“Will, it’s like you broke up with ten million people all at once.” I had hoped Lynlie was exaggerating her opinion on the response to the speech I had just given on the final day of the Intelligence Committee’s November 2019 hearings on the impeachment of President Donald Trump. I was seen by both sides, and the media, as the Republican most likely to vote for impeachment, which would have opened the door for other Republicans to do the same. I had made many Republican colleagues nervous by telling the whip team—individuals responsible for knowing in advance how many people were voting for or against upcoming major legislation—that I was undecided, which I was.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy even asked me to step down from HPSCI, which investigated President Trump’s infamous phone conversation in July 2019 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. McCarthy wanted to replace me with a bomb thrower who would more aggressively defend the president. I didn’t blame Kevin for trying. He was being a dutiful lieutenant for the president. But I said no. I had an expertise in national security, and I was one of the few people on either side of the political aisle who was seeking facts rather than pushing a predetermined position.
After questioning witnesses, reviewing documents, consulting legal minds across the country, and sitting through hundreds of hours of depositions, I determined there was not evidence to warrant a vote for impeachment.
“An impeachable offense should be compelling, overwhelmingly clear, and unambiguous, and it is not something to be rushed or taken lightly,” I said over the buzz of clicking cameras at the final day of the hearing. “I have not heard evidence proving the president committed bribery or extortion.”
With that statement, and my vote against impeachment in the House, I crushed the hopes of Trump opponents across the country. And Lynlie was right, social media exploded.
To be clear—I was open to voting for impeachment if I saw a violation of the law. That was my standard for impeachment. But I wouldn’t vote for impeachment because I disliked what President Trump said in the call. And I wasn’t going to support impeachment because I disagreed with the president on other issues—which I did.
Did the president bungle a series of foreign policy decisions? Absolutely. But he didn’t break the law.
What brought me to vote against impeachment were the facts. Based on my definition of impeachment, a crime had to be proven, and Adam Schiff (D-California) was alleging the crime was bribery or extortion. The necessary elements of a bribe in a court of law weren’t in that phone call where the president asked Zelensky for help in gathering information on alleged misdeeds by Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter.
Bribery is offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting something of value in order to influence the actions of an official in the discharge of his or her public or legal duties. Among the elements that prosecutors need to prove is intent, that the bribe involved something of value used to influence the recipient and that an offer was used to influence the action or nonaction of the recipient.
At the time of the call, Zelensky didn’t even know $400 million in military aid was being withheld. Additionally, no clear evidence was presented during the hearings that President Trump ordered anyone to condition security assistance on investigations into the Bidens. The Democrats agreed with me because they failed to include bribery or extortion in the final articles of impeachment.
The Democrats also claimed the White House was withholding documents and directing administration officials to defy House subpoenas—an obstruction of Congress. White House Counsel Pat Cipollone sent me boxes of documents that had been sent to the Hill. The House had access to all the documents it should have had access to. Regarding Trump administration officials who refused to testify before Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have turned to the courts to compel them to appear. If she had, and Trump officials had failed to appear, it clearly would have been contempt of Congress. But Speaker Pelosi never did that. She did not use all the tools within her power to force that action.
So, I voted against impeachment.
I had developed my standard of impeachment under President Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama. Over the course of the Obama presidency, I was approached several times by Republican colleagues and vocal constituents about supporting efforts to try to impeach President Obama. Their justifications for impeachment were the 2012 Benghazi attack—the assault on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya—as well as the president’s executive orders regarding immigration. There was even talk about launching an impeachment over the insane and erroneous claims that President Obama was born outside the United States.
I always said no, for the same reason I voted against the Trump impeachment. I didn’t see evidence that laws were being broken. I was being consistent.
My “video” matched my “audio.”
That’s an expression I’ve learned from Stoney Burke, who served as my first chief of staff. What you say—your audio—has to match up with what you actually do—your video. I based my work as a congressman on that principle, and I think it’s an important component of leadership. We need to be ideologically consistent. We need to do what we say.
It’s easier to do what you say when what you’re doing is based on consistent principles. When I lost my first election in 2010, I entered one of the lowest points in my life and was fortunate to receive some well-chosen words of advice from an unexpected source.
In my first Republican primary in 2010, there were five candidates. I came out on top, but I failed to receive 50 percent of the vote. So the other top vote-getter, Quico Canseco, and I went to a runoff. The media and folks who followed elections thought I would easily beat Quico. His staff started looking for jobs because even they thought I was going to win. But I lost. The media went from saying that I was this thirty-two-year-old phenom to “How did he screw this up?”
I was devastated. Losing sucked. Even worse, I felt like I had let everyone down. I was so embarrassed that I didn’t leave my house for days. I didn’t want to see or talk to anybody. There was no plan B—I thought I was going to win. For a short, crazy time, I even considered a serious offer to go fight Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. But I actually didn’t know what to do next.
So I asked seventy-five people I knew the same two questions. One: “If you were thirty-two again, what would you do?” And two: “If time and money weren’t issues, what would you do?”
I got seventy-four crummy answers. “Why don’t you go back into the CIA?” “Have you thought about going to law school?” “You could probably get into a management training track at a Texas energy company.” It was probably more deflating than losing the election. I thought I was going to learn about the next hot idea, like Google in the 1990s or Instagram in 2010.
But the seventy-fifth answer came from one of my best friends’ father—Roger Kramer, a schoolteacher and principal, whom I had known since I was thirteen. He took me to lunch at my favorite Mexican restaurant in San Antonio.
“Well, I don’t know what kind of job you should apply for,” he told me. “But you should do something that’s meaningful and hard.”
Meaningful and hard. It was the best answer.
Looking back, the most fulfilling experiences in my life have been meaningful and hard. Serving as student body president in college, serving in the CIA in dangerous places, running for Congress as a Black Republican in a Latino district, helping build a cybersecurity company following my loss before coming back and winning the congressional seat, and then serving the 23rd Congressional District of Texas. They were all super hard but unbelievably meaningful.
I took Mr. Kramer’s advice to mean that I should be committed to doing something that was for more noble reasons than my own personal gain, and that this pursuit would at times require overcoming significant challenges. Pursuing higher or more noble principles and purposes is an activity in which one must constantly be engaged, and this activity has a name. It’s called idealism. In following Mr. Kramer’s words of wisdom, I’ve discovered that idealism makes it easier to be consistent in aligning your audio and video—matching your words and deeds—because you are engaged in doing things for the right reasons. This logic would be tested during both the Trump and the Obama administrations.
In 2015, I surprised many observers by voting in support of an amendment that would have effectively undone President Obama’s 2012 executive action establishing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
DACA shields qualified young people brought to the United States illegally as children from being deported and grants them work authorization. Through no fault of their own, they came to the U.S., and they are now building businesses, paying taxes, or going to school. In San Antonio, there are five thousand DACA recipients, and large swaths of my district support giving Dreamers a permanent legislative fix to their situation. I met with them several times while in office and was always impressed with their energy, drive, and eagerness to contribute to our society, culture, and economy.
My position against Obama’s executive action caused an uproar among Dreamer supporters.
When Trump came to office, I also opposed his executive order to rescind DACA.
I was being consistent. No matter who is president, immigration law should not be made via executive action. It’s the responsibility of Congress to make laws. The 826,000 individuals who have been accepted into the DACA program between 2012 through early 2020 do not need a continual stream of contradictory executive branch actions. They need legal status to stay in the U.S.—a permanent legislative solution so they can continue to be a part of the communities they have always called home.
In Congress, I voted for the American Dream and Promise Act of 2019, a bill to provide a pathway to legal status for eligible young people who were brought here as children, who passed background checks, and who completed high school and some college or military service. President Obama had been unable to shepherd an earlier version of this legislation through Congress while he was in office because of opposition by a few Senate Democrats.
I also co-wrote the USA Act of 2018 with Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-California). Along with relief for the Dreamers, it would have improved border security with high-tech solutions like infrared cameras, radar, and lidar (a similar concept to radar that uses light instead of sound). It would also have reduced delays in immigration courts and created a plan to address the root causes of illegal migration to our country. The top reasons being violence, lack of economic opportunity, and extreme poverty in the Northern Triangle—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. For most of the twenty-first century, illegal immigrants from those three countries alone accounted for 75 percent of Border Patrol apprehensions.
The USA Act received bipartisan support, and we came so close to achieving a real solution to the U.S.’s illegal immigration crisis. But Republican Speaker Paul Ryan prevented it from moving forward in the 115th Congress in 2018, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, blocked it the following year in the 116th Congress.
Hopefully, President Biden learns from the mistakes of his two immediate predecessors and recognizes executive action may provide temporary relief, but alleviating the ambiguity that these individuals and their families live with requires a bipartisan and bicameral solution. The USA Act can still be a starting point.
In addition to immigration, the controversy over Trump and Russia provided plenty of opportunities to show that my audio and video match. I voted to release the infamous “Nunes memo,” a 2018 memo by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California) that questioned the justification for FBI surveillance of Carter Page, the former Trump adviser. I probably received more criticism for voting to release the Nunes memo than I did for the impeachment vote. Anti-Trump sentiment was at an all-time high, and people, including some in the intelligence community, couldn’t believe a former CIA officer would vote to release classified information. I did because it was my job to know the difference between information and intelligence and to exercise my duties on HPSCI to inform the public while protecting intelligence operations. I did my job, even though it wasn’t popular, because it was the right thing to do.
I supported releasing the Nunes memo not because I had anything against the FBI. I had the honor of working side by side with true American patriots in the FBI who have made tremendous sacrifices for our country. I voted to release the memo because I believed the FBI’s warrant request to approve a wiretap on an American citizen was based on unverified information drawn from rumors and circular reporting.
Some might remember hearing about the source of that information from the media. It was the Steele Dossier, a salacious document written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, which contained allegations of cooperation between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 election.
Working in the CIA, I learned to watch out for the type of circular reporting that appeared in the Steele Dossier—when a piece of information appears to come from multiple sources, but in fact comes only from one source, even though it is offered through different channels.
To be clear, my vote to release the memo was not about discrediting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—I was fully supportive of the Mueller investigation. But after spending close to a decade collecting intelligence and protecting sources and methods, I knew that it was unverified information masquerading as intelligence.
Trust me, if I had found out from the Mueller report that allegations in the Steele Dossier were true, I would have grilled the intelligence community because then it would mean people had been lying to us. But in fact, Steele is rarely mentioned in Mueller’s more than four-hundred-page report.
To me, the biggest contributor to Russian disinformation campaigns was House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-California). As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, it became clear to me that Schiff used his position on the committee to knowingly spread a false narrative that there had been collusion between the Russians and President Trump. At various times, Schiff claimed there was “more than circumstantial evidence” of collusion and evidence pointing to signs of cooperation between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Everyone—many House colleagues, the media, the public—was operating under the assumption that Schiff had access to intelligence that other people didn’t possess and that he knew something we did not know.
But he didn’t.
To be sure, Trump was duped by the Russians about their meddling in the 2016 election, particularly at his shameful July 2018 press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, when he contradicted our own intelligence agencies and accepted the former KGB officer’s denials regarding that interference. With that performance, the president actively participated in a Russian disinformation campaign that legitimized Russian denials and weakened the credibility of the United States.
Though it was clear the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election, according to the Mueller report, there was no evidence that President Trump colluded with the Russians. Black’s Dictionary defines collusion as a “deceitful agreement or compact between two or more persons, for the one party to bring an action against the other for some evil purpose, as to defraud a third party of his right.” That’s not what happened here.
But Schiff used his position to further undermine trust in our democracy. “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won,” he said during the impeachment proceedings.
I don’t know if Schiff was making those claims to create conflict and contrast, but by perpetuating this myth that the Russians actively cooperated with President Trump, he inflicted enormous damage on public trust in the election process. Schiff’s audio—wanting to protect the integrity of the election process—failed to match his video—which was taking actions to erode trust in our elections. This became an excuse for President Trump to take a page out of the Democratic playbook to undermine the election results after he lost to Joe Biden. Another appalling effort to destabilize our democracy.
Ensuring the audio and video match, is critical to leadership in Washington. The fact that this principle is so rare to find among both parties may be the reason the American electorate didn’t give a mandate to either party. Even though it’s hard, the aspirational leadership needed for a successful American Reboot will require leaders whose audio and video match.