Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to Michael Bahar, who will be leaving the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he has served as general counsel since September 2012, and as staff director and general counsel since early 2015. Because of Michael's commitment to always finding a way to ``yes,'' he has helped guide HPSCI to a run of remarkable legislative success over the past 2 years. In a city of tacticians, Michael's great gift is his ability to look at things strategically, even while reacting in real time to emerging matters at hand. Under Michael's leadership of the HPSCI Democratic staff, we have passed two successive bipartisan intelligence authorization acts, both of which received multiple and successively larger vote tallies each time they came to the floor. In June 2015, we passed the USA FREEDOM Act that ended bulk collection of telephony metadata under section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, replacing it with a new regime more protective of Americans' privacy. And later in 2015, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 was included as part of the 2016 omnibus spending bill. CISA, which encourages businesses and the Federal Government to share cyber threat information in the interest of national security, could not have been timelier. Neither bill would have been possible without Michael's tireless efforts.…”