During Wednesday’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee nomination hearing, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) spoke about changes to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
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NewsTranscript
00:00I now recognize my ranking member, Senator Whitehouse, and I would like to welcome Senator
00:05Barrasso.
00:06He'll give him a chance here to introduce the general shortly.
00:11Thanks very much.
00:12I'd like to take my time this morning to discuss something that's going on with the Greenhouse
00:18Gas Reduction Fund, which is a fund that was appropriated by Congress, obligated, and the
00:26funds disbursed to a private fiscal agent, Citibank.
00:31But because it relates to climate, and because the president insists falsely that climate
00:36change is a hoax, people who are subordinate to him feel obliged to go after this Greenhouse
00:43Gas Reduction Fund.
00:45The problem is that the manner in which they have gone after it reflects the actual weaponization
00:52of the Department of Justice in ways that the prosecutions of President Trump never
00:59saw.
01:01So it begins with the interim United States attorney saying publicly, before he's even
01:07in office, that this fund is total graft and needs to be stopped.
01:14So he's already announced his predilections about that.
01:18This fund includes nefarious actors like Habitat for Humanity.
01:24The veto clock had run, so there was no role to undo the funding.
01:28It was even disbursed, as I mentioned.
01:31So what they had to do was to try to cook up a way to freeze the fund, and the way they
01:34tried to cook up to freeze the fund was to create a pretend criminal investigation, and
01:41then they could point to the criminal investigation and tell Citibank to freeze the funds pending
01:44the criminal investigation.
01:46And the problem was there's no evidence of any crime.
01:49And that became apparent when the ask went from interim U.S. attorney Martin to the chief
01:54of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia and was
01:59told by the chief, there's no crime here, I cannot do that.
02:04Rather than stop, what he did was force the resignation, fired the career criminal chief.
02:12This is a guy who's never been a prosecutor before, and he's firing his criminal chief.
02:17So that's a pretty big red flag when you get an answer from the career staff saying, boss,
02:22there's no crime here, and then you fire them for telling you that.
02:26Then he tried to shop this notion around the office, and no career U.S. attorney would sign.
02:32I've been a U.S. attorney.
02:34It's almost unfathomable for a U.S. attorney's office to send out a pleading without a career
02:41attorney being involved.
02:44So he couldn't get a career attorney.
02:47Another big red flag.
02:49So then he went forward himself.
02:50Again, this is not an experienced prosecutor.
02:53This is not somebody who brings a lot of game with him.
02:56He just wanted to do it.
02:58So with no support from the career people in the office, he went forward alone.
03:02The alone bid is another very strong signal that something is very badly amiss in what's
03:09going on.
03:11So then, going ahead solo, as the interim U.S. attorney, he went before a magistrate
03:16judge who said, no dice, you got nothing here, and he shot him down.
03:22For a U.S. attorney's office to be shot down over a warrant application is like a hospital
03:27never event.
03:29If that ever happened in Rhode Island when I was the U.S. attorney, there would be after
03:32action investigations, reports, what the hell went on here, because you never want to put
03:38your federal judges in a position where they have to shoot down a warrant application of
03:42yours.
03:43You want to make sure that they are ironclad.
03:45So this failure by the U.S. attorney to get the magistrate judge to go along with him,
03:49that's yet another red flag flying.
03:52And then after that, they started shopping it around other U.S. attorneys' offices.
04:00That's also pretty much unheard of.
04:03What resulted was something I've never seen before, which is a letter out of the FBI recommending
04:10a temporary freeze.
04:12I don't know any procedure for doing that.
04:14It had no sign-off from anybody in any U.S. attorney's office.
04:18Again, it's just bizarre incident after bizarre incident after bizarre incident after bizarre
04:24incident.
04:25And in the backdrop to this are out-of-court statements made by Lee Zeldin, our EPA guy,
04:31and Ed Martin, this interim U.S. attorney, derogatory about the bank and the recipients
04:38of the program.
04:39It started with graft, but they went on to make allegations of fraud and criminality.
04:43Well, there are a number of things that are wrong with that.
04:47First is, allegations of fraud and criminality are defamatory per se.
04:53It's not the kind of stuff anybody should be saying about anybody else falsely.
04:59It's particularly bad when it's the prosecutive branch that is saying things falsely about
05:06people that they're either seeking to investigate or are investigating or are prosecuting.
05:11The U.S. Attorney's Manual, now called the Justice Manual, is rife with warnings, not
05:17only to the Department of Justice employees, but to the agencies working together on investigations,
05:22that you don't say derogatory things about people while you're investigating them.
05:28You let your pleadings do the talking.
05:31That is federal prosecution 101.
05:35So all of these false statements that are being made, they had the chance to try to
05:38prove their false statements, by the way, and a federal judge took a look at the best
05:43they could do and said there is no evidence here of any criminality, period.
05:48So you have the magistrate judge who shot down the warrant, and you've got the federal
05:52judge who shot down the argument that there was fraud or criminality here.
05:57And yet they persist.
06:00So the aberration here from proper prosecutive process is really telling, and both in this
06:11committee and in the Judiciary Committee, I'm going to keep digging at this, because
06:15over and over and over again, there are multiple red flags flying of prosecutorial misconduct,
06:23of legal violations, and ultimately, probably, we'll find out from civil litigation, either
06:29under 42 U.S. Code section 1983 or in a straight defamation case, what the heck went on.
06:37But I can tell you, Madam Chair, as somebody who's had to sit in that seat as a U.S. attorney,
06:41everything about this stinks to high heaven, and we need to get to the bottom of it.
06:47Thanks for letting me take the time to discuss this when we have the witnesses here today
06:50and we have my beloved friends Senator Brasso and Governor Gordon here.