Hearing of the House Judicial Committee - Opening Statement of Rep. Goodlatte, Hearing on FBI Oversight Hearing

Hearing

Welcome, Director Comey, to your fourth appearance before the House Judiciary Committee since your confirmation as the seventh Director of the FBI. Needless to say, the past year since our last oversight hearing has been challenging for the FBI on a number of fronts that we hope to review with you today.

I want to begin by commending the men and women of the FBI, the NYPD and the New Jersey police departments, for their swift action in identifying and apprehending Ahmad Khan Rahami, whose cold and cowardly acts of terrorism last week injured 29 American citizens.

This was the latest in a string of attacks, stretching back to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and continuing through to the terror attacks in San Bernardino, Orlando, and Minneapolis. They all share one common thread, namely, radical Islam. This Administration, however, including the FBI, has coined this cancer with the euphemism of "countering violent extremism." If the FBI and the rest of our national security apparatus continues its myopia by focusing on ethereal issues of "extremism," their mission to protect the American people will always be one of following up on terrorism's aftermath.

I look forward to hearing from you about how the FBI is working to proactively combat radical Islamic terrorism and put an end to this string of violence.

While terrorism is a malignancy which must be purged, other events at home have called into question the confidence that Americans have historically held in a blind and impartial justice system. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the FBI's investigation into her seemingly criminal conduct is a case in point.

It seems clear that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton committed multiple felonies involving the passing of classified information through her private email server. The FBI, however, declined to refer the case for prosecution on some very questionable bases. This past Friday afternoon, the FBI released additional investigative documents from the Clinton investigation, which demonstrate, among other things, that more than 100 of the emails on Secretary Clinton's private server contained classified information, and that emails required to be preserved under Federal law were in fact destroyed.

Even more alarming, we have recently learned that President Obama used a pseudonym to communicate with Secretary Clinton on her email server. Why is this relevant? As Secretary Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin, exclaimed when informed by the FBI of the existence of an email between her boss and the President, "How is that not classified?" Armed with knowledge of the President's now-known to be false claim that he only learned of Clinton's private email account "the same time everybody else learned it through news reports," did the FBI review why the President was also sending classified information over unsecure means? In effect, this President and the former Secretary of State improperly transmitted communications through non-secure channels, placing our nation's secrets in harm's way.

Secretary Clinton's decision to play fast and loose with our national security concerned not simply her daughter's wedding planning or yoga routines, but instead, quoting you Director Comey, "Seven e-mail chains concern[ed] matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received." Top Secret, Special Access Programs contain some of the most sensitive, secret information maintained by our government. This is a truly remarkable fact -- were anyone of lesser notoriety than Hillary Clinton guilty of doing this, that person would already be in jail.

For Americans unsure what a Special Access Program, or SAP, is, it is the kind of information that a war planner would use to defeat an enemy, or even clandestine intelligence operations. The Wall Street Journal explained that, "A SAP usually refers to a highly covert technology program, often weaponry. Knowledge of these programs is usually restricted to small groups of people on a need-to-know basis."

For those wondering whether this kind of information on an unsecure server is a problem, you need read no further than the Huffington Post which reported, "Hillary Clinton's private email server containing tens of thousands of messages from her tenure as secretary of state was the subject of hacking attempts from China, South Korea and Germany after she stepped down in 2013."

To conclude, let me ask everyone to engage in a thought experiment. One of this Nation's signature accomplishments in the War on Terror was the raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden. That operation, which was conducted by an elite team of U.S. Navy special operators, was, of course, highly classified. Now imagine if you will, that classified information relating to the raid was passed through a non-secure email server, and was accessed by nations or individuals hostile to the United States. Rather than a highly successful covert operation, we might have had a team of dead U.S. servicemen.

Hillary Clinton chose to send and receive Top Secret information over a personal, unsecure computer server housed in her various homes and once reportedly placed in a bathroom closet. These actions, without a doubt, opened these communications to hostile interception by our enemies and those who wish America harm.

These facts, and not the imagined history I have asked you to contemplate, were the basis of the investigation by the FBI, and these are the facts that you Director Comey chose to hold unworthy of a recommendation to prosecute, saying that "no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case." We, as Congress and the American people, are troubled how such gross negligence is not punished, and why there seems to be a different standard for the politically well-connected, particularly if your name is Clinton.

Mr. Director, I look forward to your testimony today.

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