Senator Paul on Impeachment of President Trump

by Rand Paul

Mr. President, the great irony of the last several weeks in the impeachment trial is that the Democrats accused the President of using his governmental office to go after his political opponent. The irony is, they then used the impeachment process to go after their political opponent. In fact, as you look at the way it unfolded, they admitted as much.

As the impeachment proceedings unfolded, they said: We didn’t have time for witnesses. We had to get it done before Christmas because we wanted it done and ready to go for the election. We had to get it done—the entire process needed to be completed—before the election.

They didn’t have time for the process. They didn’t have time for due process. They didn’t have time for the President to call his own witnesses or cross-examine their witnesses.

The great irony is, they did exactly what they accused the President of. They used the government and the government’s process to go after their political opponent.

What is the evidence that it is partisan? They didn’t convince one Republican. Not one elected Republican decided that any of their arguments were valid or that the President should be impeached.

They made it into a sham. They made it into a political process because they didn’t like the results of the election.

When did this start? Did the impeachment start with a phone call to the Ukrainian President? No, the impeachment and the attacks on the President started 6 months before he was elected.

We had something truly devastating to our Republic happen. We had, for the first time in our history, a secret court decide to investigate a campaign. At the time, when those of us who criticized this secret court for spying on the Trump campaign, they said: Oh, it is just a conspiracy theory. None of this is happening. There is no ‘‘there’’ there.

But now that we have investigated it—guess what—the FISA court admits they were lied to. The FBI has now been proven to have lied 17 times. We have a half a dozen people at the top level of our intelligence community who have admitted to having extreme bias. You have Peter Strzok and Lisa Page talking about taking down the President and having an insurance policy against him succeeding and becoming the President. You have McCabe, you have Comey, and you have Clapper.

You remember James Clapper, the one who came to the Senate, and, when asked by Senator Wyden, "Are you storing, are you gathering information from Americans by the millions and storing it on government computers?" James Clapper said no. He lied to Congress. Nobody chose to impeach him, but he lied to Congress and committed a felony. Is he in jail? No, he is making millions of dollars as a contributor on television now, using and peddling his national security influence for dollars, after having committed a felony in lying to us.

These are the people who plotted to bring the President down. These are the people who continue to plot to bring the President down. Before all of this started, though, I was a critic of the secret courts. I was a critic of FISA. I was a critic of them abusing American civil liberties. I was a critic of them invading our privacy, recording the length of our phone calls, who we talk to, and sometimes recording conversations—all of this done supposedly to go after terrorists, but Americans, by the millions, are caught up in this web.

But now, for the first time, it is not just American civil liberties that are being abused by our intelligence agencies. It is an entire Presidential campaign, and it could go either way. This is why you want to limit power. Men are not angels, and that is why we put restrictions on government. We need more restrictions now. We can’t allow secret courts to investigate campaigns.

This started before the election. It went on for the last 3 years, through the Mueller investigation. They thought they had the President dead to rights, and they would bring him down through this investigation. So, initially, the spying didn’t work, and the Mueller investigation didn’t work. They went seamlessly into the impeachment.

The question for the American public is now: Will they go on? Are they going to immediately start up hearings again in the House that will be partisan hearings again? I suspect they will. They have had their day in the Sun, and they loved it, and I think they are going to keep doing it time and time and time again.

Now, during the proceedings, I asked a question that was disallowed, but I am going to ask that question again this morning, because the Constitution does protect debate and does protect the asking of questions. I think they made a big mistake not allowing my question.

My question did not talk about anybody who is a whistleblower. My question did not accuse anybody of being a whistleblower. It did not make a statement believing there was someone who was a whistleblower. I simply named two people’s names because I think it is very important to know what happened.

We are now finding out that the FISA investigation was predicated upon 17 lies by the FBI, by people at high levels who were biased against the President, and it turns out it was an illegitimate investigation. Everything they did about investigating the President was untrue and abused government to do something they never should have done in the first place.

So I asked this question. And this is my question—my exact question. We will put it up here:

Are you aware that the House Intelligence Committee staffer   had a close relationship with   while at the National Security Council together? Are you aware and how do you respond to reports that   and   may have worked together to plot impeaching the President before there were formal House impeachment proceedings? ^{[annotation 1]}

Now, why did I ask this question? Because there are news reports saying that these two people—one of them who works for Adam Schiff and one of them who worked with this person at the National Security Council—that they knew each other and had been overheard talking about impeaching the President in the first month of his office. In January of 2017, they were already plotting the impeachment.

And you say: Well, we should protect the whistleblower. The whistleblower deserves anonymity.

The law does not preserve anonymity. His boss is not supposed to say anything about him. He is not supposed to be fired. I am for that.

But when you get into the details of talking about whistleblowers, there is a variety of opinions around here. The greatest whistleblower in American history, in all likelihood, is Edward Snowden. What did people want to do with him? Half the people here want to put him to death and the other half want to put him in jail forever. So it depends on what you blow the whistle on, whether or not they are actually for the whistleblower statute.

I am not for retributions on the whistleblower. I don’t want him to go to jail, and I don’t want him to lose his job. But if six people, who all work together at the National Security Council, knew each other and gamed the system, knowing that they would get these protections—they gamed the system in order to try to bring down the President—we should know about that. If they had extreme bias going into the impeachment, we should know about that.

I think the question is an important one, and I think we should still get to the bottom of it. Were people plotting to bring down the President? They were plotting in advance of the election. Were they plotting within the halls of government to bring down the President? Look, these people also knew the Vindman brothers, who are still in government. So you have two Vindman brothers over there who know  , who also know  , who also knew two people working on Adam Schiff’s staff, and Adam Schiff throws his hands up and says: I don’t know who the whistleblower is. I have never met him. I have no idea who he is.

So if he doesn’t know who he is and the President’s counsel doesn’t know who he is, how does the Chief Justice of the United States know who the whistleblower is? I have no independent confirmation from anyone in government as to who the whistleblower is. So how am I prevented from asking a question when nobody seems to admit that they even know who this person is?

My point is, is by having such protections—such overzealous protection—we don’t get to the root of the matter of how this started, because this could happen again. When the institution of the bureaucracy, when the intelligence community with all the power to listen to every phone conversation you have has political bias and can game the system to go after you, that is a real worry. It is a real worry that they spied on the President.

But what if you are an average ordinary American? What if you are just a supporter of President Trump or you are a Republican or you are a conservative? Are we not concerned that secret courts could allow for warrants to listen to your phone calls, to tap into your emails, to read your text messages? I am very concerned about that.

So we are going to have this discussion go on. It isn’t really about the whistleblower so much. It is about reforming government. It is about limiting the power of what they can do as secret courts. I think the FISA Court should be restricted from ever investigating campaigns. If you think a campaign has done something wrong, call the FBI, go to a regular court, where judges get to appear on both sides, and if you want to subpoena somebody or tap the phone, all right, we can do it, but it has got to be an extraordinary thing.

Think about it. Think about the danger. The other side says it is a danger to democracy. Think about the danger to democracy of letting your government tap the phones of people you disagree with politically.

I don’t care whether it is Republican or Democrat. We cannot allow the intelligence community and secret courts like the FISA court to go after political campaigns. And I mean that sincerely—Republican or Democrat. We need to change the rules. We cannot have secret courts trying to reverse the elections.

I feel very strongly about this. I was for this reform before Donald Trump ever came on the scene and before any of this happened. I have been for having more significant restrictions on these secret courts and more significant restrictions on the intelligence community to make sure they don’t abuse the rights of Americans. This is a big deal, and if we are going to get something good out of this, if there is going to be some positive aspect to having to go through this nightmare we have been through over the last several months or years now, the blessing in disguise here would be that we actually reform the system so this never happens to anyone else ever again.

I yield the Floor.

1. contentious components of included document redacted. See special:permalink/10013735 (Wikisource contributor note)