Eric Swalwell: “I thank the gentleman for yielding. I urge my colleagues to defeat the previous question and allow an amendment to be…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. I urge my colleagues to defeat the previous question and allow an amendment to be put forward on H.R. 356, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. A public report was released on Friday by the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, and it was chilling. It declared that Russia attacked our democracy in the past Presidential election. It said that the attack came from the Russian services themselves. It was ordered by Vladimir Putin and, most concerning, that Russia had a preferred candidate and that they sought to denigrate Secretary Clinton along the way. Going forward, this is not about relitigating the past. Donald Trump will be the next President. This is about preserving the integrity of our democracy and saying that our dialogue, our democracy, these fights between our parties, they belong to us. The report also said that Russia intends to do this again. We know that Russia has done this before across the globe to our allies. They are doing it right now to other countries as they seek to move forward in their democracies. Now other foreign adversaries of ours will look at what Russia did, if we do nothing, and see an opportunity to strike us again. So we have an opportunity, as Republicans and Democrats, to come together and say that the victims may have been the Democratic Party in this past election and, if history has its way, in the next election it may be a different party.…”