Bob Dornan's Call For Impeachment Speech FOLLOW THE MONEY AND LOOK AT THE NOSE
(House of Representatives -September 26, 1996)[Page: H11387]
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentlewoman wants to bid a fond farewell to the gentleman from Louisiana, Cleo Fields, I would yield to her, if I may do it first.
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Now, something else happened to me today. Besides meeting a young man who old me he was corrupted here as a page on the elevator in one of the Rayburn buildings, said it cost him 2 years of school and finally he is getting out of the university late. I also saw Clinton come to the Longworth Office Building, so I thought I would stand in the hall, ask him about tampering with a grand jury system by telegraphing pardon messages through the media, specifically through PBS on Jim Lehrer's show. Got the transcript here from the Wall Street Journal. It is unbelievable. Outrageous is what it is. It is just what the Wall Street Journal calls it.
So I am standing there and out comes that battered wife, George Stephanopoulos. That is what Bob Woodward of Watergate Woodward and Bernstein fame, naval officer, Robert Woodward wrote: George Stephanopoulos is like a battered wife. The volcanic eruptions come out of the man's head with lava flowing all over George, and he is treated like a battered wife. I did not see whose head; the man.
So here comes the battered wife, and he comes up and said what are you doing. You going to talk through the man?
I will insert 'the man' a lot tonight.
And I said, `Oh, just wanted to find out about jury tampering, telegraphing messages through media interviews and tampering with witnesses that are at this moment going before the grand jury in Little Rock.'
He says OK.
He runs back into the Ways and Means room, a whole operation is organized.
I saw the secret service smiling. I saw the Capitol police laughing. We saw the advance men talking in their little hand mikes, and 1 cost hundreds of people, I guess, 10 or 15 minutes as they had to run an operation kind of like the Bowery boys, you knowplaying 24 A, the diversion, to fake me out, and it worked. Got to give it to him.
But they had to announce to the entire press corps, the AP camera man, the Washington Post: Look, here comes the President, everybody--actual word out of advancement: all the press look this way.
So of course I looked that way, too, and we are all looking, and behind me comes Al Gore, Vice President, and the man, and up to the microphone. I turn around, I said,'Well done, guys.'
But he will get his day in court. I was going to remind him that Paula Corbin Jones had her day in court and he will have his day in court because I am filing impeachment papers. I have got lawyers working on them and have been for about 5 or 6 months, and this may be the crowning issue, this may be the straw on the camel's back, telegraphing pardon messages to people. It is unbelievable.
So I stood there, and I looked, and the first thing that came in my mind was baby boomers in power, and the second thing came to my mind were the words of Maureen Dowd about the scenes on sacred Omaha Beach, that hallowed territory, that hallowed sand where so many Americans died, a thousand in few hours there in Utah Beachon the gorgeous coast of Normandy, France. And I thought of Maureen Dowd, New York Times reporter, her words: The prepubescent yuppies running around serving the man.
Well, listen to this, Mr. Speaker. Seven pounds of heroin were found in the nose cone of an Air Force One aircraft taking the President to the U.N. in New York from Bogota, Colombia. The President in this case is Ernesto Samper, the man whose Presidency is collapsing in Bogota, Colombia, a nation which drug users in this country have helped to destroy, particularly cocaine users. They have helped to destroy it.
When you see somebody with a big red bulbous nose and doctors tell me it is not allergies; that makes your eyes water. The nose only swells from alcohol or from tearing up your nasal passages with cocaine. When you see that, you will know that that is a person who has caused--Nancy Reagan had it right, just say no--who has caused a thousand young police officers to be killed in Colombia in the laass every morning or to Protestant services because they may see Jesus before the sun goes down or during that night. Gun battles over two-thirds of all the main police headquarters; it is kind of a Federal police. It is as though our FBI wore uniforms and had street duty instead of just investigative duties, and they are dying because people want to trip out up here on cocaine, because coke powder snows on Hollywood and snows on some of the elite and some of the not so wealthy, the crack cocaine in some of the poor areas of this country. Thousands of young Federal police officers in Colombia die, and now they have a President taking--it is alleged--narco money. Now this may have been planted on his plane, but the evidence is pretty tough that during his presidential campaign that money was coming in.
Well, so much for that President. How about another President in the free world? Another President? There is more books written on him than I have ever seen. How about this book by Roger Morris? Partners in Power.
Listen to this, Partners in Power: Much bigger in scope then Blood Sport.
That was the book by Robert T. Stewart. Blood Sport. And considered more devastating in its frank revelations.
I am going to read some of the clips from this book. I will not have time to read clips from this book. I will not have time to read clips from this book; it is--Boy is the title, and then the name of a President in the free world, Boy something, the political biography by R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr.
Remember when I came to the floor with all the books that are still down in my car, and I was too tired to carry them all up here. On the Make, by Meredith Oakley; The Agenda, by Bob Woodward; The Choice, by Bob Woodward; Inside the White House, by David Meredith, where the help talks about dialog in front of the cooks and the servants and the valets, those that were not fired. Blood Sport; Unlimited Access, the conservative action group here, CAT we call ourselves. i wish we called ourselves Tiger and were a little more effective around here since we are a majority within a majority. Why do we get trashed all the time by the lunch bunch? Blood Sport; Unlimited Access.
Here are the new ones. Boy Clinton. And Partners in Power.
SNIP
I do not have time to read the review on the Boy book, but let me read first the opening of the Wall Street Journal editorial today and then ask unanimous consent to put it in the Record in its fulsome detail and then Out To Get The Clintons, this interview with Clinton on PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer on the 23d. This is opening paragraph:
In some extraordinary statements Monday Clinton stoked Susan McDougal's hopes of a presidential pardon and stepped up the White House campaign against the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr. Before the voters go to the polls in November it seems to us Clinton owes them a forthright explanation about what he would do about both of these issues in a second term, attacking Kenneth Starr, pardoning everybody who he claimed when he was so angered that we voted to pay off Billy Dale and the six other innocent people in the Travelgate scandal when we offered to pay all of their legal--costing the U.S. taxpayers about %500,000, and it is millions that we are paying out for all of these people who have been wronged. And then the Senate went to vote for it. He said he would veto it unless we paid the legal bills of the McDougals and Jim Guy Tucker and everybody he said were so innocent and punished only because they knew him. All these people, indicted, about to be indicted, or going to jail only because they knew him.Yeah, the secret message is not so secret of going on; he is going to pardon him.
Listen to this. Here is the transcript of Lehrer; I will put this in the Record. Please do not write my office. Write your own Congressman. Write Mr. Mica if you are in his district in Florida to get the Rin Little Rock the other day the reason she was refusing to testify before a grand jury is she believed Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, was out to get the Clintons. Do you agree with her?'
He is speaking to Clinton.
`Well, I think the facts speak for themselves. And I think we all know about her--she said what she said, and her lawyer said that he felt they did not want her to tell the truth. They wanted her to say something bad about us, whether it was the truth or not;' us means the Partners in Power; us, whether it was true or not. 'And if it was false, it would still be perfectly all right. And if she told the truth and it wasn't bad about us, she simply would be punished for it. That's what her lawyer said.'
Jim Lehrer, in his deadly low key style,`Do you believe him?'`Well, I think the facts speak for themselves. There's a lot of evidence to support that.'`But do you personally believe that is what it is all about, is to get you and Mrs. Clinton?''Well, isn't it obvious''You only obviously believe that, right?''Isn't it obvious?' I mean, you know, look at the D'Amato hearings. What do (the) D'Amato hearings reveal? Witness after witness after witness testifying that as governor, every time I was given a chance to do something unethical or ethical, I chose the ethical path. Witness after witness after witness, and they still--whenever a question was answered they'd go ask a bunch of new questions.
'But the American people have figured that out. They'll get that.' That line, 'they'll get that; where have I heard that before?
January 26, on a specially tailored Sixty Minutes program that was only 13 minutes long coming out ofthe Superbowl, all about a certain scandal involving somebody whose name rhymed with flowers. He said,'The American people get that. We have had problems. They will get that. They will get that.'
I guess 43 percent got it, but the rest didn't.
'I'm not worried. I trust the people. I think that's what we all should be doing.
Mr. Lehrer: `If you're reelected, would you consider pardoning the McDougals and Jim Guy Tucker during a second term?''I've given no consideration to that. You know, their cases are still on appeal. And I would--my position would be that their cases should be handled like others, they should go through--there's a regular process for that, and I have regular meetings on that,' and on and on and on.
Here it comes. The reason he was over here in the Longworth building, in my building, I am sitting up there in Jim Wright's, the former Speaker's office. The reason he is over here is he thinks he has Bob Dole in a box. People have thought they had Bob Dole whipped before. He thinks he has got it made, so now he can go out and start campaigning to take the House and Senate back.
I didn't know Harry Truman, but I read the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by David McCullough. You heard me read it the other day on the floor. Harry Truman said, 'you can't ever trust a man who commits adultery. If he will break his word to his wife, you can't trust him on anything. Keep those bimbos away from me. He would run out of the hotel, leave the building, if anybody had women around. Beth could really trust him. We have no Harry Truman here.
Partners in Power. This is tough, so I am going to leave out the man and only talk about people who are not protected by rule 18.
First of all, story: London, Sunday. Imagine the respect factor in Europe. Here is the Sunday Telegraph, London, by Ambrose Evans Pritchard. Some day I am going to get to meet this great journalist.
'The longer he resists pressure to release his medical records, the stronger the suspicions become that he is hiding something important, perhaps even something that could affect the outcome of some elections.
`Some press secretary,' I am leaving out ay.
'But not everybody has fallen for this diversionary tactic. In a biting editorial last week,' that I missed, so I will have to put it in the Record in January,'the Wall Street Journal asked whether' someone was covering up a history of drug use. 'Drugs are a much more serious matter. If the American people were ever led to believe that somebody was a heavy user of cocaine while head of a certain subgovernment entity in a certain state, the scandal would be thermonuclear.'
Stories about past drug use by some are a staple of the talk show programs around America, but no major paper in the U.S. has had the guts yet to publish an investigative expose. The Washington Times almost did this week. They came that close. They sent out sheets to people around the country saying,`Here it comes tomorrow.' Then they backed off, and I got a headline story out ofit, interesting, with my subcommittee on a Czech general saying that Americans were used as guinea pigs from the Korean and maybe the Vietnam War, because it left the whole area above the full front-page story empty.
So he goes on to say, Ambrose Evans Pritchard, to his London audience, in the biggest circulation paper in Great Britain, he says: This is not because drug use is too much of a tabloid issue. Far from it. The mainstream media were quick to print uncorroborated allegations of a stupid convicted felon in the slammer who claimed to have sold marijuana years ago to a young Dan Quayle. Remember how that moved on the network news, the headlines, of establishment paper after liberal paper?
In the case of someone, a number of people have come fonvard with direct knowledge of drug use, but the press always finds a reason to impugn the source's credibility; hence, a fascinating meeting with 20 of us telling Gary Aldrich, `We will protect you,' giving him a round of applause, and then came his two little children. Dan Burton and I said,'We were applauding for your honorable dad, Gary Aldrich, author of'Unlimited Access.'
Back to the London paper. This is not a tabloid, this is like the New York Times in London, or like the New York Post or Daily News.
He says, in the case ofthese people that have come forward, nothing short of documentary proof, though, will induce the newspapers to examine the claims. Hence, the intense speculation in Washington about the medical records. But there are other records. A freelance journalist, Scott Wheeler, has obtained copies ofthe Arkansas State police surveillance audio tapes from the 1984 investigation of a Roger, whose last name is Clinton, the younger brother of somebody. He was eventually convicted for dealing in cocaine and sent to prison.
The tapes revealed that Roger Clinton was a drug trafficker, not just an addict who crossed the line. He can be heard describing how he used to smuggle large amounts of cocaine right through the airports hidden under his clothes. And I have a tape somebody is going to play for me tomorrow where he says, I'm not worried about the cops surveilling me, I've got other cops watching those cops, because I've got a friend in a high place.
And it says, the most interesting comment he makes about the Governor is, got to get some for my brother. He's got a nose like a vacuum cleaner. Then there is the case of Charlene Wilson, currently serving a prison term in Arkansas for drug offenses. She told the Sunday Telegraph in London 2 years ago that she had supplied somebody with cocaine during his first term. He was so messed up that night he slid down the wall into a garbage can.
The story has credibility because she told it under oath to a Federal grand jury in Little Rock in December of 1990. At the time she was an informant for the 7th Judicial District drug task force in Arkansas. Gene Duf she was telling the truth. What happens to her, Duffy? She's now in hiding in a secret place somewhere in Texas.
What about Charlene Wilson. Charged with drug violations. In 1992 she was sentenced to 3 1 years for selling a half ounce of marijuana and $100 worth of methamphetamine to an informant. She protested she was set up to eliminate her as a political liability and she appealed on the grounds of entrapment. With the help of a brilliant Arkansas lawyer, John Wesley Hall, her case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court--across the street, Mr. Speaker. Finding a violation of her constitutional rights, the court ordered the State of Arkansas to give Ms. Wilson a fresh trial or set her free. She's being set free as of November--probably after the election.
And what about those grand jury transcripts? They are secret, of course, sealed in perpetuity, but every witness has the right to the transcripts of their own testimony if they make a formal request.
So she will probably formally request them and we will get to see them and it may be too late because America has a morality test, all day long until the polls close, a morality test on November 5. And then at the same time it has an IQ test to see what we are going to tell the children in this country.
In this book,'Partners In Power,' page 325:
On one ofthe 1983-84 videotapes--I better give the publisher, Henry Holt. Get this book, folks, Pop for the $27.50, for pete's sake. Henry Hold, 'Partners In Power.
A fabulous biographer, Roger Morris, writes:
Yeah, there was a mansion in the guest house, Roger answered, oh, they love it. Even sketchy State trooper entry and exit logs at the Governor's mansion would bear him out showing him coming and going at the family quarters accompanies by females, girl, a friend, at least 36 times after February 7, 1983, the height of drug trafficking, and guards recorded visits within days of the women that he was bringing. Roger in with 2 females to change for party. Roger and girl going to the mansion, 2 hours. Girl, in, out. And on one of the 1983-84 videotapes filmed by the local narcotics officers, Roger Clinton was said to tell a supplier jauntily: Got to get some for my brother, he's got a nose like a vacuum.
So there it is, folks. You want the line. Get the book. 'Partners In Power.
ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE SPEAKER PRO TEMPORE The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. MICA). The Chair must ask the gentleman from California to suspend for a moment at this point.
The Chair would remind all Members that it is not in order to engage in personalities toward the President. Although remarks in debate may include criticism of the President's official actions or policy, it is a breach of order to question the personal conduct of the President whether by actual accusation or by mere insinuation.
The gentleman may proceed in order.
Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I have a question.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman will state his question.
Mr. DORNAN. If a Member has read--and, of course, I was talking about this Member--over 10 books, traveled Arkansas, spoken to people, and believes that a high public official was and may still be a cocaine addict, do I not have a right to state that publicly on the floor of this House?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair would respond not on the floor of this House. And also in response to a question concerning the proper bounds, the requirements of decorum in debate prohibit any personal abuse of the President spanning the full range of affronts from the attribution of unworthy motives to name-calling.
The gentleman may proceed in order.
[Page: H11392]
Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, then let me deviate in the remaining few moments to point out the headline--these are public issues--the headline of yesterday's Washington Times: 'In ey from banks, and if one person is immune from discussion, then let us talk about all the others. A person is known by the company he keeps.
I want to close discussing this rule XVII because people watching this House may be confused about the separation of powers. To keep order in this place, there is comity between Members and the Members in the other body, and it can be stretched when one Member criticizes on the Senate floor this Member for being a hobbyist on a gut-ripping issue like POW issues and Missing In Action, but we have to have some comity here.
But only in this Congress, the 104th Congress, was the office ofthe President and the office ofthe Vice President put under the rules, thereby damaging the separation of powers. I can assure you after I file charges of impeachment, articles ofimpeachment, and I can do it from zero to 1,000, after that, I will move when we reassemble, God willing I am back and you are back, I will demand in our rules from our leadership to finally show the guts to go back to the way this existed for over 200 years, and have this separation of powers so that the offices of the President and the Vice President are no longer included in our rule XVIII that demands civility between ourselves.
Let me read one line about President Samper of Colombia: A scathing assessment of the Bogota scene with its dozens of censored stories, crippling folly and indolence, intellectual shallowness, and social and mercenary corruption by the political world it is supposed to monitor, resulting in a 'day of the locusts' talk-show demagoguery by liberals.
Mr. Speaker, when you read this, the reaction to a young person would be holy schnikes, how did our great country come to all this corruption and scandals?
END
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