On the recordFebruary 16, 2017
Mr. Speaker, we should be joined momentarily by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. I want to close out, though, my own thoughts by responding to something I have been hearing over the last week here in the Halls of Congress. Now that it is clear from our intelligence agencies, 16 of them, including the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and so on, that Vladimir Putin had a deliberate campaign of espionage, cyber sabotage, propaganda, and fake news to undermine American democracy in the 2016 election, and now that it is clear that there were high-level contacts between Trump associates and officials of the Russian Government, it is no longer being denied by anybody on either side of the aisle. What I have started to hear is, well, sure, they tried to hack our election, and, sure, they leaked thousands of emails, and, sure, they changed the dynamics of the campaign and what people were talking about in the campaign, but there is no proof that they stuffed any ballot boxes or they hacked into the computers. And that is true; we don't know that they stuffed any ballot boxes or hacked into computers, and we will have to see if anything comes out about that when we finally get to do a real comprehensive investigation. But, Mr. Speaker, the reality is that we should be terrified and appalled and outraged that they were allowed to go as far as they did.…





