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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I will close in the calmest possible way that I can. For more than 3 1/2 years, I have tried to get cooperation from the minority. For more than 3 years, I have tried to get the cooperation of the minority, and I haven't gotten it.
I get it on things which don't lead to the President or to a Cabinet officer or to an administrative branch. This leads to an administrative branch under the Secretary of the Treasury.
When the minority says that if you would just refer this back and we just have an opinion, quite frankly, they produced these opinions. They sought out 30 people to rubberstamp the same basic opinion again and again, many of whom provided nothing other than we agree. I didn't say anything about that during debate. That is their right.
The ranking member says if we will just release those 39 documents--if he wants to destroy this investigation, he can release them. If he wants to show a roadmap, he can release them. These are not documents that are exclusive. They are documents that either one of us could choose to release.
Good practice is, as we continue investigating--and the questions and the answers from witnesses not be in their entirety released to create a roadmap, that is practice of good counsel, and the ranking member himself said he would have done the same thing in some cases.
We only learned, a matter of days ago, that people working in the office of the President had withheld, until a court ordered them to release the documents, showing that they invented, out of thin air, a false narrative as to what happened at Benghazi and why, asserting a video that, in fact, was not supported by the facts; and for a long time, since September 11, 2012, we had been misled.
In an ongoing investigation, one in which they would have you believe that Lois Lerner would have testified if she just had a week more, they have had months to see if they could get Lois Lerner back to testify. Of course, they can't. She never intended to testify.
This has all been a game of catch me if you can; I say I will, I say I won't.
Our evidence, as the ranking member said, does not lead to the Oval Office. At this point, it leads to Lois Lerner. At this point, Lois Lerner attempted to assert the President's position as to Citizens United, using her power to stop these 501(c)(4)'s from their free speech.
At this point, the indication is that Lois Lerner says one thing to the Justice Department and a different thing to Congress.
So as we consider the simple issue of did she waive her rights or not and get it, as the gentleman from Vermont suggested, before a judge, that is all that is before us today. And the idea that we would release, in their entirety, those thousands of pages in order to give a road map to those yet to be deposed is wrong and inappropriate, and the gentleman knows it or he would have released them himself, which he has every right to do. But it would be irresponsible.
So I ask people to vote for contempt because it takes to an impartial Federal judge that question, a question already decided by our committee that had a vote, a question that will be voted the same way by the ranking member no matter how many experts are listened to. Go ahead and have the vote. Send it to a judge. Let a judge decide.
In the meantime, let's continue with the investigations as to the IRS' targeting of conservative groups, something that has been documented to have been inappropriate if you were conservative and not so much if you were moderate or liberal.
We have an individual who is at the center of it all. I have never alleged that it goes to the President. I have said that the Tea Party would clearly and fairly be described as enemies of or adverse to the President's policies, and I think that is pretty comfortable to understand. And they were targeted by somebody who politics with the President and who, quite frankly, was trying to overturn the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United in support of the President's position using her power.
And with that, I urge support and yield back the balance of my time.
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