I’m very grateful for the opportunity to speak about the Recess Appointments Clause today. In the small town of Alpine, Utah, where I live, we speak of little else. It is of great interest to those of us who watch the Supreme Court to see this case get teed up.
general. but second, i know what you have reported, and it s shocking, because essentially you have the president whose principle responsibility in relationship to foreign leaders is to protect the national security of the united states, injecting his own personal campaign into those discussions. and that is yet another example of trying to bring foreign interference into a decision that should be made solely by american citizens. you heard yesterday, as you point out from the intelligence community s inspector general, but he s been barred from sharing any details from the whistleblower complaint. barred by his boss, the director of the the acting director of national intelligence, who s relying on a justice department memorandum. if the complaint is actually what the wall street journal is now reporting, does the administration s rationale for withholding the complaint from your committee, the intelligence committee, hold up? no, it doesn t, at all. i mean, this law is very,
that s right. the whistleblower acted according to the rules. and by the way, the inspector general acted according to the rules. this is a career person, had private practice, but then a justice department prosecutor appointed by the trump administration in a scrupulously is following the letter of the law in the carrying out of his duties. and by the way, that s a humbling experience, to see a civil servant who at great jeopardy, personal jeopardy, and clearly no personal political interest, doing his job. and the whistleblower is in the same category. but the bottom line here is that we ve got to enforce the whistleblower statute. and i m really hopeful that my republican colleagues are going to share with us concern about the upholding of our whistleblower system. congressman peter welch, thanks so much for joining us. thank you. i want to bring in our senior
we are not too early in the process, to repeat again, to be very, very alarmed and in fact horrified that multiple outlets have now reported and confirmed that the president of the united states reached out to a foreign power for aid in winning an election next year. strategically, preet, what is the house intelligence committee need to do to try to get their hands on this whistleblower complaint? so i think adam schiff, as any member of congress, and we ve seen this for the last couple of years, also, is a little bit of a disadvantage, because this president, with his counsel and the department of justice have taken the position basically on most things that they re not going to be transparent, even when they say there s nothing to see here, they re like, there s nothing to see here, but you also can t see it. it s a little bit difficult. what i do think bodes well for how adam schiff is conducting himself is, i think he s been strategically smart to this point. the only reason we
but from your background, do you believe that he should have been able to answer this, rather than say, i still don t know. i think yes is the answer, simply. what he s doing is relying on what he says is a justice department memorandum from the office of legal counsel that says, he doesn t have to answer questions of that sort. he can essentially rely on past practice to say, this is confidential, i m not o going to answer it. that memorandum really doesn t say this. it says, this is in the context of executive privilege and has to be asserted as such. in june we asked you about this and said, i m not going to answer it until the president makes a decision. then they write him a letter saying, you re coming up october 18th to testify. please get an answer from the president. he doesn t get an answer from the president and he defaults to the memorandum and i am not going to take the chance of ruining the possibility of his assertion of executive privilege, he, the president. and i do