U.S. Senate Erupts As Grassley And Whitehouse Battle Over Todd Blanche — WORLD NEWS — US NEWS

[0:00] I'm in this seat this morning because Illinois Senator Durbin was a close friend of Illinois [0:12] Senator Obama and then U.S. President Obama and today in a star-studded celebration the [0:22] Obama Presidential Library is going to open and Senator Durbin very very much wanted to be there. [0:30] I think he is exactly where he should be and that leaves me to fill in for him today. [0:39] I'd like to take my time this morning to suggest that combining our oversight hearing of the [0:49] Department of Justice with the nominations hearing for Acting Attorney General Blanche [0:59] would be a grave mistake for the committee. I don't believe we did that with Attorney [1:07] General Garland and I think the record of the Department of Justice under Todd Blanche lends itself [1:18] to very vigorous oversight. Oversight which we have been denied because when we ask questions [1:29] we get scripted litanies of insult and quarrel rather than actual answers to our questions. [1:36] When we ask for documents and records in writing we get nothing. We are reduced to filing FOIA requests [1:46] that are then not even complied with as FOIA requests. So the oversight function of this committee [1:57] is really I think being systematically disabled. That's particularly significant when you have Attorney General [2:04] Bondi saying that it was Todd Blanche who was responsible for the Epstein files disaster. The releases [2:16] of private information and images of victims. The cover-up of documents that named Donald Trump and just the general [2:28] incompetence of the whole wretched mess. I don't think that it would be a good idea for this committee to [2:39] be complicit in covering up the cover-up of the Epstein files. Move on to the slush fund which a great [2:50] number of my Republican colleagues have expressed real reservations about with its attachment of a tax [2:58] amnesty deal for Trump, the Trump family and the Trump businesses. There are very legitimate questions [3:07] to be asked about that including has that cockamamie idea really been withdrawn or is it just being hidden [3:17] briefly so it can resurface in some other fashion. We should be looking into this as a committee. It's [3:26] important stuff and even if we shirk our duties at looking into all of this it appears that a Florida [3:35] court is going to be looking into all of this and I think it's a bad look for the committee to be turning [3:41] a blind eye to what went into the slush fund deal and the tax amnesty deal and then discover through a [3:50] court proceeding in Florida all the stuff that we failed to look at. It's hard to be taken seriously [3:58] if we have failed to do our own duty and then the court proceedings reveal the mischief. I will say that [4:07] I've looked. I have never ever heard of senior officials of the Department of Justice [4:20] being called before a court with respect to a fraud upon the court. Look up fraud upon a court. It's a [4:29] pretty serious charge. This one was brought raised I guess I should say by 36 three dozen retired federal [4:37] judges some very very respected ones some very very conservative ones and the judge in the proceeding [4:45] in Florida out of which the slush fund settlement emerged reopened the case to have a look. She asked for [4:57] responses. She suggested that the DOJ might have violated its own policies in the settlement. She [5:05] suggested that there was an IRS defense memo out there that would be relevant to the proceedings. [5:13] The violation of DOJ policies would obviously be a matter for DOJ to answer. The IRS client memo would [5:22] obviously be something for DOJ to answer. She also questioned whether there was collusion. It takes two to [5:31] collude. It would be a collusion between the Department of Justice lawyers and Trump's private lawyers. [5:39] So there's another reason for the Department of Justice to have responded. What happened last Friday? [5:46] No response from the Department of Justice. First ever accusation of senior level Department of Justice [5:52] people of fraud upon the court with an invitation to rebut the allegations, an invitation specific [6:00] to Department of Justice conduct and they duck. So that is going to continue. The three dozen judges [6:11] have their answer this Friday and then the court will go forward. I will contend that we don't look like [6:16] much if that information is being developed in a federal courtroom and we haven't been allowed to ask [6:22] questions and indeed our oversight has been collapsed into a confirmation hearing. I have never seen the [6:29] Department of Justice as badly run as this one. I've never seen fraud upon the court allegations. I've [6:37] never seen so many suggestions of contempt. I've never seen so many no true bills. I've never seen so [6:42] many cases thrown out. I've never seen so many accusations that department arguments were false, [6:48] were pretextual, were designed to fool rather than inform the court. And we see that over and over [6:54] again from judges appointed by every president. It is now at the point where the Department of Justice [7:00] and the U.S. government have lost their presumption of regularity in federal court proceedings. All of [7:08] this matters. All of this is something to which this committee should be paying attention. And with respect to [7:17] what our chairman has said about the norms of the committee, well, one norm is that U.S. attorneys come through this [7:24] committee after a process of consultation before they get to run U.S. attorney's office. Over and over [7:35] again, we see these slippery deals where acting U.S. attorneys are appointed and then the first assistant [7:45] is fired. And when the time runs out on the acting U.S. attorney, they slip back into the first attorney [7:53] position and leave a vacancy. It's an obvious scam to get around this committee's norms. And we have [8:03] put up with this. It didn't happen once. It didn't happen twice. It has happened over and over and over [8:09] and over again. And on top of that, we've seen U.S. attorneys called out for misconduct over and over and [8:17] over again. None of this is normal. None of this is normal. And the fact that this committee won't look into [8:25] it, I think, is a shame. And I think if we try to be complicit in failing in our duty to look into this [8:33] by combining the Blanche nomination hearing with the Department of Justice oversight hearing, we will [8:39] have made a very, very grave mistake. Thank you, Chairman. I'm only going to respond to the process [8:47] question you brought up, not the other issues you brought up. But I'd like to remind you that you [8:53] mentioned Garland as attorney general. There were eight months between his nomination and the first [9:00] hearing. You got to realize that there's only four weeks we meet in July. There's two weeks we meet [9:10] in September. That's six weeks between now and the election. You got to realize, and I'm not running [9:19] the Senate, so I don't determine the calendar of the Senate. But we basically only have three days a week. [9:27] So that's 18 days between now and the election. And that's why we have to combine the oversight [9:37] with the others. And we're going to accommodate it by giving members on your side all the time you need [9:43] to ask questions. We're negotiating that now. And we'll try to accommodate you as much as we can. [9:50] But with only 18 days, you can see that we can't have eight months between the nomination and the [9:58] confirmation or the oversight hearing. Well, I know that the chairman is sympathetic to the oversight [10:08] problems that we face here and the degree to which this department's behavior is exceptional. And I look [10:16] forward to having those hearings go forward in a way that reflects the chairman's consistent desires [10:23] for real oversight. And I hope that the proceedings reflect that. You know, when I came to the United [10:29] States Senate, we started at 10 o'clock on Monday morning and we went till four on Friday. Now, [10:35] it seems to me both Republicans and Democrats like a three day work week. There's plenty of problems for [10:42] or there's plenty of work for an individual senator to do seven days a week if they want to work seven [10:49] days a week. But you can't solve this country's problems if you don't get a hundred of us together [10:55] at one time. And that's whether you got a Democrat majority or Republican majority, that's the way it's [11:02] been. We got to put in more time here in Washington DC meeting if you want to do what you want to do. [11:09] No objection to those thoughts.