Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor of the House of Representatives again to introduce and talk to this body and to the American people about my constituent, Amir Hekmati. Amir is an American. He is a United States marine. He is a brother. He is a son. He is a Michigander. He grew up in my hometown of Flint, Michigan. He served this country in uniform, as I said, in the United States Marine Corps. He is of Iranian descent, though he was born in the United States. In 2011, for the first time, he traveled to Iran to visit family he had never met, a grandmother he had never seen. He traveled under his own name, notified the Iranian Government that he was going to be there; and after just a couple of weeks, he was apprehended, disappeared. His family didn't know where he was for months until it was revealed that he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for espionage, a charge that he is completely innocent of. In fact, the Iranian court of appeals, the appeals process, even set aside that conviction and set aside his death sentence. There was no evidence. They did convict him and sentence him to 10 years, a conviction that is based on the fact that, under Iranian law, he is considered an Iranian citizen even though he was born in the United States and never had even been there before. But the fact that he had served in the Marine Corps created a set of facts that caused them to convict him of a crime and sentence him to 10 years. It has been 3\1/2\ years.…”