Congressional Committees Quotes

Should I stay in Greenville, teach my students, or work for Mike Espy (in Washington, DC)….Capitol Hill had many more men than women walking the halls, whether they were members of Congress or congressional and committee staff or lobbyists. The receptionist was usually a woman, and the chief of staff, a man. Sometimes I wondered why anyone in Washington would want to listen to what a girl from Soso, Mississippi, had to say.

Dr. Irving Stone of the Institute for Forensic Sciences in Dallas. He’s the guy who analyzed the clothing worn by President Kennedy and Governor Connally for the congressional committee that reexamined the Kennedy assassination.

Hours before Washington’s inauguration was scheduled to take place, a special congressional committee decided that it might be fitting for the president to rest his hand on a Bible while taking the oath of office. Unfortunately, no one in Federal Hall had a copy of the Bible on hand. There followed a mad dash to find one.

press or to Congressional committees. Thus the only way secrecy can be kept is to exclude from the making of the decision all those who

The executive secretary of the Citizens Congressional Committee was Charles W. Winegarner. A former advertising executive from Fort Wayne, Indiana, he now worked full-time promoting the cause.

... they only trusted the wisdom of people brighter and more worldly than themselves when it was expressed in the vocabulary and style of rural idiots. In his guise as Brazenydol, he had once had a contract with DARPA to teach a team of physicists the basic terminology of tractor pulls so that they could give an acceptable explanation of omniwavelength stealth to a Congressional committee that didn’t understand tractor pulls, either.

Shortly after Bush took office, a government scientist prepared testimony for a Congressional committee on the dangerous effects of industrial uses of coal and other fossil fuels in contributing to “global warming,” a depletion of the earth’s protective ozone layer. The White House changed the testimony, over the scientist’s objections, to minimize the danger (Boston Globe, October 29, 1990). Again, business worries about regulation seemed to override the safety of the public. The ecological crisis in the world had become so obviously serious that Pope John Paul II felt the need to rebuke the wealthy classes of the industrialized nations for creating that crisis: “Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective, are contrary to the order of creation.

Every time General David Petraeus appeared before a congressional committee, whether to testify about Iraq or Afghanistan or to be confirmed as CIA director, the hearings were largely a waste of time. Members of Congress burned through large segments of their time-limited question periods by tossing verbal kisses to the witness and going on about what a patriot Petraeus was. There was little time to ask serious questions about the strategy of our trillion-dollar military engagement in the Muslim world and to explore alternatives. The fawning of military cheerleaders such as Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham reached such extravagant lengths as would have made Caesar blush.

The human consequences of Reagan's budget cuts went deep. For instance, Social Security disability benefits were terminated for 350,000 people. A war hero of Vietnam, Roy Benavidez, who had been presented with the Congressional Medal Of Honor by Reagan, 'Was told by Social Security officials that the shrapnel pieces in his heart, arms, and leg did not prevent him from working. Appearing before a congressional committee, he denounced Reagan.

When a congressional committee reported in February on the Mississippi bloodshed, it concluded that the nation had arrived at a crossroads and “must either restrain by force these violent demonstrations by the bold, fierce spirits of the whites” or tell newly enfranchised black citizens, “we have made you men and citizens . . . now work out your own salvation as others have done.”70 It had become flagrantly obvious that no common ground existed between the white and black communities in the South, no middle position that allowed for compromise.

Indeed, agencies of the state are more insular and potentially more corrupt because of that insularity than are private-sector companies. Corporations must answer to stockholders and customers and defend against lawsuits of wide variety, but government agencies seldom have to answer to anyone other than sympathetic congressional committees and are largely immune from lawsuits filed by citizens whom they fail to serve or actively damage. Each agency becomes a little kingdom and builds formidable encircling walls, which often inhibits the efforts of law-enforcement officers.

The Department of Justice had become known as the Department of Easy Virtue. In 1924, after a congressional committee revealed that the oil baron Harry Sinclair had bribed the secretary of the interior Albert Fall to drill in the Teapot Dome federal petroleum reserve—the name that would forever be associated with the scandal—the ensuing investigation lay bare just how rotten the system of justice was in the United States. When Congress began looking into the Justice Department, Burns and the attorney general used all their power, all the tools of law enforcement, to thwart the inquiry and obstruct justice.

It’s crucial to understand that ordinarily the FBI applies for a wiretap separately from the National Security Agency. The NSA had tapped my phones for years, going back to the 1993 World Trade Center attack. But those wire taps would not automatically get shared with the FBI, unless the Intelligence Community referred my activities for a criminal investigation. The FBI took no such action. Instead—by coincidence I’m sure, the FBI started its phone taps exactly when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee planned a series of hearings on Iraq in late July, 2002.212 That timing suggests the FBI wanted to monitor what Congress would learn about the realities of Pre-War Intelligence, which contradicted everything the White House was preaching on FOX News and CNN. In which case, the Justice Department discovered that I told Congress a lot—and Congress rewarded the White House by pretending that I had not said a word. But phone taps don’t lie. Numerous phone conversations with Congressional offices show that I identified myself as one of the few Assets covering Iraq.213 Some of my calls described the peace framework, assuring Congressional staffers that diplomacy could achieve the full scope of results sought by U.S policymakers.

The claim that Bush lied was false. Bush could not have lied to John Kerry or the congressional Democrats about WMD’s in Iraq because Kerry and other Democrats sat on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and had access to the same intelligence data that Bush relied on to make his case for the war. When the Democrats authorized and supported the war, they knew everything that Bush knew. The claim that he lied to get their support was itself the biggest lie of the war. Its only purpose was to hide the Democrats’ own perfidy in abandoning the nation’s mission for partisan gain, and to discredit the president and turn the country against him, at whatever cost, in the hope of winning the 2004 election.

If America were a house, they’d be the termites. It’s that bad,” said Georgia Republican and voter database expert Mark Davis about the lawfare engaged in fighting against voting integrity laws. Long before COVID-19, the Democratic Party of Georgia, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sued Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in November 2019 to get him to water down the state’s requirements for checking signatures on mail-in ballots.57 Governor Kemp, under pressure from Democratic groups alleging voter suppression, had already signed a law earlier in 2019 that relaxed signature requirements and made it more difficult to reject ballots for signature mismatch or other ballot problems. Elias, who was leading the lawsuits, wanted the requirements relaxed even more.58

the mystery was far from solved. Nobody understood why heparin—which is made from the mucosal lining of pig intestines, most of which come from China—was suddenly making patients sick. In February 2008, the FDA discovered the likely source of the contamination: a Chinese plant supplying crude heparin to Baxter. In a clerical blunder, the FDA had completely overlooked and failed to inspect the facility, Changzhou SPL, located about 150 miles west of Shanghai. Instead, it inspected and approved a plant with a similar-sounding name. Predictably, once FDA officials finally traveled to Changzhou in February 2008 to make an on-the-ground inspection, they found serious problems. The facility had dirty manufacturing tanks and no reliable method of removing impurities from heparin, and it acquired the crude heparin from workshops that had not been inspected. Chinese regulators were no help at all. A loophole in Chinese regulations allowed certain pharmaceutical plants to register as chemical plants, which made them subject to far less oversight. For U.S. congressional investigator David Nelson, whose committee was now immersed in the heparin crisis as well, the situation laid bare the “classically good reason to be suspect of production coming from any country that doesn’t have competent regulatory authority.” The FDA issued an import alert in March 2008, meaning that Changzhou SPL’s shipments would be stopped at the U.S. border. Though

In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23 The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die. Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.” Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war.

This was one of the unfortunate consequences of exaggerating the enemy's evil. You were obligated to exaggerate your own virtues as well. To counter the enemy's fiendish subversion, you wielded a blunt instrument of righteousness. And then you got a congressional committee of yahoos with subpoena power and God on their side...If only, Axel thought. If only they weren't so god damned dumb.

A still-classified section of the investigation by congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has taken on an almost mythic quality over the past 13 years — 28 pages that examine crucial support given the hijackers and that by all accounts implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism. Now new claims by Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of Al Qaeda, that he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi Arabian government in the prelude to Sept. 11 have brought renewed attention to the inquiry’s withheld findings, which lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks have tried unsuccessfully to declassify.

The Westminster system understandably produces governments with more formal powers than in the United States. This greater degree of decisiveness can be seen clearly with respect to the budget process. In Britain, national budgets are not drawn up in Parliament, but in Whitehall, the seat of the bureaucracy, where professional civil servants act under instructions from the cabinet and prime minister. The budget is then presented by the chancellor of the exchequer (equivalent of the U.S. treasury secretary) to the House of Commons, which votes to approve it in a single up-or-down vote. This usually takes place within a week or two of its promulgation by the government. The process in the United States is totally different. The Constitution grants Congress primary authority over the budget. While presidents formulate budgets through the executive branch Office of Management and Budget, this office often becomes more like another lobbying organization supporting the president’s preferences. The budget, put before Congress in February, works its way through a complex set of committees over a period of months, and what finally emerges for ratification (we hope) by the two houses toward the end of the summer is the product of innumerable deals struck with individual members to secure their support. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was established in 1974 to provide Congress with greater technocratic support in drawing up budgets, but in the end the making of an American budget is a highly decentralized and nonstrategic process in comparison to what happens in Britain.

Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”21

In the many different scandals of the Obama administration, from Benghazi to Hillary Clinton’s emails, how has Judicial Watch succeeded so often in exposing the truth when Congress has failed? Part of it is the hard, focused, and dogged work of our investigators and the skill, professionalism, and tenacity of our lawyers, as well as our other staff who help support and run one of the most effective citizens’ groups in the country. But it is also because FOIA is a straightforward tool that quickly gives Judicial Watch access to the federal courts in order to ensure compliance with our record requests to ensure transparency. Congressional investigations, when committees bother to conduct them, are political by nature. Their effectiveness is often hindered by committee members of the political party whose president is in the White House in order to protect the president, their party, and their political allies. Congress today relies on the Justice Department to enforce subpoenas issued by committees that are intended to force executive branch compliance with requests for information and witnesses. With a politicized Justice Department, which has been the hallmark of the Obama administration, there is no effective enforcement of such congressional subpoenas. A sorry example of this is the refusal of the Obama Justice Department to enforce the contempt citation against Lois Lerner for refusing to comply with a subpoena for her testimony before the House Committee investigating the IRS scandal. The administration was not about to go to a judge for an order compelling Lerner to testify and reveal what she knew about the administration’s targeting of conservative organizations.

When the Mattachine Society of Washington’s founder, Frank Kameny, testified to a congressional committee in 1962, he informed his interrogators that the group’s mailing list had only about a hundred names on it. That was inconceivable to congressmen such as John Dowdy, a Texas Democrat who had assumed that the society was an arm of a “national and international organization” with “up in the millions” of members.79 The committee was puzzled further by the fact that Kameny believed that there were a quarter-million homosexuals in the city—not because they doubted that there were so many, but because he didn’t have each one’s contact information. The investigators assumed, Johnson wrote, “that homosexuals were inherently drawn to the same clique and would somehow all be on the same mailing list.

And why did we need both an SEC and a CFTC—which often battled each other—to regulate the securities markets? Was the profusion of agencies grounded in some underlying legal or economic logic, or was it mainly about turf? The main answer was political: If you have multiple regulators, you need multiple congressional oversight committees, each of which is a gold mine for political contributions.

The five chairs of the power committees,” for example, “must contribute $500,000 [each] and raise an additional $1 million” for congressional campaign funds. Big donors thus get to choose not just who runs for office, but who, once elected, leads.

Where the cutting has been wholesale, and has lasted, is in Congress—Congress: the first branch of government, closest to the people; Congress, which on our behalf keeps an eye on all those unelected bureaucrats. Congressmen and -women have sabotaged their own institution’s ability to do that for us. They have smashed the tools it possessed to help fashion laws in the public interest. They have crippled their own capacity to come to independent conclusions as to the nature of the problems such laws would address. Congress has been disabled from inside. Most of this happened in one of those revisions of the House of Representatives’ internal rules when an election flipped the majority party. It was January 1995, and a last-minute geyser of campaign cash had delivered an upset Republican victory two months before. Newt Gingrich held the gavel. The very first provision of the new rules he hammered through on January 5 reads: “In the One Hundred Fourth Congress, the total number of staff of House committees shall be at least one-third less than the corresponding total in the One Hundred Third Congress.” Congressional staffers are the citizens’ subject matter experts. Over years, these scientists and auditors and lawyers and military veterans build up historical knowledge on the complex issues that jostle for House and Senate attention. They help members, who have to be generalists, drill down into specifics. Cut staffs, and members lose the bandwidth to craft wise legislation, the expertise to ask telling questions in hearings—the ability to hold oversight hearings at all. The Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office all suffered the cuts. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished—because, in 1995, what new technology could possibly be poised on the horizon? Democrats, when they regained control of the House, did not repair the damage. Today, the number of staff fielding thousands of corporate lobbyists or fact-checking their jive remains lower than it was a quarter century ago.

would once again haul the lion's share of military supplies; that Congress would grant their claim of $494,000 in losses suffered in 1857 on the way to Fort Bridger, when attacking Mormons destroyed several trains; and, finally, that Congress would quit its interminable bickering and authorize a triweekly service over the Central Route, thus saving the Pony Express. None of these expectations materialized. In the end, desperation led William Russell to traffic in stolen government bonds, money belonging to the Indian Trust Fund of the Interior Department, where they were held for the benefit of various Indian tribes. Russell "borrowed" the bonds to cover the company's losses. When he learned what had happened, President Lincoln himself insisted on an investigation. Russell was arrested in his New York office and jailed. Called before a congressional committee, he testified freely and frankly, at the suggestion of his lawyer, who knew that by a congressional act of 1857, witnesses who testified before Congress could not be indicted for the matters on which they testified. Although he was saved by a legal technicality from trial and imprisonment, Russell did not escape censure. In a letter to the attorney general a week after his inauguration, Lincoln referred to the matter of the stolen bonds as "the Russell fraud." Though spared the worst punishment, Russell was nevertheless disgraced, and returned to Missouri, where he died broke on September 10, 1872. He was sixty years old. The Pony Express had been Russell's great gamble, the critical turn of the cards, and it had failed. "That the business men and citizens of Lexington believed in Russell and highly respected him is quite obvious," wrote the authors of Saddles and Spurs. "His record for more than two decades was without spot or blemish. During that time he was regarded as one of the town's most progressive citizens. Then, in the year 1860, in the far away city of Washington he, by one act, stained that shining record. Anyone who studies his remarkable life, including this incident, turns from it all with a feeling of intense sadness that a brilliant career such as his should close under a shadow." William Waddell returned to Lexington and died there on April 1, 1862, at the age of sixty-five. As for Alexander Majors, he moved to Salt Lake City, where he tried freighting, then prospecting. After 1879, he lived in Kansas City and Denver. Buffalo Bill Cody, then at the height of

(Admiral Jeremy Boorda, chief of naval operations, gave his last status report to the relevant congressional committees and then, shortly afterward, was found dead under what I consider to be mysterious circumstances.)

The CIA’s talk of a peaceful solution was a smokescreen. “As is typical of such clandestine operations,” Hyland writes, “the policy discussion was cryptic.”53 Just as it was better not to mention any possible collusion with South Africa, so it was better to shroud IAFEATURE in a mist of peace. This was particularly true in light of the Hughes-Ryan amendment, passed by Congress in December 1974, which stipulated that the CIA had to report “in a timely fashion, a description and scope” of covert operations to eight congressional committees. And Congress, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, was an unreliable partner. “It can be assumed,” the Davis task force warned, “that there would be strong Congressional opposition to any US involvement in support of one of the contending factions [in Angola].”54 Through the summer and the fall of 1975, the administration briefed the relevant congressional committees about IAFEATURE, but the briefings were less than candid. Representative Diggs, who chaired the Congressional Black Caucus and was a bitter foe of South Africa, would have strenuously objected had he known the true scope of the operation. “[We were told that] South Africa was not going to be any part of this. . . . So we were not going to ‘be embarrassed’ by South Africa,” Senator Biden noted in January 1976.

an outdoor food court—“and then spend some time shopping before leaving to go back to the States in the evening. But tonight there’s a reception for the American congressional committee at a restaurant on Orchard Road called Rivera’s. Technically, the party isn’t open to the public, but the restaurant is in a shopping center.” “Easy access,” Quinn said, starting to see where she was going with this. She nodded. “I was thinking you could contact her on the Sandy Side message board and tell her about the reception. Maybe even tell her where a good place

When recruiting candidates for the House of Representatives, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) looks for aspirants to raise so much money, so early—$250,000 in the first quarter the candidate has declared—that it’s almost impossible to do without a massive personal or family bank account.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

partners Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, had kept busy. I don’t know if Guccifer is a man or a woman or a robot, but it was releasing these private items from the Democrats in a manner that seemed very attuned to the rhythm of the United States election. Before I left for Martha’s Vineyard, Guccifer released cell phone numbers and passwords from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee so that those candidates would not begin their campaign season undistracted. Less

It is possible that some people have been so mauled by life in this society that such a semi-suicide is the best alternative to real suicide for them. Curiously, a hell of a lot of M.D.s are using the same logic in relentlessly over-prescribing tranquilizers, many of which are quite habit forming (e.g., Librium) and some of which (e.g. Tofranil), are definitely linked with impotence according to psycho-pharmacologists. As Dr. Lawrence Kolb told a Congressional committee way back in 1925, “There is . . . a certain type of shrinking neurotic individual who can’t meet the demands of life, is afraid to meet people, has anxieties and fears, who if they took small amounts of narcotics – and I have examined quite a few of them – would be better and more efficient people than they would be without it.” Dr. Kolb also described two physicians who were opiate addicts and practiced successfully until they managed to “kick the habit,” after which they became hopeless problems to themselves and their families. “These two physicians that I am talking about didn’t get cured," Dr. Kolb said scornfully, “they should have had it (the drug) forever, because it (the cure) would not mean anything but an insane asylum for them, and they were doing a pretty good job of work as physicians when they were on the drug and regularly taking it.” American society has ignored Dr. Kolb’s pragmatic approach for decades and has struggled heroically to get all these lost souls off their depressant drugs. Or has it? The “war against heroin” continues; but in New York, the state has abandoned the hope of real “cure” and is satisfied just to get the junkies off an addicting drug it has made illegal – heroin – and onto an equally addicting drug it has made legal – methadone; and in the nation at large, prescriptions for central nervous system depressants are said to run into the tens of millions every year. The official attitude, by default, now appears to be, “If you can’t bear our society without being half-asleep, let us at least control which drug you choose to be half-asleep on.” This is not a formula for a non-addicted nation. It is a face-saving game to allow those bureaucrats whom William S. Burroughs calls “control addicts” to continue to believe that they are, by God, controlling everybody they want to control.

all you need to do is consult an 1872 congressional hearing on the Klan quixotically entitled Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. The multi-volume document makes scary reading, even now.

Months later, I would still catch myself scratching my head, wondering what had possessed Meadows to deliver incriminating evidence right into the hands of congressional investigators. Did he simply have an awful legal team? Were the texts provided by mistake? Could he have actually wanted to assist our work? Or was Meadows trying to play some kind of chess game with the select committee? Did he figure he could appear to be cooperating or maybe even make some sort of deal while not handing over anything useful? I tend to think it was the latter. There were multiple indications that—despite how much he turned over to the committee—Meadows was trying to keep information from us.

In order to understand how everything went to hell on January 6th, you have to understand that the District of Columbia has its own rules. The city was established as a federal district in 1790. In the years since then, Washington has gained a greater degree of autonomy and home rule, but it doesn’t operate like a normal state or city. A congressional committee reviews laws passed in the city and retains authority over its budget, and of course there’s still the thorny issue of taxation without representation in Congress. Local DC Metropolitan police officers often have to take a backseat to specialized federal police forces in the city’s many national parks and federal buildings, including the Capitol. There, the primary law enforcement agency is the US Capitol Police. According to a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) directive issued in 2003, the department’s policy is to “extend assistance” to the Capitol police if it is required.

landscape that was as partisan as the halls of government, Democrats and conservative Republicans refused to believe correspondents from opposing newspapers about lawlessness. Doubters also rejected the testimony from witnesses delivered before congressional committees under

In a media landscape that was as partisan as the halls of government, Democrats and conservative Republicans refused to believe correspondents from opposing newspapers about lawlessness. Doubters also rejected the testimony from witnesses delivered before congressional committees under oath and denied the existence of the Ku Klux Klan.2

On and on, working late hours between courtroom trials and congressional committee meetings, and nearly killing themselves [Alexander Hamilton and James Madison] doing it, they wrote the most enduring explanation of government ever put to paper before or since.

The August 2000 Congressional investigation found that the majority of ACIP members were conflicted in that vote.103 That report found that seven out of ten ACIP working group committee members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine. According to

Congressional public hearings are not for the public but for Congress. They are designed to provide the Committee members with as much exposure as possible, and give the public the impression that its Congressmen are serious about what they’re doing and that they have not been squandering the taxpayer’s money. Hearings are primarily designed, in other words, to be politically rewarding.

Changes to the Department of Justice Back up the independence of the department by making it a criminal act for any member of the executive branch to directly intercede in a case for personal reasons. Allow an independent judge – not associated with a particular case – the ability to oversee plea deals. Allow more direct congressional oversight of actions in the justice department. Institute more judicial oversite on plea bargaining. 97 percent of the cases end up there. Appoint a congressional committee to investigate and recommend changes to the ongoing DOJ culture that emphasizes closure rates and stiff sentences. Re-examine the maxim “Tough on Crime” to address real life issues – including mandatory sentencing guidelines. Institute guidelines to reduce the adversarial nature of the American Justice system and make the defense and the prosecution more equal under law.

Pelosi would create a special House committee to investigate the insurrection. A few weeks later, the House considered a bill to award a Congressional Gold Medal to every officer who defended the Capitol on January 6th. It was a simple, apolitical gesture of recognition. The Congressional Gold Medal bill did not call for any kind of investigation or cast aspersions on anyone. It merely honored the officers who risked their lives to stop a violent insurrection. Even so, twenty-one Republicans voted against it. For the historical record, here are the names of those twenty-one spineless fucks: Andrew Clyde, Paul Gosar, Jody Hice, Lauren Boebert, Barry Moore, Ralph Norman, Matthew Rosendale, Chip Roy, Warren Davidson, Scott Perry, Mary Miller, Andy Biggs, Thomas Massie, Andy Harris, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, Michael Cloud, Greg Steube, Bob Good, and John Rose.

Also, members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful bipartisan lobbying organization dedicated to ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel. AIPAC’s clout could be brought to bear on virtually every congressional district in the country, and just about every politician in Washington—including me—counted AIPAC members among their key supporters and donors.

The Federal Writers not only documented the natural wonders of the country, but the hidden lives of minorities, working women, immigrant laborers, sharecroppers, and others typically ignored by the history books. Their writings helped to inspire Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, among other classics. Sadly, much of the Federal Writers’ work was stored away as the Red Scare heated up, congressional committees held hearings to search for communist infiltrators on American soil, and World War II gripped the nation.

Johnson himself experienced that. During the time he was an active member of the Communist Party, he was not atheist. He explained to the congressional committee, “I hid my religion. I committed the grievous sin of hiding it. I outwardly accepted the atheistic anti-religious program of the Communists, but secretly in my heart I retained my religious convictions. Of course, that was an awful struggle, an internal struggle, a struggle between two different and opposing philosophies, the philosophy of charity and the philosophy of hate. Sometimes I wonder how I did that tightrope walking.” In fact, added Johnson, now that he had left the party, he had joined a Baptist Church in New Jersey and attended church services in New York regularly.

J. P. Morgan had started before the war, as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract.

Merging the SEC and CFTC was a political nonstarter because they were overseen by separate committees in Congress. The congressional oversight committees jealously guarded their turf because the market players regulated by the two agencies could be counted on to provide lucrative campaign contributions.

Housing prices had never before fallen as far and as fast as they did beginning in 2007. But that’s what happened. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan explained to a congressional committee after the fact, “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of [2007] because the data input into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria. Had instead the models been fitted more appropriately to historic periods of stress, capital requirements would have been much higher and the financial world would be in far better shape, in my judgment.”3

One informed theory holds that the secret procedures have a specific, defined role for a small, preselected set of congressional leaders—perhaps as small as the four party leaders of the two houses—who would serve as a “rump” or “skeleton” Congress until a full group could be established months later and would, in the absence of the larger body, serve to approve or disapprove legislation and executive actions. Such a body would mirror the “Gang of Eight” who are kept regularly informed by the president about covert military and intelligence actions conducted around the world. Whereas Congress in general is supposed to be kept informed of U.S. military and intelligence matters, the president could choose in “extraordinary circumstances affecting vital interests” to tell only this smaller group—the four party leaders and the chairs and ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees—about particularly

The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising that the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong. Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads. Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for Harper’s magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future. Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment.

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment. His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends. Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.

The nature of the congressional investigating committee has suffered violence at the hands of some who have not understood or appreciated the scope and function of such a committee. Too often, in recent times, the committees have been used for publicity rather than for the original purposes intended.

Mr. Cohen was only recently able to access a hard drive with important documents. Said drive contains over 14 million files, which consist of all e-mails, voice recordings, images, and attachments from Mr. Cohen’s computers and phones. To date, Mr. Cohen has located several documents that we believe have significant value to the various congressional oversight and investigation committees. Working alone, Mr. Cohen has only had the time to go through less than 1 percent of the drive, or approximately 3,500 files. Mr. Cohen needs time, resources, and assistance to separate out privileged and personal documents from these 14 million files to make the rest available for review by various congressional committees that have sought his help in fulfilling their Article I oversight responsibilities. Mr. Cohen is prepared to do so – but it will take time, effort, and ready accessibility to members of Congress and their staffs to assist in providing the relevant documents.

By early 2017, several congressional committees were examining Russia's interference in the election. Within the Executive Branch, these investigatory efforts ultimately led to the May 2017 appointment of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III.

ask the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA to treat the records that they had supplied the Committee in the same fashion as “Congressional material” not to be released to the public. This included documents which private researchers had previously requested and would have likely received under the Freedom of Information Act.

an early indication of how very astute he was about the ways of Washington. Naively, I had always assumed that Congressional public hearings were for the public. So I had thought that the Assassinations Committee’s public hearings would be our opportunity to present to the American people the first objective overview of the Kennedy assassination.

But Washington teaches its own civics lessons and I learned that Congressional public hearings are not for the public but for Congress. They are designed to provide the Committee members with as much exposure as possible, and give the public the impression that its Congressmen are serious about what they’re doing and that they have not been squandering the taxpayer’s money. Hearings are primarily designed, in other words, to be politically rewarding.

It was a matter to be settled behind closed doors. But the press became involved and, more particularly, Thomas Paine, who at the time was secretary to the congressional Committee of Foreign Affairs. In an article published in several installments in the Pennsylvania Packet and transparently written under the pen name “Common Sense,” he asserted in January 1779 that official papers conclusively proved that the supplies furnished by Beaumarchais had been a free gift from France. Paine’s divulgence of such top secret information transformed the issue from a congressional quarrel into an international incident.

Throughout the day, Republicans in the committee grilled Secretary Clinton on why more wasn’t done to provide the necessary security for Ambassador Stevens in Libya prior to the attack that resulted in his death. Now, the irony of this is, when looking at congressional votes, it was actually the Republican-controlled House that voted to cut funding to foreign embassies, leading up to the September 11, 2012 attack.