Boehner on CNN's State of the Union: Speaker Should Produce Evidence That CIA Lied to Congress or Apologize to Our Intelligence Professionals
House GOP Leader Discusses the Speaker's Accusations Against the CIA, Republicans' Efforts to Find Common Ground with the President on Health Care, and GOP Efforts to Rebuild the Party
Washington,
May 17, 2009 -
In an interview today on CNN’s State of the Union, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to bring forward evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lied to Congress so the Justice Department can open an investigation and if she can’t, apologize to our nation’s intelligence professionals. During the interview, Boehner also discussed Republicans’ efforts to find common ground with the President on reforms to expand Americans’ access to affordable health care and highlighted the GOP’s work to rebuild the Party by offering better solutions rooted in Republican principles. Following is full video and key excerpts from Boehner’s interview with State of the Union host John King:
BOEHNER CALLS ON SPEAKER TO PRODUCE EVIDENCE THAT CIA LIED OR APOLOGIZE TO OUR INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS:
“Lying to the Congress of the United States is a crime, and if the Speaker is accusing the CIA and other intelligence officials of lying or misleading the Congress, then they should come forward with evidence and turn that over to the Justice Department so that they can be prosecuted. If that’s not the case, I think she ought to apologize to our intelligence professionals around the world. You have to understand, John, we treat prisoners, detainees, prisoners of war better than any country in the world. And our intelligence professionals have done a marvelous job in doing their job – keeping Americans safe. And when you think about the fact that we lost 3,000 of our citizens on September 11th, we’ve lost nearly 5,000 of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting for our safety and security here in America, all of this information that helps our soldiers, that helps our border security people, all comes from our intelligence professionals around the world. And instead of criticizing them, instead of accusing them of lying, we ought to be patting them on the back and telling them, ‘job well done.’”
BOEHNER SAYS THE SPEAKER’S ACCUSATIONS ARE RAISING MORE QUESTIONS THAN PROVIDING ANSWERS:
“She’s the one that continues to bring the controversy to new levels by talking about it in ways that raise more questions than answers. You know, I’ve had concerns about the release of these interrogation memos, the fact that they’ve closed Gitmo without having a plan, with what to do with these terrorists. The bigger question is what is the Administration’s overarching strategy to confront the terrorist threats that we have and to keep Americans safe? And some of these decisions that the President has been made early on were rather contradictory to what I believe was needed to keep America safe. Over the last couple of weeks, he has been more pragmatic about some of these decisions. But this controversy over the Speaker was caused by her and continues to be escalated by none other than Speaker Pelosi.”
BOEHNER DISCUSSES REPUBLICANS’ EFFORTS TO EXPAND AMERICANS’ ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE:
“The American people want affordable access to high quality health insurance, and there is no disagreement between Republicans and Democrats on trying to achieve that goal. That's why this week, Republican leaders sent to the President a letter outlining our goals to fix the health care system and reaching out to him to try to find some bipartisan way to achieve this. Scrapping our current system and putting together this big option I don’t think is the answer. I think what we can do is go in and look at those who don't have access to high quality affordable health insurance and find ways of getting them insurance in the private sector, and I think that we can improve the system for all Americans.”
BOEHNER UNDERSCORES THE NEED TO LET DOCTORS AND PATIENTS – NOT GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRATS – MAKE CRITICAL HEALTH CARE DECISIONS:
“American people don’t want their care rationed. They don’t want the government deciding the appropriate procedures. Frankly, we think doctors and patients can make these decisions on their own. Let's go in and tinker with the current system and make sure it works better. We have the greatest health care delivery system in the world. Why do we want to jeopardize that with some big government-run health care option?”
BOEHNER ON THE GOP PROPOSING BETTER SOLUTIONS ROOTED IN REPUBLICAN PRINCIPLES:
“The fact is that there’s nothing wrong with going out and listening to the American people, sharing our principles, trying to find ways to address the concerns of the American people, but address those concerns with solutions – solutions that are built on Republican principles. So I think this dialogue is important. We’ve got a long way to come back. We’ve been through two disastrous election cycles. So the idea of working on new solutions – I made it clear on the opening day, when I gave Speaker Pelosi the gavel, that we wouldn’t just be the party of no. That if we found ourselves in a position where we had to disagree with our new President or we had to disagree with our Democrat colleagues in the House, then it was our obligation to come forward with what we thought was a better solution.”
