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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [00:22]
Mint Mobile / Remitly Advertiser
of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com welcome to the Watch Floor.
- [00:32]
Sarah Adams
I'm Sarah Adams. I worked on Capitol Hill from 2015 to 2017. So I'm not speaking as an outsider looking in. I'm speaking as someone who actually worked inside of the system and knows how it actually operates inside, how it protects itself, how it manages risk and how accountability is something that often happens well after the fact, if it even happens at all. Today we're gonna talk about the issue that's all over the media, of course, these sexual harassments and sexual abuse claims coming out of Congress. But I want to be clear right from the start, this episode isn't going to be about rumors. It's not going to be any sort of political targeting because the problem is equally prevalent on the right and on the left. I served up there. I saw it. There's no clean side. And this isn't going to be just about isolated individuals. It's going to be the pat pattern of this occurring. And that is going to keep occurring if we allow it to. Remember, none of this happens inside of a vacuum. And right now, the issue is back in our faces due to a number of individuals. We have, of course, Eric Swalwell, the
- [02:13]
Ryan Reynolds
stunning fall and this scandal now widening.
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News Reporter
Tonight, Congressman Eric Swalwell resigning from Congress.
- [02:18]
Ryan Reynolds
It's now official, his resignation read before Congress. Swalwell forced to step down amid multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. The scandal already forcing him to drop out of the California governor's race.
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Sarah Adams
We have Tony Gonzalez.
- [02:32]
Ryan Reynolds
Republican Congressman Tony Gonzalez from Texas says
- [02:35]
Sarah Adams
he will file his retirement from office tomorrow. So again, questions on the timeline here, if that means he's leaving his seat immediately or what. But we have been reporting, of course, on sexual misconduct accusations against Gonzalez, who dropped his reelection push in the last couple of weeks and then discussion around Corey Mills.
- [02:52]
Ryan Reynolds
I don't even fall into the category
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News Reporter
of Swalwell and Gonzalez.
- [02:56]
Ryan Reynolds
One, I'm not married.
- [02:58]
Sarah Adams
So there's one thing this is just
- [03:00]
Mint Mobile / Remitly Advertiser
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- [03:31]
Sarah Adams
One side of the piece, we also have the whole other side that's due to corruption claims and those type of issues. But today we're mostly focused on sexual abuse, sexual harassment and even crimes, right? I mean, we're hearing rape in some of these conversations. This should not be happening in one of our pillars of government. This should be where people are representing of us. This should be the best of us. There should even just be a basic lover, professionalism. And we're not seeing that. And I think Americans are getting incredibly frustrated. So this has placed renewed attention on a very important question and it's the fact, how does Congress actually handle misconduct allegations when they involve members of Congress themselves? Because we see they don't get handled very well. And if that misconduct is an actual crime, right? Like if we're saying rape, which is a crime, is there any sort of mandatory reporting structure where that automatically goes to law enforcement? Because that does not seem to exist here. We have a system that treats these misconduct cases with no transparency at all. But oddly, they're like the oversight function in our government and they go around telling everybody else they need to show transparency. I mean, just for a second, think of the irony in this. It's like, oh, well, I can commit crimes and I can hide them and I can cover them up and I can misuse taxpayer funds, but no one else can. I mean, this is one of the most absurd things and everybody is tired of kind of these two tier justice systems to begin with in our government. But then the fact that nobody holds Congress's feet to the fire when misconduct happens in Congress. It's not like there's a lot of time put into what happened. It's more, oh my gosh, how do we handle this internally so it doesn't become public. So I just want you to understand that is the thinking process. It's all about protecting each other. And again, it doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat, you are protecting the system you live in work in fall under. And they're always about protecting their system. Now, to understand this, we need to go back actually to 1995. So for most of the modern congressional history, Congress operated, and I think we all can say they still do, in, like, a legal gray zone. But it was really bad when it came to workplace protections. So the staffing in these congressional offices had no sort of enforcement systems or mechanisms to protect them like you would have in a private sector. So that meant there was no protections for harassment, discrimination, Any sort of workplace standards like that didn't apply to Congress in any sort of direct, enforceable way. So what happened is, in the early 1990s, it was getting to be very difficult for Congress to keep doing things the way they normally do. There was a lot of legal challenges, plenty of public criticism. And that's why this is how it works. You have to do public criticism to have any sort of change. It's just how it is when people say, oh, you're giving Congress too hard of a time. No, like, this is how you get them to do something.
- [07:07]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [07:35]
Sarah Adams
Unfortunately, also, there was these growing contradictions that I was talking about. Congress was out legislating kind of these workplace protections, and then their own staffs were saying, hey, why aren't we afforded any of these similar protections that are happening all across these industries? So what they did is they pushed for what was called the Congressional Accountability act of 1995. So this law extended workforce protections into Congress itself. And then it created, like, formal mechanisms that for things like sexual harassment or discrimination claims. But that also created something then that now is even more complicated. This is actually a hybrid system. If you ever looked at how it works. Part of it is this internal process, and then part of it is an external legal framework. But there's no fully independent enforcement body inside of Congress. So when Congress says, we investigated it or we handled it or we looked into it, that is not like a law enforcement investigation. And I think people get confused by that. Even we'll do these throwaway things, you know, instead of actually Criminally prosecuting someone under the Department of Justice. You'll see politicians will do this thing and they throw this junk charge at them, this lying to Congress. And then everybody's like, oh, great, the government did something against this bad guy. It's like, no, they just fooled you and they gave him this useless charge when they should have been charged under the Department of Justice in a real legal system, because Congress isn't a real legal system. But they play games with us all the time. You have to know this exists. They allow this basically to protect themselves. This hybrid system then shaped everything that went forward after. So if we look at between 1997 and 2017 and this number's all over the place now, approximately 17 to 18 million dollars in US taxpayer funds got paid out in these settlements. Now, there is confusion. A lot of people think that whole amount was for sexual harassment claims. It wasn't. It was a number of things, like discrimination cases as well, retaliation claims. Right. A lot of retaliat problems in Congress and other workplace disputes. So the key issue isn't just about kind of the money amount. It's the fact that the public doesn't actually see any of the inner workings of what happens here. And then there's not, like, documentation that goes along with it. So, for example, there's no, like, you know, public database of the allegations. There's no consistent disclosures of any sort of outcomes. There's no way to track patterns to see if there's misconduct among offices. So you can move a staff member to three different offices who's been sexually harassing people. He could do it a dozen times because no one's sharing the info. No one's actually trying to stop it. And that's a real important thing. I want people to understand they are not trying to end this on the Hill. They are trying to keep it out of the news. We have two already contradicting efforts here. When they stand there and say, we want to stop this from happening and we want good people here, well, they could do a lot more if that's the case. We basically get no visibility into whether this behavior is continuing, what's actually happening behind closed doors. These settlements are resolved internally, confidentially, and in many cases without any sort of public disclosure about what happened. So the public might see this little glimpse that maybe some money was spent, but they don't even know exactly what it was spent on. And this isn't some sort of classification issue. Putting this out there isn't going to reveal our nation's secrets. It's though how they built this transparency, fake transparency structure was to shield themselves. I mean, think about it. If you work in an important position in the government and you've actually paid out money to people you've abused, harassed, et cetera. Well, and then if the enemy finds out about that, they can blackmail you and do things against you. So the strange part is they're creating this whole system that basically can give anybody leverage against these people, but saying, no, no, no, we can't give this to the American public. It's like, no, you can give this to the American public. We can weed these bodies out. Because guess what? They're already compromised. We do not need criminals serving in our Congress. I mean, I feel that's a basic ask. And it's strange how hard it is to make that true. So after public pressure, because again, that's the only damn thing that works. And a lot of efforts pushed by the MeToo movement, it was in 2014 where Congress did pass reforms. So if a Congressmember makes this deal and let's say it's to pay out 50,000 for a sexual harassment claim, he then has to reimburse the treasury for that money. Now, I'd like to see the enforcement and make sure it's happening, but they say since 2018, they're paying out of pocket. So at least we dealt with the financial piece of this. Now, in that case, let's say he actually went beyond sexual harassment and he actually committed rape. Well, nothing in that system that I explained to you, it's still the old system. Does anything to move that into the criminal lane, move it to law enforcement. The only things they really did is they said, we added another training requirement and we updated our reporting systems. But that doesn't fix the limitations here, that there's no real accountability, that they can handle all this misconduct internally themselves. There's no real time reporting of allegations or outcomes. We don't even know how rampant this is. There's no universal requirement to take any serious allegations and immediately take them outside of Congress and put them in law enforcement's hands. The system improves some on the financial side, but it's not protecting anyone. And it's literally allowing members of Congress and their staff to help each other cover up crimes. I mean, you say you have an ethics committee, but that's almost like a smoke and mirrors, right? Because the investigation by an Ethics committee, if it goes nowhere, it did nothing. Let's talk about the House Committee on Ethics. It's often presented as Congress's internal accountability body. They Say it all the time. Don't worry. We have an Ethics Committee, and they got it. They're investigating this. They're looking into us. But it has no criminal enforcement element at all. It isn't even tied to a law enforcement agency. So it's this bipartisan internal committee that reviews violations of House Rules, and it can recommend disciplinary actions, such as reprimands, censure, or expulsion referrals. But, of course, even when you start talking expulsion, they all start playing games with each other. It's like, if you do it, we're going to do it, and everybody backs down. Even the little disciplinary piece that they have here, they rarely actually use it. So that's an important thing to understand. So don't think of the Ethics Committee anything like law enforcement. It is completely separate. It does not prosecute crimes. It does not operate independently or outside of Congress. So all the staff in the Ethics Committee have worked all around the Hill under a lot of these congresspersons. They're all in the same system. Then it also doesn't automatically ensure that every allegation of criminal conduct gets sent to authorities. This huge structural gap. And it was made that way because they made it to benefit themselves, as always. So when a serious allegation comes up, they'll tell you, oh, we looked into it. We investigated it. There's no criminal charges. Yes, there's no criminal charges because you never referred it to, like, the DOJ or you never handed it over to law enforcement. So of course there's no criminal charge. If someone, a staffer on the Hill, reports a rape to the Ethics Committee, and then the Congressperson pays a fine and no one ever gave to law enforcement, and then like, eight years later, you say, well, he was never charged. It's just an allegation. It's because the system was made to cover it up from the beginning. So I think it's a very, very frustrating thing. So all these people inside Congress know what's going on. They know what's happening. And then they all act, oh, shocked when something pops up. And they're like, I would never expected that. I didn't know that. It's like you have a whole committee that literally covers up all of this. Like, stop. We're not stupid. Now, if you start looking at some of these documented cases inside Congress, a pattern emerges. Remember, though, this is such a small percentage. This could just be like 1% of the cases because there's no transparency. So I want that to be incredibly clear. It's not like we just have a handful of cases. It's just those are the only ones that have kind of like seeped out into the public. So in 2006, we had Congressman Mark Foley. He resigned after we all found out that he sent sexually explicit messages to one of the teenage congressional pages. Yes. A teenager working inside of Congress. This is a high school student. So this case exposed, as you can imagine, massive failures in internal oversight and any sort of warnings that came in involving this page program that existed at the time. Also in 2017, we had Congressman John Conyers. He resigned after multiple staff allegations came out of sexual harassment. In one case, we found out he likely paid $27,000 out of our U.S. taxpayer dollars. Right. For his controversy. And in 2018, we had Congressman Blake Fahrenhold and he resigned after these sexual harassment, actually after a settlement. And then we found out that settlement was probably $84,000 of our taxpayer dollars because he fell under the pre reform system. Remember I told you in 2018, because the public pressure and the Me Too movement, they said you got to pay it yourself. Well, his fell under that, so he didn't have to pay it. Right. So of course they still found ways to get around the rule they put in place to make the public happy. And then we had Katie Hill very famously resigned after having inappropriate relations with staff. And this raised a much broader question that a lot of people don't spend time on. It's this workplace power dynamic that occurs. And then of course, there's no enforcement around it. And you really do have staff in these congressional offices kind of like stuck in the system, and it then enables it. Then we have Matt Gaetz. Obviously he was under federal investigation, had serious allegations, including sexual misconduct, potentially trafficking. The ethics committee started putting out threats. We're going to release this report when he was maybe going to be the attorney general. So he stepped away. No charges ended up being filed, and the case was closed. Again. It was a strange thing watching political leverage occur and maybe no justice, but we don't know because it was a lot of innuendos that came out instead of just doing full transparency and accountability. And if someone committed a crime, holding them responsible for it. The point is not to collapse all this into one narrative. The point is there's a pattern. This pattern has continued. It'll keep continuing because Congress is handling all this internally. It's only having any sort of delayed visibility when it gets triggered in some way and comes out in the public. And then even then the public's like, well, why are we finding out about this? Five or six years later, it's likely not true. And that's the games I play. That's why they keep it in the bucket of an allegation and they make sure no one is actually ever charged with anything. And I don't think any of us want a system that operates that way. We don't operate that way in our real lives, that Congress should not live under different rules. Now, I want to go back to the piece of Mark Foley for a minute because first off, it involved teenagers and we shouldn't just say that quickly
- [21:44]
News Reporter
and move on to federal law enforcement. Officials have told the Associated Press neither state nor federal charges are expected. Foley resigned nearly two years ago after being confronted with the emails and instant messages he sent to the teenage boys. Shortly after leaving Congress, Foley's attorney announced that his client was gay and had been molested by a priest as a teenage altar boy. Foley's lawyer maintains that while the former congressman did send those explicit messages, Foley never had an inappropriate contact with the miners. During the investigation, Foley checked himself into an Arizona treatment facility for what his attorneys said was alcoholism and other behavioral problems. An FBI investigation into Foley's actions has not been closed yet.
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Sarah Adams
So the House Page program was this program where they placed high school students inside the Capitol and they did a lot of legislative work. It was one of those great first foot in the door into the federal government. Well, when it came out with what Mark Foley did, it was very clear that there is misconduct in the program. And the crazy part is we don't even know the level of misconduct. We don't know if he was the only one. He likely wasn't. That's what's pretty scary. So they ended the program in 2011. A lot of people say, oh, no, no. The program was ended because it was financially cost prohibited. It ended because of this scandal and the fact that a lot of people were pushing and there were questions, is there more that happened to these teenagers in this program? And. And why are minors in Congress to begin with? Why were minors not properly supervised in Congress? And why were some congresspersons allowed to harm them? And the crazy part is we have never heard anything more about that program and whether anyone else was involved. And I think that's a very concerning thing. And I think that's frustrating for us. We get these congresspeople that talk at us all the time. They're always politicking, taking a stand, acting tough, and then they go into their offices and pretty much do nothing, Right? They don't keep any of their promises and Then now we have this whole problem. It's like, were you ever harassing a teenager? Did you rape one of your staff? I mean, we don't want to focus on those things. When we have real problems and we have real things that need to be done. We have to fund our homeland security. For example, we have massive threats facing the US homeland and we're wasting our time on these losers who are covering up crimes against women. It's like they don't belong anywhere near Congress. Now there's another thing that matters and never gets discussed. But since I served on the Hill, I think it's really important to explain there is this environment staff works in on Congress. When Congress is in session, staff can work 60 to 80 hours a week. It's like a constant. And their job security is directly tied to that congressional member they serve. So any career advancements for them on the Hill are heavily dependent on the references and relationships are building. Now within this tight community, a member of Congress controls promotions, committee access and long term pathways. Even though this member of Congress is in charge of them, don't even assume that they have really great professional relationships with them. I remember it was my first day on the Hill. I spoke to Congressman Gowdy who ran my committee and he left the room and one of the senior staff members says, we never speak directly to the Congressman or say his name directly. And I said, I don't care what you do. I do, right. So she just assumed she was going to force this crazy system on me, that I couldn't just talk to my boss and say, say something. I mean, it was the craziest thing. There's so many things like that. It's like there will be members of Congress and they'll turn to one of these senior, like a senior lawyer and say, go get me a coffee. I mean, so you have to understand these people are in the system now. They choose to stay in the system. So I'm not saying feeling that bad for them, to be honest. They allow this to occur. But think of it, if you're a junior staffer, I went in pretty senior. I had worked across the government. I don't take much crap. But you're a junior, let's say you're 22 years old and you go in, you have no leverage, you definitely have no mobility. And you do have this fear of professional retaliation because it's constantly enforced in you there like the whole time you're there, they make you feel like you could be doing something wrong or caught for doing something wrong. It's this very, very strange place. It's hard to to explain how it is. It's almost like they're fearful of their leaders there. Instead of working as a team and collaborative. It's a very strange environment. The other thing is, even though these reporting systems exist, you have to think about what these people are doing. They're forced to weigh, well, do I give up a future on the Hill? Oh, do I report this? Because they will have career consequences. The retaliation is insane because remember, it's a small, interconnected world. So you put in one of these complaints, you're a problem child, no one wants to work with you, you'll get pushed out. And again, we hope more people would say, good, I don't want to be a part of a system like this. But sadly, a lot of these people don't see how many opportunities are out there. They aren't conf enough yet in who they are, in the skills they have that really Congress probably doesn't deserve them anyway. And they're in this power structure that really harms them. So I just want to at least explain that piece of being staff on the Hill because it isn't anything glamorous. So as we have these kind of high profile cases coming out, you know, I just wanted to be clear. It's not one case that matters here. It's the system around these cases. If they get two people to quit or they get four people out in the next couple of weeks, that isn't going to fix the problem. First off, there is no universal requirement to give credible criminal activity to law enforcement. Why does that not exist? Why should that not be mandatory reporting? Why are they allowed to handle all of this, especially sexual abuse and harassment internally? They review it internally, they resolve it internally, and then it sits there internally. And as we've seen five, 10 years later, it can be used as a tool of leverage against someone again. That's crazy. So we make a system, hides these crimes, and then it's a system that can also be used as blackmail. And people think this is is just a way of doing business, like this is not how our Congress should operate. Then we have the problem. As I told you, you get this gap between allegations and real law enforcement investigations. So forever these Congress people can say, oh, that was just an allegation. I was never charged with anything. And they're right, because the system stopped them from being charged with anything. Right. They helped cover up the allegation, the crime, et cetera. So this is not about isolated misconduct. It's this whole entire system built so Congress can operate still outside of really enforcing any sort of workplace accountability that they apply to everybody else. Reforms have to be so much more than these financial reforms. We can't just focus on what our taxpayer dollars paid for. We need to understand harm the entire system causing to the whole process of just legislating anything. I mean, I explained to you a very dark system. Can you imagine being within that system for 20 years, what it makes of you now? We then have to trust you to do the right thing by us, to make the right decision, to act ethically, to be honorable. I mean it's almost like this impossible situation because we all just allow the misconduct there to occur. Congress does act on its own in a system completely separate from real accountability. And the problem is structural. If we don't actually push for some sort of structural change every couple years these will pop up. We'll all throw around tweets about them, maybe someone will step down and then the same thing happens two, four years later and we allow a broken system to continue to cover up crimes. And nobody wants a Congress that looks like that. Yes, we don't think highly of them, but it is up to us to also hold them accountable and say what we want from them. And if we're not getting what we need from them, we need to vote them the hell out. Thanks for being here today. On the watch floor,
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Ryan Reynolds
Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.