The Daily Signal - ‘People Want Justice’: Rep. Jody Hice Talks IG Report and Impeachment

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

“One of the biggest questions I have back home in the 10th District of Georgia is, ‘When are heads going to roll over all this corruption?'” says Rep. Jody Hice, a Republican. “People want justice.” Hice joins the podcast to discuss the new report released by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz. He also discusses government spending and the impeachment process. We also cover the following stories: Michael Horowitz testifies on the Hill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell talks about impeachment. Time names climate change activist Greta Thunberg as its person of the year. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, December 12th. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Daniel Davis. At a time of year when Congress is usually consumed with spending bills, this year it's all about impeachment. Today we'll have Congressman Jody Heiss on the show to respond to the impeachment effort, the Inspector General Report, and what Congress ought to be doing on spending. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and please encourage you. others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. Another heated hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday, this time with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, discussing his team's

new report out on the FBI's use of the FISA courts and surveillance of Trump AIDS. Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California, said this via ABC. According to the IG's report, the FBI complied with existing department and FBI policies in opening the investigation. And the IG, quote, did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced this decision, end quote. Or any specific investigative steps taken by the FBI. That's the finding. Here's one comment from Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, via C-SPAN. So we're faced with two possibilities.

Either one, these FBI agents purposely used the power of the federal government to wage a political war against a presidential candidate they despised, or two, these agents were so incompetent that they allowed a paid foreign political operative. to weaponize the FISA program into a spying operation on a rival presidential political campaign. I'm not sure about you, but I'm not sure which one is worse. I am sure that neither conclusion is acceptable. They're both horrifying for slightly different reasons. I'm not sure there is a substantive distinction between the two of them.

I'm not sure one can conclude. I'm not sure it's possible to conclude that the, bias evident in communications between some of these investigators wasn't at least a part of. Now, the fact that you say that there wasn't a causal connection between them, that there wasn't a sine qua non but-for causal chain between those communications and the opening of the investigation itself is beside the point. The fact is, these were agents who made their bias clear, and they went after someone in part because they did not look. like his candidacy, and that's inexcusable.

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, was also riled up via Fox News. Who at the Department of Justice was, and by the way, several Democrats, it's interesting seeing Democratic senators wanting to defend this abuse of power. Several senators, Senator Feinstein said, I wrote this down. The FBI didn't place spies in the Trump campaign. Senator Leahy said something similar. Well, that may be true, not spies in the Trump campaign, but, But reading from your report, in particular page four of the executive's summary,

your report says thereafter the Crossfire Hurricane team used the intrusive techniques, including confidential human sources, to interact and consensually record multiple conversations with Page and Papadopoulos, both before and after they were working for the Trump campaign, as well as on one occasion with a high-level Trump campaign official who was not the subject to the investigation. So they didn't place spies in the campaign, but they sent spies to record senior members of the campaign in the middle of a presidential campaign when that candidate was the nominee for the other major party that was the opposing party to the one in power. Is that right? They send confidential human sources in to do those.

Did anyone at DOJ, who at DOJ knew about this? Did the Attorney General know about this? Did the White House know about this? based on what we found, nobody had been told in advance. But once it was happening, did they do? They did not. The only evidence that somebody knew were the line attorneys in NSD in the National Security Division when they were told very selective portions of what had occurred.

Nobody knew beforehand. Nobody had been briefed. And frankly, that was one of the most concerning things here is that nobody needed to be told. And I can tell you from my time at the Department of, of justice and for my time in law enforcement, any responsible leader when hearing that you're talking about sending in spies and sending in a wiretap on any presidential nominee should say, what in the hell are we doing? And by the way, the people up the chain who are saying we didn't know if you had responsible leadership, there's no more important decision than you make. I can tell you

what I was at DOJ if someone said, let's tap Hillary Clinton, or let's tap Bill Clinton or John Carrie, the people there would have said, what in the hell are you talking about? What was going on here? This wasn't Jason Bourne. This was Beavis and Butthead. And one more part of Cruz's exchange with Horowitz, this time via C-SPAN. A lawyer at the FBI creates fraudulent evidence, alters an email. That is in turn used as the basis for a sworn statement to the court that the court relies on. Am I stating that accurately? That's correct. That is what. occurred. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted the Democrats from the Senate floor on Wednesday, saying that they were rushing headlong into impeachment. Yesterday, House Democrats announced they will

rush ahead and prepare to send the Senate articles of impeachment based on at the least thorough and most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history. Well, the House Democrats' denigration of their solemn duty will not cause the Senate to denigrate ours. President Trump also hit back and defended himself. Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday night, he said this. You saw their so-called articles of impeachment today? People are saying they're not even a crime. What happened?

All of these horrible things, remember? Bribery and this and that. Where are they? They send these two things. They're not even a crime. This is the lightest, weakest impeachment. You know, our country's had actually many impeachments. You call judges and lots of, many impeachments.

But it was on today, everybody said, this is impeachment light. This is the lightest impeachment in the history of our country by far. It's not even like an impeachment. These people are stone cold, crooked. When a guy like Shifty Shiff, here's a corrupt politician. With a new executive order, the Trump administration is taking aim at anti-Semitism on campuses. NBC News reported that an unnamed senior administration official told reporters that Trump would be signing an executive order on anti-Semitism

to enshrine the definition from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance of anti-Semitism into an executive order and clarify that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to anti-Semitic acts. The unnamed official also said, we looked at the data and we saw that there's been a rise in anti-Semitic incidents since 2013, and we began a policy process to figure out specifically what we could do on the subject. New details have emerged from Tuesday's shooting in Jersey City, New Jersey, which claimed the lives of five civilians and one police officer. USA Today reports that two suspects attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City. Two police officers on the scene returned fire and stopped them, preventing further harm. Investigators also discovered a live pipe bomb in the shooter's van. One of the

shooters was linked to the group Black Hebrew Israelites, widely considered to be a hate group. The city has declined to call the shooting in anti-Semitic hate crime, but one of the shooters did publish anti-Semitic posts on social media. In just the last year, anti-Semitic hate crimes in nearby New York City have gone up by 22 percent. The Brits are going to the polls today, and its stake is the fate of Brexit and whether Britain really will leave the European Union. Who is the next Prime Minister, depends on which party, Labor or Conservative, gets more seats. Current Prime Minister Boris Johnson is running on the slogan of Get Brexit Done. Labor leader, Jeremy Corpard, Corbin, meanwhile, has been accused of anti-Semitism. A top British rabbi, writing in the Times of London, accused the Labor Party last month of having an anti-Semitic problem, writing, it is a failure of culture. It is a failure of leadership. A new poison, sanctioned from the top, has taken root in the Labor Party.

Time Magazine has selected its person of the year, Greta Tunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist who made a splash at the United Nations this year and landed big media hits after traveling across the Atlantic Ocean on a solar-powered boat. She then scolded public officials at the UN for not doing enough to fight climate change. This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. Yet I'm one of the lucky ones. Tunberg is the youngest person ever to be named Time Person of the Year.

Next up, we'll feature Daniel's interview with Representative Jody Heiss about impeachment and more. Americans have almost entirely forgotten their history. That's right. And if we want to keep our republic, this needs a change. I'm Jared Stepman. And I'm Fred Lucas. We host The Right Side of History, a podcast dedicated to restoring informed patriotism and busting the negative narratives about America's past. Hollywood, the media, and academia have failed a generation. We're here to set the record straight on the ideas and people who've made this country great.

Subscribe to the Right Side of History on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Stitcher today. I'm joined now by Congressman Jody Heise. He represents Georgia's 10th Congressional District. He sits on the Oversight and Reform Committee and is a member. of the House Freedom Caucus, and notably he is host of the Freedom Caucus podcast. Thanks for your time, Congressman. Great to be here with you. Thanks for having me. So this week we got the long-awaited Inspector General report about the origins of the FBI's surveillance on the Trump campaign and how that came about. The report says there was no direct

evidence of political bias on the FBI's part, just a ton of incompetence, lots of errors and mistakes and omissions in their applications to the FISA court to get their warrant. Based on your reading of the facts, what do you make of that conclusion? Yeah, I would disagree with that conclusion. You don't have to go very far to see that this was much more than incompetence. There was an effort to go after the president. And fortunately, we have another investigation going on with the Attorney General Barr in Durham. And, of course, they immediately came out themselves challenging those conclusions.

And their investigation is much broader, much deeper. They have much more information to draw from. And it was as though they were responding with an not so fast here. We have more information. We've got the goods. We know that there was indeed an attempt out of bias to destroy the president and to go after him. And I think that's going to come out when their investigation concludes.

But I think, you know, the report itself was fine. I do disagree with some of the conclusions. But this ought to send chills down the spine of every American. When you think that the FBI literally was weaponized to spy on American citizens, that is a chilling reality that took place. And we have got to get to the bottom of the. this. And I think at the end of the day, particularly when Barr's investigation is over, we will get to the bottom of this. Yeah, one of the big questions that I had looking over this is, you know, if the FBI

thought that Russia was trying to bait the Trump campaign and they wanted to stop that, why not just talk to the Trump campaign and say, hey, they're trying to bait you. You need to watch out. Instead, they launch a secret surveillance investigation. Yeah, and the reason they were launching a secret investigation, in my opinion, is because it was the DNC and Hillary Clinton that was paying for this thing. I mean, the whole, the false dossier is it all gets started to begin with is it is, you start connecting the dots of this thing and you see that it is very broad, it's very deep, deep state, if you will, heavily involved in this whole process.

and the president really was a victim in this, and it is revealed, exposed, I believe, even in what Horowitz has come out with, to this point that, yes, there was the whole FISA warrant, at least 17 major, significant errors and omissions involved in putting together a false document in order to get a FISA warrant thereby to begin spying on the president and his campaign. That is a frightful reality that took place in the United States, and behind it all is being funded by Democrats and high-ranking individuals within the Democratic Party. And so I think when this comes out further with the investigation that Barr is doing, we're going to see some extremely disturbing realities and some facts when that report comes out. Yeah, William Barr, the Attorney General, says he's going to take – who wants to take steps to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen. again. And that must be the big concern, right? Because there already was protocol in place.

That's right. So what do you do? Well, what you do is you make people pay who have broken the law and have broken the trust of the American people, individuals who have been involved in this. You know, one of the biggest questions I have back home in the 10th District of Georgia is when are heads going to roll over all this corruption? people want to know, people want justice, people want to believe that lady justice is still blindfolded, that it does not matter if you have a D in front of your name or not, that if you break the law, if you violate the trust of the American people in this deep kind of way that apparently has taken place here, that there are going to be consequences. And you're not going to be protected or find cover just because you have a D in front of your name in this instance.

And so, yeah, I think William Barr is coming out with the statement already. He's setting the pathway. He's setting the standard that heads are going to roll. And that's how you prevent this type of thing from happening in the future. Well, this week House Democrats have put forward two articles of impeachment against President Trump. And they're saying that they have to impeach him now because he clearly cheated in the first election. And the second one is coming up. So you've got to prevent that from happening.

What's your response? Yeah, I mean, they were doing this before he ever even took office. By the time as a candidate, the day after he was inaugurated, they were talking about impeaching him. And it's stunning to me that they were talking about impeachment before the phone call with the Ukrainian president ever even took place. In fact, Nancy Pelosi announced that they were going to proceed with impeachment before the facts ever even came out on this thing. This has been a Democratic Party from day one of this administration that has aggressively been looking for haystacks anywhere they can find it in hopes that there's a needle somewhere in the haystack. And they've just been going from one issue to another to another to another trying to find anything that they can thereby come up and say, hey, look what we found. Now we can impeach the president and justify it.

And, you know, with these two articles that they've come up with, they're extremely vague. They still have not declared what the president did. That was an abuse of power. What did he do that obstructed Congress? It's all vague, lame attempts to create something out of nothing. The only thing the Democrats do not have in this entire impeachment inquiry is evidence. And that's a pretty big deal. When you're talking about impeaching the president, you need evidence of crimes, treason,

bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors. And there is zero evidence of any of that. What do you make of the process that's played out and what Republicans have or haven't been able to do? It's been the most unfair thing I've ever seen in my life. Never would I have dreamed that this type of process would actually take place in the United States of America. We have not been given a voice. We've not been able as a minority party. We have not been allowed to subpoena people.

There have been times that Adam Schiff literally stopped the witnesses from answering questions that were coming from Republicans because he was uncomfortable with where those questions may lead. The president has not been able to defend himself. We've not been able to call any witnesses that we wanted to talk with. By House rules, the minority is supposed to be given a minority hearing. To this day, we still have not been granted a hearing where we are able to subpoena people and have our own questioning of individuals. That has not taken place. I mean, the whole thing has been an absolute sham.

While we were meeting in the basement of the Capitol with the depositions that Adam Schiff was leading, we were not allowed to talk to the media, but they continually lived. leaked specific phrases from the witnesses that they were allowed to bring forth. Again, we were not allowed to have any witnesses we wanted. They only brought witnesses that they thought would bring damaging reports and testimony against the president. And then they leaked certain things to the press that they wanted to. If we leaked anything, we would be in trouble. So it's absolutely indescribable how unjust, how partisan, how enormous,

of a hoax this whole thing has been. It has consisted of anything but fairness and justice. Adam Schiff released a report about his committee's impeachment investigation. Why do you think he hasn't testified yet? He needs to. He absolutely needs to. He is the architect behind this whole sham. He is the one that put it together. And hopefully he will be required to provide testimony under oath if this goes on to the Senate. Hopefully his day of reckoning will come. But, you know, just for an example, when all of this started, it was Adam Schiff who basically was saying the whistleblower was, you would think the whistleblower was the most important person in the world at that time. And we have information. We have found a needle, so to speak,

and Adam Schiff was touting, and Nancy Pelosi, this whistleblower was going to testify in the very near future. Then it became known that Adam Schiff and his staff and or his staff had been coordinating with the whistleblower on this whole thing. In fact, the whistleblower was not even a whistleblower until after he or she met with Schiff and his staff and they convinced that individual to come forward as a whistleblower. Once that information became known, then all of a sudden Adam Schiff did not want that whistleblower to testify, and he started going to individuals who, again, here's safe, second, third, fourth-hand information. Many of the witnesses who came forward had zero information whatsoever.

No fact witnesses have been brought forth from this whole thing. You know, and you and I, you cannot get a speeding ticket on second-hand information. But this whole process has been, we're going to impeach. the president on he said, she said that they heard someone thought this, that, and it is just, it is absolute insanity what the Democrats are dragging the American people through. Are you concerned that this could create a cry wolf effect where, you know, you impeached the president, you know, we impeached in the 90s, now we're impeaching President Trump. Eventually the American people might just think, oh, impeachment, that's a partisan thing.

Well, that's certainly what it is now. and that is part of the risk that we are facing with impeachment. Impeachment is supposed to be for serious high crimes and misdemeanors, and there is none of that involved here. In fact, already Democrats are saying that if this impeachment fails, they are going to turn around and impeach him again. And it just goes back to their attempt to impeach him the day after he was inaugurated, before he had ever had an opportunity to do anything wrong.

They were wanting. And listen, just because you don't like a president, that's fine. But that is not an impeachable offense. The Democrats here are trying to impeach someone. They don't like and they don't like his policies. They are fearful he is going to be reelected. And so they're only out is to try to impeach him. And they're doing anything they can.

So, yeah, I think this sets an extremely dangerous precedent for the whole impeachment process for future administrations. Well, shifting to something that Congress has more traditionally focused on and that's spending. It is December, which means you and your colleagues are going to be voting on a bunch of spending measures, or depending how it shakes out, one big spending measure, we'll see. So House Democrats are packing these bills with lots of progressive items that I would imagine are just going to get taken out in the Senate.

Do you think they're going to be successful? Yeah, I hope they will. And you say there's going to be. a bunch of spending measures, whether it's a bunch of measures or one big measure, what we do know it's a bunch of spending and a lot, a bunch of unnecessary spending. And yeah, hopefully the, the Senate will help us get rid of a lot of the stuff. But look, this is another example of the lack of ability, in fact, the absolute inability of the Democrats to legislate and to lead. We have had spending issues. We have known for the entire year.

that the government was going to run out of money on the 20th. They did nothing all year long. They were focused on impeachment. Same is true with funding our military. And we have a host of other issues that lowering drug prices, for example, USMCA, all these things all year long, the Democrats have done absolutely nothing. And when the president tags them as the do nothing Dems, he has spot on. They have done absolutely nothing.

Now we come to the end of the year, and we have spending measures that need to be passed. We have funding the military that needs to be passed, and there is no telling what kind of garbage is going to be placed in those spending bills. But again, we are going to be coming back right before Christmas, having battles when everyone's wanting to be home with their families for Christmas. And the Democrats are hopeful that during that pressure that people will cave and just pass whatever they put on the table. And I can tell you there's a bunch of us who that is not going to be enough. We're going to be fighting tooth and nail to limit the scope, the size and scope and spending of government. Well, we tend to see more and more short-term continuing resolution

bills instead of these year-long appropriations bills. And that's become really a pattern in the last five, ten years in Congress. How did we get there? And what's like the problem in Congress that's keeping Congress from actually passing long-term bills? Well, you've got appropriations. who, I mean, they have struggled. Everything has become so partisan. We are living in an environment where partisanship is the rule of the day. And so it becomes increasingly difficult to find agreement on these massive spending bills when it's so intensely charged with partisan politics.

and that becomes even more of an issue in the Senate. But that is driving all of this. And so when it becomes as partisan as it is absent the best interest of the United States, but more the best interest of our partisan party politics, then what gets put into these bills is all sorts of measures that are advancing political agendas rather than advancing that, which is in the best interest of the United States as a whole. And so you have, for example, in an NDAA bill, spending bill, to fund our military.

We now have in a military funding bill a measure that's going to give parental leave and all this sort of stuff to every federal employee. Right. So that's partisan. If we're going to deal with a military spending bill, then let's do. deal with just military issues. But that's what happens when everything becomes a partisan party driven. All these spending measures start getting heaped with partisan party agenda, political agenda measures that are placed in them. And that becomes poison pills for a number of people and shuts the process down. Would you say that House leadership has too much control over the

legislative process that the committees that you're on need to have more power? Absolutely. Yeah. And that's where a lot of the problem is as well. Leadership has, you know, we have committees that are assigned the responsibility to do different things, whatever was within the jurisdiction of XYZ committee. And those committees need to be given the authority to do their work and to submit that work to the Congress as a whole for a vote. Instead, leadership more often than not dictates what is going to be done even within committee work. And so, yeah, that in itself becomes a very partisan issue because leadership of whatever party is in control too often is dictating everything that's taking place even in committee work. All right. Well, we'll see what

happens with the spending bills and, of course, impeachment and everything else. Congressman Jody Heiss, I want to plug your podcast one more time because our listeners should check it out. It's the Freedom Caucus podcast. Congressman Jody Heist, thank you for your time. Well, thank you. Let me just say the Freedom Caucus podcast is all about bringing information inside baseball information to people as to what's happening. The best way to find it, I think find us on Facebook, Facebook.com, slash Freedom Caucus, and at Twitter, simply at Freedom Caucus. Follow us, subscribe at iTunes or SoundCloud. We encourage people to do that.

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