Opinion| During the House Judiciary Committee’s questioning of Attorney General William Barr, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) used his time as he always does, to engage in deliberative and significant discussion:
Sen. Cruz: You’ve had an extraordinarily successful legal career. You didn’t need to take this job.
You stepped forward and answered the call yet again knowing full well that you would be subject to the kind of slanderous treatment, the Kavanaugh treatment, that we have seen of senators impugning you integrity.
Sen. Cruz, using his position as the last senator to be given the floor, debunks the Democrats entire line of attack against Barr at today’s session.
And that was because of your decision not to release the report piecemeal but rather to release those nineteen pages along with the entire 448 pages produced by the special counsel?
If that is their argument, I have to say that is an exceptionally weak argument, because if you’re hiding something, I’ll tell you right now, you’re doing a very lousy job of doing it.
Because the thing they’re suggesting you hid, you released to congress and to the American people.
So, if anyone wants to know what’s in those 19 pages, that are being so breathlessly, ‘oh Bob Mueller said release those nineteen pages,’ you did!
You did a couple of weeks later but we can read every word of the nineteen pages along with the full report.
Cruz went on to use his time to establish that Mueller had completed a thorough investigation – 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, special staff, 2800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 230 orders for communication records, almost 50 orders authorizing the use of pen registers, 13 requests of foreign governments for evidence, and 500 witness interviews – over a period of 2.5 years.
And now, in the blink of an eye, all mention of Russia has magically disappeared. Replaced, instead, by a faux outrage that Barr sat on 19 pages two weeks longer than Democrats would have liked because he was preparing the entire report for release..
Remind them that Mueller sat on his conclusion that there was no underlying Russian collusion – at least between Team Trump and the Kremlin – more than 19 months ago.
