Press Releases

(As prepared for delivery)

Mr. Chairman, I want to start off by sending my well wishes to our own Dr. Murphy. Praying his surgery is a success and that he’s back on this dais in no time, and in the meantime, I’ll be keeping him and his family in my thoughts.

To the topic at hand, you know how I feel about this and for details to emerge from the press last night enrages me. It’s a crime to leak any taxpayer information. It’s the most serious matter that our Committee is entrusted with, and another stain on your work.

Republicans’ sham impeachment inquiry is over, and everyone knows it, including many of the members of your own conference. Right wing pundits and allies alike have agreed, this inquiry is a “dead-end” that is “falling flat,” which has unveiled “zero evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors.”

After months of wasting time and thousands of taxpayer dollars, the Republicans have convened another Executive Session.  Yet again, there is no legislative purpose to any of this. No dots have been connected, nothing new has been unveiled, the Committee still hasn’t been transformed into a law enforcement entity. You haven’t even succeeded in embarrassing the President, only yourselves.

This endeavor has shown just how far this Majority will go in pursuit of political gain by weaponizing the power of this Committee. 

We are in our fourth Executive Session and it must be the final. The Majority has lost the plot and the Committee’s involvement must end.

The incoming affidavits from the whistleblower state the documents were provided to the Committee “as requested by staff of the relevant U.S. Committees.”  My staff certainly did not request these documents, which are largely personal in nature and have nothing to do with the President.  For the life of me, I can’t understand what legislative purpose the Majority was imagining would come from this.

The Majority’s obsession with one private citizen who never held public office is wrong and is not within the long-standing traditions and norms of this Committee. The Committee has wasted countless hours on a fishing expedition going nowhere.  The Majority has reached a dead end.  My colleagues on the other side of the aisle need to recognize this and get back to the work we were elected to do.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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