Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., took to the Senate floor on Feb. 4, 2020 to criticize Democrats’ efforts to impeach President Donald Trump and remove him from office. “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,” Paul said. He went on to slam the Democrats’ use of a FISA court during the Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Transcript
The great irony of the last several weeks in the impeachment trial is it the Democrats accused the president of using his governmental office to go after his political opponent.
The irony is, they then use 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 need to be completed before the election. They didn’t have time for the process. They didn’t have time for due process. They don’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 accuse the president of, they use the government and the government’s process to go after their political opponent. What is the evidence that it’s partisan, they didn’t convince one Republican, not one elected Republican decided that any of their arguments were valid or 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 six 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 deciding 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’s just a conspiracy theory, none of this is happening, there’s no there there. But, now that we’ve investigated it, guess what? The FISA court admits that they were lied to. The FBI has now been proven to have lied 17 times.
We’ve got a half a dozen people at the top level of all of our intelligence community who have admitted to having extreme bias. You’ve got Peter Strzok and Lisa Page talking about taking down the president, having an insurance policy against him succeeding and becoming the president. You’ve got McCabe, you’ve got Comey, you’ve got 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 now? He’s 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, 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’s not just American civil liberties that are being abused by our intelligence agencies. It’s an entire presidential campaign, and it could go all the way. This is why you want to limit power.
Men are not angels and that’s why we put restrictions on government. We need more restrictions now. We can’t allow secret courts to investigate campaigns. It started before the election, it went on for the last three years through the Mueller investigation. They thought they had the president dead to rights and then bring him down through this investigation. So, initially the spying didn’t work, 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’ve had their day in the sun and they loved it and I think they’re going to keep doing it time and time and time again.
