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WATCH: Rep. Cummings exposes the hypocrisy of the House Oversight Committee

"The only answer Republicans will accept is that Hillary Clinton must be guilty."

CREDIT: SCREENGRAB
CREDIT: SCREENGRAB

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) lit into Republicans on Tuesday for obsessing over Hillary Clinton’s emails while doing nothing to stop the Trump administration from forcibly separating immigrant families at the southern border.

Cummings’ remarks came during a House Oversight Committee hearing about the recent inspector general’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, marking the second straight day of congressional hearings related to Clinton’s emails.

Cummings, the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, pointed out that the inspector general report released last week found political bias didn’t affect the way the Clinton investigation was handled — which directly refutes the persistent GOP talking points that a flawed investigation shielded Clinton from prison. Still, he noted, many Republicans seem unwilling to accept this conclusion.

“At this point, I think it’s crystal clear that the only answer Republicans will accept is that Hillary Clinton must be guilty,” Cummings said.

They will keep going on and going until they get that answer, even if the facts will never support it,” he continued. “And even if multiple independent reviews come to exactly the opposite conclusion. Republicans in Congress are only willing to use their full arsenal of constitutional weapons to attack Hillary Clinton, or protect Donald Trump.”

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Cummings contrasted Republicans’ approach to Clinton’s emails with their disinterest in doing anything to stop Trump’s cruel policy of separating families.

Neither the Oversight Committee nor the Judiciary Committee has issued a single subpoena to investigate President Donald Trump or any other topic related to his administration, including the key moral and ethical issue of the day, which is the president’s new policy to separate children from their families. 

And so I ask the question, and it is a simple question — Are we really going to sit here, 70 members of the Congress of the United States of America in 2018, and have a hearing that just repeats the hearing the Senate had yesterday on Hillary Clinton’s emails? We sent letter after letter, letter after letter, asking these committees to investigate the Trump administration’s policy, which is now resulting in child internment camps — that’s what I said. Child internment camps. But we have gotten no response. 

Look, even if you believe people entered our country illegally, even if you believe  they have no valid asylum claims in their own country, even if you believe immigration should be halted entirely, we all should be able to agree that in the United States of America, we will not intentionally separate children from their parents. We will not do that. We are better than that! We are so much better. We should be able to agree that we will not keep kids in child internment camps indefinitely and hidden away from the public. What country is that? 

This is the United States of America! We now have reports of parents being deported, but the Trump administration is keeping their children here. 2018 in America. We do not need legislation. This is a policy. Understand this, this was a policy invented, implemented and executed by President Donald Trump. 

So in conclusion, Mr. Chairman, we need you — those children need you. I’m talking directly to my Republican colleagues. We need you to stand up to President Trump. We need you to join us in telling him that we reject this mean policy. We need you to tell him to abandon this policy. We need you to remind him that this is the United States of America and it is a great country. And we need you to stand up for those children. 

And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. 

Even though the IG’s report found that political bias didn’t impact the Clinton investigation, Trump and his allies in Congress have misrepresented its key findings in an effort to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign.

Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress have yet to unify behind legislation that would stop the Trump administration’s widely-denounced family separation policy — despite the fact that many of them profess to oppose it.