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Randal Howard Paul, a Republican United States Senator from Kentucky, read aloud the name of the alleged whistleblower who first raised alarms about President Donald Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine. And most Republicans didn’t seem to care.
After being denied by Chief Justice John Roberts last week, Paul used a period reserved for senators’ impeachment speeches to read aloud the name of an intelligence community official alleged to be the whistleblower.
“They made a big mistake not allowing my question. My question did not talk about anybody who is a whistleblower, my question did not accuse anybody of being whistleblower, it did not make a statement believing that someone was a whistleblower. I simply named two people’s names because I think it’s very important to know what happened,” Paul said on the floor.
The Kentucky Republican’s comment on the Senate floor was met with shrugs by most Senate Republicans.
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The trial proceedings Feb 3 and Feb 4 floor time was reserved for senators who wanted to deliver speeches on the Senate floor about the impeachment process and how they plan to vote.
Full Transcript
Rand Paul:
The great irony of the last several weeks in the impeachment trial is that the Democrats accused the president of using his governmental office to go after his political opponent. The irony is they then used the impeachment process to go after their political opponent. In fact, as you look at the way it unfolded, they admitted as much. As the impeachment proceedings unfolded, they said, “We didn’t have time for witnesses. We had to get it done before Christmas, because we wanted it done and ready to go for the election. We had to get it done. The entire process needed to be completed before the election.” They didn’t have time for the process, they didn’t have time for due process, they didn’t have time for the president to call his own witnesses, or cross examine their witnesses. The great irony is they did exactly what they accused the president of. They use the government, and the government’s process, to go after their political opponent.
What is the evidence that is partisan? They didn’t convince one Republican. Not one elected Republican decided that any of their arguments were valid, or that the president should be impeached. They made it into a sham, they made it into a political process because they didn’t like the results of the election. When did this start? Did the impeachment start with a phone call to the Ukrainian president? No, the impeachment and the attacks on the president started six months before he was elected. We had something truly devastating to our Republic happen. We had for the first time in our history, a secret court decided to investigate a campaign. At the time, when those of us who criticized this secret court for spying on the Trump campaign, they said, “Oh, it’s just a conspiracy theory. None of this is happening. There is no, there, there.”
But now that we’ve investigated it, guess what? The Pfizer court admits they were lied to. The FBI is now been proven to have lied 17 times. We’ve got a half a dozen people at the top level of our intelligence community who have admitted to having extreme bias. You got Peter Strzok and Lisa Page talking about taking down the president, having an insurance policy against him succeeding and becoming the president. You’ve got McCabe, you’ve got Comey, you got Clapper. You remember James Clapper, the one who came to the Senate and when asked by Senator Wyden, “Are you storing? Are you gathering information from Americans by the millions and storing it on government computers?” James Clapper said, “No.” He lied to Congress. Nobody chose to impeach him, but he lied to Congress and committed a felony. Is he in jail? No, he’s making millions of dollars as a contributor on television now, using and pedaling his national security influence for dollars after having committed a felony and lying to us.
These are the people who plotted to bring the president down. These are the people who continue to plot to bring the president down. Before all of this started though, I was a critic of the secret courts, I was a critic of Pfizer. I was a critic of them abusing American civil liberties. I was a critic of them invading our privacy, recording the length of our phone calls, who we talk to, sometimes recording conversations. All of this done supposedly to go after terrorists, but Americans by the millions are caught up in this web. But now for the first time, it’s not just American civil liberties that are being abused by our intelligence agencies, it’s an entire presidential campaign, and it could go either way. This is why you want to limit power. Men are not angels, and that’s why we put restrictions on government. We need more restrictions now. We can’t allow secret courts to investigate campaigns.
This started before the election. It went on for the last three years through the Mueller investigation. They thought they had the president dead to rights and they’d bring him down through this investigation. So initially, the spying didn’t work, the Mueller investigation didn’t work. They went seamlessly into the impeachment. The question for the American public is now, will they go on? Are they going to immediately start up hearings again in the house, it’ll be partisan hearings again? I suspect they will. They’ve had their day in the sun and they loved it, and I think they’re going to keep doing it time and time and time again.
Sen. Rand Paul reads alleged whistleblower's name in Senate Trump impeachment trial (Feb 4, 2020) https://t.co/7UzkKNYWkp
— HYGO News (@HygoNews) February 5, 2020