State of the Union: Interview With Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH)

Interview

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Thank you. Happy Father's Day to you and to my father, Ray, 93.

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Yes, very good.

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Well, China is definitely feeling the heat. I mean, we're -- this is not -- in addition to the spy balloon that the whole world watched go across the United States, the issue of the allegations of spying facilities in Cuba, you also have the police stations that have been identified by the administration that they're raiding.

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In the United States.

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They're spying on Chinese American citizens.

You also have Kevin McCarthy having established in the House on a bipartisan basis a China Committee to look just at the issue of China and their threats to the United States. If you recall, the first meeting that Blinken had with the Chinese counterparts in Alaska, they actually chastised him.

They came out full bore criticizing the United States. I think you're going to see a much more tempered response from China at this point because they're feeling the heat,. They understand that the American public see China now as a threat. And the administration, I think, is turning up the heat.

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Well, it's certainly of grave concern.

So, the chair and ranking of both the House Intel and Senate Intel have seen some of the documents, both from the Biden cache and the Trump documents itself. And I can tell you that, from having looked at both of those documents, I have grave concern about both of those type of documents being out in an unsecured place.

Both of them included details of national security issues that should not have been outside of a controlled environment.

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Right.

Well, I have a great deal of respect for Bill Barr, but I have to correct something that he said. My committee actually brought in the archivists, and we had them testify as to what was occurring in the -- with the issue of the Trump documents. We have released the transcript.

And, actually, the Archives was unaware that they had classified documents. The first cache of documents that were delivered to the Archives was the first time that they became aware that there were classified documents involved. They were pursuing just presidential records.

And then, within four months of Trump giving, surrendering to them classified documents, when they opened the boxes and were surprised that even had classified documents, within four months, Mar-a-Lago was raided. So it wasn't this entire time, but it certainly was an unacceptable time.

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Well, and, again, this is a legal process that is going to have to go forward.

What my committee is doing on a bipartisan basis is looking at, how did this occur? What laws need to be changed? Well, we heard from the archivist that every administration since Reagan has delivered to them documents that included classified and unclassified documents mixed.

And 80 members of Congress have sent documents to libraries where the libraries had to subsequently get in touch with them and say, we found classified documents, including Senator Muskie, who had 98 classified documents. This is a systemic problem.

Now, with respect to this litigation, it's going to go forward. And I'm certainly not going to defend the behavior that is listed in that complaint. But they're going to have to prove it. And it's a legal process that's going to have to go forward.

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So this is very troubling, because -- and this is going to be troubling for you, especially as you read that the Durham report, after the years of which there were these accusations of Trump-Russia collusion, in that these allegations were absolutely false.

What's concerning here is not that a campaign would make those accusations. The Clinton campaign did opposition research or the Clinton campaign made these accusations. It's when it comes to you, as the government, speaking. When the government opens an investigation over uncorroborated information that they take directly from a political campaign and they make it a government investigation -- I mean, this was not just the initial investigation itself. Then it resulted in the special prosecutor. Every investigation that has occurred, including now the Durham report, make -- is -- conclusively states that this was a result of people who had political bias who undertook an investigation based upon total Clinton campaign-funded research that was uncorroborated and turned out to be even untrue.

And that's where you have to be concerned. When your government's lying to you, when your government is telling you that something has happened that has not happened, that's when our committee has to be involved, and that's when we have to look at what happened here. How do we make certain this doesn't happen again? How do we make certain that we don't have people with a political bias entering into political campaigns and using the authority of the government to have major media and the government take actions that are not based on truth?

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Sure.

So what you're talking about is the portion of the Durham report that relates to the FISA -- the Foreign Surveillance Act, and the issue of the court itself...

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... and the whole application process, where the FBI lied to the FISA court to get...

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What we have found is that there are problems in the entire process with the FISA courts in which people are not held accountable.

And it's across the board that there is in bipartisan, bicameral that people believe that this needs to be changed. Now, Durham didn't say, I don't recommend any changes, meaning there are no changes that need to be made. He said in the document that he delivered...

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Right. He said, in the document he delivered, he didn't think it was appropriate to include those.

He did, however -- and I have spoken to him directly -- agree that he would give us his insight as to what changes he thinks need to be made, and that's the work that our community is doing -- our committee is doing. We're pulling him in to our committee to say, OK, now that we have seen that there were abuses, that this was wrong, and that there are problems with FISA itself, what are the recommendations that you think we should pursue?

Here are some of the things we're looking at. What do you think of these?

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Thank you.

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