evidence to show you how innocent he was, because the FBI had taken it.

I know FBI agents who are the most honest people I have ever met. We have thousands of them in this country. Thank God for them.

But what happened under Director Mueller's leadership?

Well, the whistleblower that exposed the fraudulent misconduct gets run out of the FBI, under Director Mueller.

And what happened to the one who fabricated the evidence, fabricated the case, hid evidence that showed Ted Stevens' innocence?

When Mueller is Director, that FBI agent continued to get accolades and be moved on to investigate some of the most important cases the FBI had. That was Director Mueller.

He also had a policy he created called the 5-year up-or-out policy, which an article in The Wall Street Journal pointed out years ago. It ended up destroying or running off thousands and thousands of years of experience from the FBI, weakening this incredible investigative body that, until Mueller got there, was the best investigative body in all of America.

But after running off thousands of thousands of years of experienced FBI agents so that he could have less experienced agents--agents who would not have the experience to say: But, Mr. Director, that would be a mistake, which was done in 1985 or 1992, and it didn't work out--no, he had people with no experience.

I know from being a prosecutor that right out of law school you are ready to put the bad guys away. You are going to push the line to the limit. You are going to do your job, salute the flag, and it always helps to have experienced people around to say: Look, I know you mean well. That is not a good idea.

Mueller liked to run those people off. He spent millions of dollars that some agents pointed out was being wasted on programs that were wasteful and ineffective.

Now that we know what is coming out this week, I am surprised how naive I continue to be. I thought Mueller accepted the job of special counsel to investigate the Russia-Trump alleged relationship because it would be a great job and he could carry out vendettas that he might have. That was so naive.

Now we know that he had an investigation of Russia. He had an undercover informant for years working on the case and that he covered up that investigation, along with Rod Rosenstein, so that Hillary Clinton could make this deal, approve the deal.

And yes, there were other people who approved the deal. I believe that Attorney General Eric Holder also approved the deal and also helped covered up the investigation to show the investigation would show, from all the indications, that Russia was committing crimes in America to get ahold of our uranium.

Knowing that, if that investigation were made public, there is no way Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder could have approved the deal that was selling off 20, 25 percent of America's uranium to Russia. She could never have done that.

If she hadn't done that, there is not any doubt in some of our minds that the investors, the stockholders, ultimately, of Uranium One certainly would not have contributed over $100 million to the Clinton Foundation, and Russia would not have been paying half a million dollars for one short speech--remarkably, it is hard to believe from the State of the Union Addresses he gave, but he actually could give a short speech and get half a million dollars for one short speech.

He didn't get paid that much for other speeches. What was so special? Could it be that Hillary Clinton was so critical in persuading others to sign onto allowing Uranium One to get so much of our uranium? Gee, perhaps that is why Russia was so emboldened?

Then we find out there is more than that. The Democratic National Committee, we are told, were helping pay for this dossier that just created the most lurid, ridiculous allegations against Donald Trump as a candidate, trying to destroy his Presidency.

Not only that, the DNC was involved, and the Clinton campaign may have been involved, and the FBI gets involved with that, and it appears they may have used the DNC to pay for manufactured evidence that was absolutely false and that could be used to get the FBI, under Mueller's control and the U.S. Attorney's Office, under Rosenstein's control, to go after the Trump campaign and possibly get wiretaps, based on the DNC Fusion GPS manufactured evidence.

So going back to Mueller accepting the appointment as special counsel and Comey possibly committing a crime the way he went about leaking private information to The New York Times, it appears, if you look at his contacts and who reported what from The New York Times and what could have only been known by James Comey--it is possible he did it six other times--it is possible James Comey committed crimes in one or all of those six other leaking occasions, if he was the source, as it appears he may very well have been.

Now, it becomes more clear in my naivety in thinking Mueller had personal motivation, including getting paid for a job he would love to do to go after people he didn't like in the Republican Party, including Donald Trump. But now it is becoming more clear. Comey needed Mueller to be a special counsel, and he admitted it in testimony here. He leaked information, which may have been a crime, in order to get a special counsel that he had to have known was going to be Robert Mueller, his friend joined at the hip, and that his other friend, Robert Rosenstein, would certainly appoint Mueller, because Rosenstein and Mueller were involved in covering up the FBI's investigation of Russia and their efforts to get uranium.

If Mueller and Rosenstein hadn't covered up that and helped seal that information and gotten the informant to agree to a nondisclosure agreement, then Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation would be short megamillions that they received as a result--it certainly appears--of the uranium transfer from the U.S. to Russia.

So, Mueller and Rosenstein and Comey all needed Mueller to be appointed, and Mueller needed to accept appointment as special counsel, because he had to cover up the cover-up that he and Rosenstein had been involved in years earlier in order to facilitate the deal that was made to sell off our national security.

President Trump had this great plank in his platform as he ran for President that we need to bring in money that Americans have earned overseas back into the United States. Well, it has never been here, but bring it into the United States.

But these American citizens and American companies have had to leave it in foreign banks and in foreign businesses in foreign countries because, in some countries, they pay 50, 60, 70 percent tax on it. If they bring it into the United States, they will be required to pay probably 40 percent, plus penalty and interest. So 35, 39 percent, plus penalty and interest. They can't afford to do that or they would be paying more tax than the money they earned. So they had to leave it in foreign countries and in foreign banks.

Former FDIC Chairman Isaacs came to the Hill back when this doofus named Henry Paulson was telling us we had to give him $700 billion so he could buy mortgage-backed securities and save our economy.

In our private conference call--I will never forget--he said: I have got to have $700 billion to buy these mortgage-backed securities because nobody knows what they are worth and only the government has the wherewithal to buy those. Hold them until they get value back, and that will save all these banks and keep them from going under, which would destroy the United States economy and take us back to a day worse than September of 1929. So you have got to give me $700 billion to buy these mortgage-backed securities.

When we were allowed to punch in and ask a question, somebody in my party beat me to the question, and it was this: Secretary Paulson, if nobody knows what these mortgage-backed securities are worth, how do you know you need $700 billion to buy them?

I will never forget his answer: ``We just needed a really big number.''

When I heard that, I knew that this bozo did not need $700 billion. We shouldn't have trusted him as Secretary of Treasury. But he got his $700 billion. Between him and Geithner, they bailed out their friends, they bailed out the big banks while the community banks were being punished. They had to borrow money at regular

rate, and they made sure that their friends, the investment banks that brought us to the brink of ruin, got money for nothing. In fact, they got big bailouts. That was a bad day in American history.

Isaacs had the idea that you don't need to take taxpayer money. If you will just say the United States Congress should pass a bill that says anything we declare to be a troubled company or a troubled asset, if that is invested in by American companies, American individuals who have earned money overseas, never brought it into the country, if they will bring that money from those foreign countries and invest it in what Congress labels as troubled, they will pay no tax on bringing that money into the country. Then we will probably have a trillion dollars come in. You won't need the $700 billion in taxpayer money or borrowed money from China to bail out the banks. You will have Americans who will invest in those with money they earned overseas. You don't need TARP. It won't be the government getting into bed with the big banks and the terrible precedent that will set. That was a great idea.

But Paulson was so determined to let his enemies like Lehman Brothers go bankrupt without help and to allow his company Goldman Sachs to be the big dog, that he didn't want to do Isaacs' idea, and he convinced enough Members of the House, both Republican and Democrat, to give him $700 billion, because he needed a really big number.

Well, President Trump had that similar idea: let's allow American money to come into America that is earned overseas, and that will get our economy going. Americans will bring this money in, and it will be great for the economy. That is what we need to get the economy going.

Well, little did we know that, years before, candidate Donald Trump had the idea of bringing in American-earned money from foreign countries to get our economy going. Yet Hillary Clinton had the idea of selling off our national security to get megamillions to go to the Clinton Foundation, her and her husband's bank account, to get the economy going in America.

Wow, that was a great idea, wasn't it?

We sell off some of our national security to bring in foreign money, specifically, Russian money to get our economy going. And if she had been elected President, then the cover up that Mueller and Rosenstein did of the original investigation into Russia's efforts to corruptly buy American uranium and corner the market, that would continue to be covered up.

Wow, what a great deal. Even though Hillary Clinton did not win the election, Donald Trump did. And they got Donald Trump's Attorney General to recuse himself so that Rosenstein, a guy that participated in covering up the original FBI investigation, could appoint someone else who helped cover up that original uranium investigation with the Russians and make him special counsel so that not only would he make a lot of money and get to work with lots of people he liked that hated Trump and loved Hillary, but he could also cover up the prior coverup, even though Hillary didn't get elected. Amazing the kind of stuff that is coming out now.

The work that John Solomon and The Hill have done has been extraordinary. I have got an article from October 25: ``FBI informant in Obama-era Russian nuclear bribery was cleared to testify before Congress.''

That is great news. Despite Mueller and Rosenstein's efforts to keep their prior Russian investigation that they covered up so that the Russia uranium deal could go through, wow, we may actually get to find out about that now that the FBI informant has been cleared under the current Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions. We will get to find out more about that Russia effort to corner the market using U.S. uranium.

An article from FOX News: ``Gag order lifted: DOJ says informant can speak to Congress on Uranium One, Russia bribery case with Clinton links.''

And then I was glad to see a friend down the hall, Chuck Grassley, a senator there from Iowa. He is calling for special counsel in the Uranium One scandal. Of course, that is appropriate.

The FOX News article: ``Clinton mum on Fusion GPS scandal as Dems' dossier denials pile up.'' That is from October 26.

So now there are indications the Democrat National Committee, a Member actually paid for this fictitious dossier that could be used to get warrants to investigate political opponents in a Presidential race. This is incredible. Absolutely incredible.

Even going back to Tammany Hall, as far as I can recall, they didn't have an FBI Director and an Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General that had helped cover up a prior investigation so that their friends could make millions of dollars.

Let's see. There is an article in The New York Times from Jo Becker and Don Van Natta, Jr. This goes back January 31 of 2008. It indicates: ``Late on September 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier, Frank Giustra, touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west, a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

``Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra''--I will just say ``Mr. G''--``was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. G on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former President of the United States, Bill Clinton.

``Upon landing on the first stop of the three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan's President . . . whose 19-year stranglehold on the country had all but quashed political dissent.''

Another man ``walked away from the table with a propaganda coup after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader's bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton's public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan's poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton's wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

``Within 2 days, corporate records show that Mr. G also came up with a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan's state-owned uranium agency. . . . `'

So it is just incredible. The deeper you get in this stuff, the more it smells.

A Wall Street Journal article written by Holman Jenkins, Jr.: ``The FBI's Political Meddling.'' Interesting story. I like the way it starts because it starts referencing a movie, I believe. ``Let's give plausible accounts of the known facts, then explain why demands that Robert Mueller recuse himself from the Russia investigation may not be the fanciful partisan grandstanding you imagine.

``Here's a story consistent with what has been reported in the press--how reliably reported is uncertain. Democratic political opponents of Donald Trump financed a British former spook who spread money among contacts in Russia, who, in turn, over drinks, solicited stories from their supposedly `connected' sources in Moscow. If these people were really connected in any meaningful sense, then they made sure the stories they spun were consistent with the interests of the regime, if not actually scripted by the regime.

``The resulting Trump dossier then became a factor in Obama administration decisions to launch an FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, and after the election to trumpet suspicions of Trump collusion with Russia.

``We know of a second, possibly even more consequential way the FBI was effectively a vehicle for Russian meddling in U.S. politics. Authoritative news reports say FBI Chief James Comey's intervention in the Hillary Clinton email matter was prompted by a Russian intelligence document that his colleagues suspected was a Russian plant.

``Okay, Mr. Mueller was a former close colleague and leader but no

longer part of the FBI when these events occurred. This may or may not make him a questionable person to lead a Russian-meddling investigation in which the FBI's own actions are necessarily a concern.

``But now we come to the Rosatom disclosures last week in The Hill. . . .

``Here's another story as plausible as we can make it based on credible reporting. After the Cold War, in its own interest, the U.S. wanted to build bridges to the Russian nuclear establishment. The Putin government, for national or commercial purposes, agreed and sought to expand its nuclear business in the U.S.

``The purchase and consolidation of certain assets were facilitated by Canadian entrepreneurs who gave large sums to''--drum roll--``the Clinton Foundation, and perhaps arranged a Bill Clinton speech in Moscow for $500,000. A key transaction had to be approved by Hillary Clinton's State Department.''

How about that?

``Now we learn that, before and during these transactions, the FBI had uncovered a bribery and kickback scheme involving Russia's nuclear business, and also received reports of Russian officials seeking to curry favor through donations to the Clinton Foundation.

``This criminal activity was apparently not disclosed to agencies vetting the 2010 transfer of U.S. commercial nuclear assets to Russia.''

That is why, Mr. Speaker, I refer to the original FBI and DOJ coverup involving Mr. Rosenstein and Mr. Mueller, which was going to be able to be covered up. That is, so we understand the plot here, Mueller as FBI Director, and Rosenstein working as U.S. Attorney or deputy U.S. Attorney, whatever he was at the time. It is interesting, I hear a rumor that he may have even signed on part of this sealing documents to help cover up the original investigation. It would be interesting to see if he did that. Wow. If it turns out he signed off to get the FBI investigation document sealed, and Mueller, as FBI Director, was charting the course to get this thing sealed, covered up, well, the guys that did the coverup are in charge of the investigation, which would allow them to cover up their prior coverup, which would look bad since they covered it up to allow the Hillary Clinton approved deal selling United States security via our uranium to Russia.

I didn't realize how bad Russia was until my friends across the aisle and Secretary Clinton--candidate Clinton--defeated candidate Clinton kept talking about how bad Russia was. Well, they about convinced me.

But this article says: ``The criminal activity was apparently not disclosed to agencies vetting the 2010 transfer of U.S. commercial nuclear assets to Russia. The FBI made no move to break up the scheme until long after the transaction closed. Only 5 years later, the Justice Department, in 2015, disclosed a plea deal with the Russian perpetrator so quietly that its significance was missed until The Hill reported on the FBI investigation last week.''

They almost, if not for the good work of Mr. Solomon and I think somebody else at The Hill, might have been missed entirely. So good work. There are some potential Woodwards and Bernsteins out there, in addition to the hardworking news investigators with places like The Daily Caller and Judicial Watch, Conservative Review, and others.

The article goes on to say: ``The agency, when Mr. Mueller headed it, soft-pedaled an investigation highly embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton as well as the Obama Russia reset policy.''

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.