Prepared Floor Statement of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
Ranking Member, Senate Judiciary Committee
On the nomination of Theodore David Chuang,
to be U.S. District Judge for the District of Maryland
Mr. President,
I’d like to speak for a few minutes on the nomination of Theodore Chuang to be District Judge in the District of Maryland.
I’ll oppose the nomination, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.
I can’t support this nomination because of the central role Mr. Chuang played in this Administration’s persistent and steadfast stonewalling of the congressional investigation into the attack on our diplomatic mission in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
That attack resulted in the first murder of a sitting United States ambassador in over 30 years. Three other brave Americans serving their country were killed there as well.
As we all know too well, just hours after the fighting had ended, this Administration, in the middle of a presidential campaign at the time, rushed to blame the attack on an obscure internet video.
The Administration denied what was already clear: what happened at Benghazi was a premeditated terrorist attack that had nothing to do with a video.
The CIA’s Libya station chief and other administration officials immediately recognized and reported that the attack was an act of terror, not a spontaneous demonstration.
The American people demanded answers.
Congress demanded answers as well.
But the Administration has systematically stonewalled our ability to get those answers.
And that is where this nominee’s role comes in. Following the Benghazi attack, Mr. Chuang left his position at the Department of Homeland Security to undertake a special detail at the State Department.
His job at the State Department was to provide legal guidance and manage the department’s responses to the congressional investigation into the terrorist attack.
For months, the State Department ignored congressional inquiries. That forced the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to issue subpoenas in August 2013.
Mr. Chuang received those duly issued subpoenas, but continued the administration’s policy of systematic stonewalling.
Let’s be clear: The State Department has never asserted that the emails, documents, or witness interviews conducted by the Benghazi Accountability Review Board are protected by executive privilege.
The State Department has never asserted any privilege justifying its refusal to disclose documents responsive to the subpoenas.
The State Department has never provided any legal basis whatsoever for its continued stonewalling of this investigation.
So, following Mr. Chuang’s nomination hearing before the Judiciary Committee, I asked him several questions for the record about why the State Department refused to comply with its legal obligation to respond to the subpoenas. Mr. Chuang, who was in charge of coordinating the State Department’s responses, couldn’t come up with a legal basis. Instead, he cited only “institutional concerns.”
Mr. President, that’s not good enough. Abstract “institutional concerns” don’t permit the executive branch to toss a congressional subpoena in the garbage.
Benghazi raises questions of vital national importance that remain unanswered. They remain unanswered because this administration refuses to honor its legal obligations to comply with congressional oversight. The American people deserve better and so do we. We are members of a co-equal branch of the federal government.
But the Benghazi scandal isn’t simply going to go away. In fact, just this week, additional emails came to light demonstrating that the White House led a coordinated messaging effort on Benghazi from the very beginning.
This is what one of the emails said: it was the administration’s goal “To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video and not a broader failure of policy.”
That quotation is from an email sent by the administration’s deputy national security advisor on September 14, 2012 – two days after the attack. That email was sent even though officials on the ground in Libya had reported that the attack was an act of terror.
Some have called this email the smoking gun proving that the administration intentionally misled the American people about the terrorist attack. But no matter how this email is characterized, it was clearly responsive to congressional subpoenas and does not seem to have been produced until a government-watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking to compel the administration to comply.
So let’s be clear, from what we know now, it took a FOIA request and an ensuing lawsuit to force the State Department to produce documents that were obviously related to the terror attack at Benghazi.
And this is the case even though House committees made multiple requests for those documents and then issued subpoenas compelling their production.
I’m sure Mr. Chuang thought he was doing his duty to zealously represent his client when he was managing the document subpoenas the State Department received from Congress. But his role in coordinating the administration’s responses was plainly unsatisfactory and unacceptable.
We should demand and expect more respect for congressional oversight. For this reason, I have decided to oppose this nomination.
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