Transcription
Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman and welcome Attorney General Bond. You've got the best lawyer's job in America because your mission is justice and your clients are the American people.
But to promote justice for the people, you've got to listen to the victims like the women seated behind you today. Those are just some of the hundreds of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's global sex trafficking ring who are demanding that the truth be told, and are demanding accountability for the abusers who trafficked and raped them. You still haven't met with these survivors. So with their permission, let me introduce to you the survivors and late survivors' family members who are present today. There's Teresa Helm, there's Jess Michaels, Laura Bloom McGee, Danny Benski, Liz Stein, Marina Lacerda, Skye and Amanda Roberts, who are the family of the late Virginia Giuffre, Charlene Richard, and Lisa Phillips.
Now, you're not showing a lot of interest in the victims, Madam Attorney General. Whether it's Epstein's human trafficking ring or the homicidal governmental violence against citizens in Minneapolis, as Attorney General, you're siding with the perpetrators and you're ignoring the perpetrators. And you know that there are actual memos of victim statements in there. And you also took down the Department of Justice's prosecution memo from 2019. So it's clearly not all duplicative, but even if it were, why not release it? Just release all the duplicative stuff.
In the half you did produce, you redacted the names of abusers, enablers, accomplices, and co-conspirators, apparently to spare them embarrassment and disgrace, which is the exact opposite of what the law ordered you to do. Even worse, you shockingly failed to redact many of the victims' names, which is what you were ordered to do by Congress. Some of the victims had come forward publicly, but many had not. Many had kept their torment private, even from family and friends. But you published their names, their identities, their images on thousands of pages for the world to see. So you ignored the law and even with over 100,000 employees at your disposal, you acted with some mixture of staggering incompetence, cold indifference, and jaded cruelty towards more than 1,000 victims raped, abused, and trafficked. This performance screams cover-up.
Convicted sex trafficker and groomer Ghislaine Maxwell opened the gates of hell to Virginia Giuffre and hundreds of other victims, as Virginia recorded in her remarkable book, Nobody's Girl. But when Maxwell was subpoenaed to come testify before Congress, you and Todd Blanche quickly moved her from a higher security prison to a minimum security camp in Texas where she's enjoyed five-star treatment, including catered meals, private gym time, and access to a therapy puppy. All because Todd Blanche, who's utterly failed to investigate the monstrous crimes of Epstein and Maxwell's co-conspirators, spent nine hours with Maxwell and satisfied himself that she would have nothing untoward to say about Donald Trump, which is your only real interest in the matter based on institutional performance.
But abandoning victims and coddling perpetrators is what you do best. When the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the brutal killing in Minneapolis of Renee Green, a poet and 37-year-old mother of three by Trump's masked paramilitary ICE agents, you shut it down. You claim you're investigating the cold-blooded murder of Alex Preddy, an ICU nurse at the VA, but how can we trust the administration when the president and Kristi Noem call Preddy a domestic terrorist? And Stephen Miller called him a would-be assassin. Not only do you refuse to share evidence with the state and local investigators and prosecutors in Minnesota, you have blocked their access to the crime scene and the evidence. How are you seeking justice for Marimar Martinez, the Montessori school teacher in Chicago who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent, who bragged about it on text? Or the family of Keith Porter, a father of two shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent in LA. Or the family of Silverio Villas Gonzalez shot and killed in Illinois minutes after he dropped his kids off at school. There's no sign of any movement at the Department of Justice. You even launched a criminal investigation into Renee Green's grieving widow. How sick is that?
But it's even worse. You've turned the people's Department of Justice into Trump's instrument of revenge. Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time. He tells you to go after James Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, and Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve Board, and members of Congress like Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Alyssa Slotkin, Chrissy Houlihan, Jason Crowe, Chris Deluzio, and Maggie Goodlander, to name a few. And you snap to it. You replace real prosecutors with counterfeit stooges who robotically do the president's bidding. Nothing in American history comes close to this complete corruption of the justice dysfunction and contamination of federal law enforcement.
And the good news is many serious lawyers at DOJ, including some of your own original employees, have refused your lawless orders. Danielle Sassoon, your original pick for acting U.S. Attorney who clerked for Justice Scalia, U.S. Attorney says soon refused to participate in this blatantly corrupt scheme. Her top assistant, Hagan Scotton, an Iraqi war vet and two-time Bronze Star recipient who clerked for Chief Justice Roberts and then Judge Kavanaugh, promptly resigned, too, writing to your office, quote, "I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to file your motion, but it was never going to be me."
You and the president nominated Eric Siebert, a 15-year career prosecutor, to be your U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. But after five months of investigating Laetitia James and James Comey, he found no evidence to justify criminal charges. So you forced him out. You replaced him with Lindsay Halligan, Trump's personal lawyer from the Mar-a-Lago documents case who had zero prosecutorial experience and no qualifications. And then you were humiliated when a federal judge found that this corrupt appointment was blatantly unlawful and threw out Halligan's indictments entirely.
And grand juries of American citizens have repeatedly rejected your vendettas and baseless indictments brought by the hacks left at DOJ. Now, with two different grand juries in Virginia voting down indictments against Letitia James in a single week. And just yesterday, another grand jury shut down your vendetta factory by rejecting indictments against the six members of Congress who had spoken out to remind all service members that they have a duty to refuse illegal orders. You tried to get a grand jury to indict six members of Congress who are veterans of our armed forces on charges of seditious conspiracy simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. I hope you will heed the wisdom and the constitutional patriotism of those grand jurors and not try it again by doubling down on that humiliation.
As your best lawyers are sacked for having participated in the January 6th case or just flee for the exits now, your new lawyers keep lying in court. In dozens of cases, they've been excoriated for lying to federal judges. Chief Judge Boesberg, right here in D.C., suggested your Department of Justice perpetrated a fraud on the court. Other judges found your statements to be, quote, "inexplicably misleading," "patently incredible," "totally inconsistent," and "so disingenuous that the court is left with little confidence that the government can be trusted to tell the truth about anything."
Now, as a ranking member, I asked the chairman to add a few extra rounds of questions today because we each have five hours of questions, not five minutes, but we're stuck with five minutes. That's clearly insufficient to give voice to America's victims and survivors, and to demand answers about all the corruption and cover-ups that we see at DOJ right now. We've got just one round, so we ask you politely but firmly, Madam Attorney General. Please do not waste one second of our precious time by evading questions, by changing the subject, or engaging in personal attacks against members of Congress. We saw your performance in the Senate, and we're not going to accept that. This isn't a game. In the Senate, you brought something with you called a burn book, a binder of smears to attack members personally for doing the people's work of oversight. Please set the burn book aside and answer our questions. And when you hear us reclaim our time, that means it's time for you to stop speaking. We only have five minutes. So when we reclaim our time, that means you stop. And if you don't, we will ask the chair to stop the clock and let you go on his time.
The quality of justice in America depends on the character of our government. Please do your job and bring the Department of Justice back from the brink. The survivors seated behind you and the American people watching everywhere deserve a Department of Justice worthy of its name. I yield back, Mr. Chair.