House Intel Committee holds a hearing on the Mueller report

order without objection the chair is permitted to declare recess at any time in april of 2016 as the us presidential race was getting underway an individual with with links to the russian government reached out to the trump campaign to telegraph the kremlin's preference for mr trump joseph massoud a london-based maltese professor told george papadopoulos a member of trump's foreign policy team that he recently met with high-level russian officials who told him that the russians had dirt on hillary clinton including thousands of emails papadopoulos was also informed that the russian government could assist the trump campaign through the anonymous release of stolen material at the time mr papadopoulos was given this extraordinary information the american public was unaware that the dnc and clinton campaign had even been hacked let alone that russia was behind the attack and planned to weaponize the data that it stole in july of 2016 the russian government began dumping the stolen emails in precisely the same fashion it had previewed for mr papadopoulos it was it was at this point informed of the russian outreach to papadopoulos and aware that the russians were actively meddling in our election through the anonymous release of the information that the fbi opened up its investigation but as james comey would explain in his first public testimony on the matter in march 2017 and before this committee the investigation began not as a criminal probe but as a counterintelligence investigation what does that mean how does a counterintelligence investigation differ from a criminal investigation what does it mean that a u.s person may be acting as a witting or unwitting agent of a foreign power and how could the russians use the compromise of u.s persons to influence u.s policy in a manner that jeopardizes our national security these are the questions that we hope to answer today during the second of a series of hearings the committee will be conducting to explore the special counsel's disturbing findings in volume one of the report and to examine what steps are necessary to protect the public our democracy and our national security we'll hear from two former senior fbi executives who oversaw the counterintelligence division of the bureau will help us better understand the counterintelligence implications of the range of contacts between the trump campaign and russians directly or indirectly tied to kremlin intelligence services volume 1 of the report outlines a sweeping and systemic effort by russia to interfere in the 2016 election for the benefit of donald trump it establishes that the trump campaign welcomed the russian interference because it expected to benefit electorally from information stolen and released through the russian effort it shows how the trump campaign built the theft and dumping of russian stolen documents into its campaign messaging and strategy and as special counsel made clear it sets out in great detail why the conduct in his report should concern every american the report details well over 100 contacts between the trump campaign and agents and officials of russia some of this outreach was conducted in public as when the president called on russia to hack his opponent's emails and only hours later a unit of the russian military intelligence the gru attempted to do exactly that other contacts took place outside of the public view as in the case of the june 9 2 2016 meeting at trump tower in new york between a russian delegation and the president's eldest son donald trump jr his son-in-law jared kushner and paul manafort trump's campaign chairman that meeting was part of a plan to secretly receive help in the form of dirt on hillary clinton from the russian government still other contacts because of encrypted apps destroyed communications and deception remain shrouded in secrecy such as manafort's meetings with constantine kalimnik someone the fbi assesses to have ties to russian intelligence manafort's provision of internal polling data to kill nick and their discussion of the campaign strategy for women winning democratic votes in midwestern states most americans consider the solicitation of foreign help during a presidential campaign the offer of foreign assistance and the campaign's eagerness to accept that offer quote if it is what you say it is i love it to constitute plain evidence of collusion not to mention the sharing of polling data and campaign strategy by the chairman of a campaign with a foreign nation which at that very same time is intervening to help their campaign win nevertheless and contrary to the president's oft-repeated mantra and the many misrepresentations of the attorney general the special counsel reached no conclusion as to whether the trump campaign's many russian contacts constituted collusion since that term is not defined in criminal law for those who have not yet read the mueller report and most have not they might be astonished to learn that a finding of no collusion much less a finding of no obstruction is nowhere to be seen on any page or in any passage of the mueller report instead in making its charging decisions the special counsel examined only whether it could meet the justice department's high bar of being able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt at trial each element of the crime of conspiracy and found that it could not even as it emphasized that the failure to establish a conspiracy did not mean the absence of evidence of conspiracy volume one of the mueller report is therefore by its very nature and the special counsel's mandate a report about the exercise of prosecutorial judgment who should be charged and who should not it does not contain the fbi's counterintelligence findings that is what trump campaign transition or administration figures including the president acting as agents of a foreign power wittingly or unwittingly were they advancing russian or other foreign interests by virtue of financial incentives or compromise whether or not such actions were a crime these are the types of concerns that the fbi's counterintelligence division works to expose prevent and investigate using an array of investigative and intelligence capabilities as we will hear from our witnesses today the primary objective of a counterintelligence investigation is not to target an individual for prosecution but to protect the nation by developing information about the actions and intentions of foreign powers and to thwart them before they can act against us the president's efforts to make money from a real estate project in moscow and to conceal the transaction from the public are a quintessential example of a counterintelligence nightmare that may or may not include criminal activity it may not be a crime to build a trump tower in moscow or for michael cohen to seek the kremlin's help to do so it may not be a crime to try to enrich yourself with a foreign business deal even while running for president or to lie about it to the american people but it is deeply compromising and not only because the of the inducement of hundreds of millions of dollars no that is only part of it it is also deeply compromising because the russians were on the other end of the transaction and could expose the president's duplicity at any time in fact when the trump organization's efforts to enlist the kremlin's help in the deal were finally exposed dmitry peskov putin's spokesman told the international media that the kremlin never responded to michael cohen's outreach thanks to the mueller report and our own committee's investigation we now know that mr peskov's statement was a lie the kremlin did follow up so here we have the prospect of the kremlin participating in a cover-up by the president of the united states here is what we know the president sought to make money from a foreign power during the campaign so did some of his children so did his campaign manager and deputy campaign manager so did his personal lawyer and his national security adviser some of these actors have been prosecuted but all of their actions are deeply compromising of our national security and yet mueller's report provides no evaluation of the counterintelligence concerns raised by these facts and others of all the questions that mueller helped resolve he left many critical questions unanswered what happened to the counterintelligence investigation were there other forms of compromise like money laundering left out uninvestigated or referred to other offices where individuals granted security clearances that shouldn't have and are there individuals still operating in the administration that leave america vulnerable we are determined to find out and now yield to the ranking member for any opening remarks that he would like to make thank you mr chairman here we are more than two years since democrats from this committee publicly claimed to have more than circumstantial evidence that the trump campaign colluded with russians to hack the 2016 election and more than two years since they read false allegations from the steele dossier into the congressional record at an open hearing of this committee after that the american people were subjected to endless hysteria by the media democrats and anonymous intelligence leakers seemingly every day the media triumphantly published a supposed bombshell story often based on classified documents the reporters had not actually seen which purportedly proved that president trump or some trump associate was a treacherous russian agent democrats on this committee regularly joined the news pundits in denouncing the traitors eventually the democrats became convinced that the mueller report would finally rid them of their sinister president who had the audacity to defeat hillary clinton the entire scheme has now imploded and the collusion accusation has become exposed as a hoax one would think the democrats would simply apologize and get back to lawmaking and oversight but it's clear they couldn't stop this grotesque spectacle even if they wanted to after years of false accusations in mccarthyite smears the collusion hoax now defines the democratic party the hoax is what they have in place of a governing philosophy and or a constructive vision for our country the democrats assembled us today to analyze the shoddy political hit piece known as the mueller report it's written in the same spirit and with the same purpose as the steele dossier which was once championed by democrats on this committee but which they rarely mentioned after it was exposed as yet another democrat created hoax unfortunately for the democrats the mueller dossier as i call it either debunked many of their favorite conspiracy theories or did not even find them worth discussing these include mueller's finding that michael cohen did not travel to prague to conspire with the russians no evidence that carter page conspired with russians no mention of paul manafort visiting julian assange in london no mention of secret communications between a trump tower computer server and russia's alpha bank and no mention of former nra lawyer cleta mitchell or her supposed knowledge of a scheme to launder russian money through the nra for the trump campaign insinuations that mitchell originated these insinuations against mitchell originated with fusion gps chief glenn simpson and were first made public in a document published by democrats on this committee the real purpose of the mueller dossier however was to help democrats impeach the president in absence of any evidence of collusion thus the report includes a long litany of ordinary contacts between trump associates and russians as if a certain number of contacts indicate a conspiracy even if no conversations actually created or even discussed a conspiracy excerpts from a voicemail from trump attorney john dowd that the mueller team selectively edited to make it seem threatening and nefarious no comment on the close relationship between democrat operatives at fusion gps and multiple russians who participated in the june 9 2016 meeting at trump tower in fact no mention or comment on fusion gps at all no useful information on figures who played key roles in the investigation such as joseph mifsud a malta diplomat or the australian diplomat alexander downer or the democrat paid operative former spy christopher steele no useful information about the many irregularities that marred the fbi's russia investigation furthermore the moeller dossier cites dozens of articles from the reporters and publications that were most responsible for perpetuating the russian hoax thus mueller produced a perfect feedback loop intelligence leakers spin a false story to the media the media publishes the story mueller cites the story and the media and the democrats then fake outrage at mueller's findings in some mueller relied on a mass of reporting whose central narrative that the trump campaign colluded with the russians to hack the elections is false and the democrats spread a hoax claiming trump is a russian agent but it was later discovered the only people who colluded with russians were the democrats who paid for the steele dossier which relied on russian sources like to remind the democrats on this committee that this was created to do important oversight work of our intelligence agencies this work is even more crucial now that the media have abandoned their traditional watchdog role and instead have become a mouthpiece of a cabal of intelligence leakers i understand the democrats inability to move past their failed hoax and get back to normal business nevertheless i suggest they give it a try welcome the speakers today and look forward to your testimony yield back thank you to our witnesses for coming before the committee today to ensure that all members are able to ask questions due to competing business of other committees this morning today's witnesses will be afforded five minutes each for their opening statements which will be strictly enforced we'll then proceed immediately to member questions i want to thank our witnesses for joining us for this important open hearing stephanie douglas currently serves as senior managing director of guidepost solutions addressing high-risk investigations and compliance matters prior to this position ms douglas served for over 23 years at the fbi in a variety of roles including as assistant executive assistant director of the national security branch robert anderson is currently the chief executive officer of cyber defense labs and previously was a principal at the chertoff group and managing director at navigant consulting mr anderson served for many years in the fbi rising to be the executive assistant director of the criminal cyber response and services branch i'd also like to welcome the minorities witness andrew mccarthy a former assistant united states attorney like many of our staff from the southern district of new york and currently a senior fellow at the national review institute and a contributing editor of the national review and ms douglas we'll start with you good morning chairmanship ranking member nunez and members of the committee thank you for the opportunity to answer questions relative to volume one of the special counsels report regarding russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as was established and communicated by the u.s intelligence community in early 2017 the russian government systematically and effectively used a number of intelligence tools to impact the 2016 election the special counsel's report supports these conclusions and provides specific and detailed examples which illustrate the methods of russian influence i'm happy to answer questions regarding this report but understand that i have no access to any supporting information or investigative detail other than that that is provided in the special counsel's report i am proud to have been a special agent in the fbi for almost 24 years most of it focused on counterintelligence and national security matters while the fbi has been the subject of much discussion in the press and elsewhere i support the work of the counterintelligence professionals who worked with the special counsels to to conduct this exhaustive investigation i hope that my presence here in our discussion today will lead to further awareness and preparation for what is certain to be another high threat election in 2020 so with that i'm happy to answer your questions thank you mr anderson thank you ranking member nunes and members of the committee thank you for the opportunity to be here today to talk to you about counterintelligence and cyber threats to our great nation i hope that my background and experience as the former assistant director of counterintelligence for the fbi where i was responsible for all counterintelligence espionage and economic espionage matters can assist in shedding some light on the daily threat our country faces from foreign intelligence services these threats were highlighted several times by the heads of the united states intelligence community and also in the report on the investigation into russian interference in the 2016 presidential election which is commonly known now as the mueller report in my current role as the ceo of a cyber security company i see hundreds and hundreds of cyber breaches every year and in my opinion these attacks originate from a variety of criminal organization nation states and hacktivists in my opinion in the last three years these attacks have become more sophisticated prevalent and have occurred on a much larger scale than before i think this is extremely important when we talk about hostile intelligence services and their activities in the 21st century during my career i had the privilege to work for three directors louis free robert muller james comey the last position i held as the chair had said was the executive assistant director of the criminal cyber response and services branch where i managed a number of divisions but i was mainly in charge of high profile criminal and cyber investigations the threats to our country have changed remarkably since when i first entered into law enforcement in 1987 as a young delaware state trooper during my career i had the privilege to work alongside the men and women of the fbi and the united states intelligence community who i can tell you have worked tirelessly to combat these hostile intelligence services activities to our great country as the committee knows the number of sophisticated counterintelligence cyber attacks against this nation's networks and private sector companies and government has increased dramatically i look forward to discussing this issues with you today and the committee and i stand ready for your questions thank you very much thank you mr anderson mr mccarthy thank you mr chairman ranking member nunes members of the committee thank you for inviting me here this morning i served as a federal prosecutor for nearly 20 years almost all of it at the united states attorney's office for the southern district of new york where i retired in 2003 as the chief assistant u.s attorney of the southern district satellite office in white plains since leaving government service i've been a writer and a commentator i'm appearing this morning in my personal capacity as a former government official who cares deeply about our national security and the rule of law for most of my first several years as a prosecutor my work focused on international organized crime after the world trade center was bombed on february 26 1993 i spent much of the last decade of my tenure working on national security investigations i'm proud to have led the successful prosecution of sheikh omar abdul rahman and 11 other jihadists for conspiring to wage a war of urban terrorism against the united states i was privileged in that effort to work alongside a superb team of federal prosecutors support staff and investigators assigned to the fbi's joint counterterrorism task force it was in connection with that investigation that i became intimately familiar with the fbi's counterintelligence mission and the powerful tools that the constitution and federal law make available for the execution of that mission while it escapes the attention of many americans who know the bureau as the nation's premier law enforcement agency the fbi is also as my colleagues at the table have noted our domestic security service uh this is a purposeful arrangement of our on our government's part to have both the national security and the law enforcement mission housed in the same under the same bureaucratic roof and i believe it's a prudent one and that the fbi does it generally speaking in an exceptional fashion i look forward to engaging with the committee i'd make a few general points to start about volume 1 of the report it draws three principal conclusions first the putin regime perceived advantage in a trump victory and conducted its in its operations accordingly second there is evidence that the trump campaign hoped to benefit from the publication of negative information about the opponent and third there is no evidence of a conspiracy between the trump campaign and the russian regime the first of these two findings are more in the nature of political assertions than prosecutorial findings if there is insufficient evidence that a conspiratorial enterprise existed a prosecutor has no business speculating on the motives in a politically provocative manner moreover i do not believe the assertion is borne out by the evidence the report shows that agents of putin's regime express support for trump's candidacy that is entirely consistent with the motivation to incite divisions and dissent in the body politic of free western nations which is russia's mo throughout the world russia's goal is to destabilize western governments which advantages the kremlin by making it more difficult for those governments to pursue their interests in the world putin tends to back the candidates he believes will lose on the theory that an alienated losing faction will make it harder for the winning faction to govern putin is all about russia's interests which is destabilization it is a mistake i respectfully submit to the committee to allow him to divide us by portraying him as on one side or the other side he's against all of us there's no reason to doubt that the trump campaign hoped to benefit from the publication of negative information about secretary clinton that is what campaigns do it is not an admirable aspect of our electoral politics that campaigns seek negative information euphemistically known as opposition research wherever they can find it candidate trump's opposition hoped to benefit from the theft of tax information the clinton campaign took help from elements of the ukrainian government and through its agents it hired a british former spy to tap kremlin-connected operatives for damaging information about trump the first amendment makes it difficult to regulate this sort of thing our guiding principle is that good information will always win out against bogus information we can debate how well that works but we shouldn't pretend that the trump campaign is the first or the only one ever to play this game finally as for the conclusion that there was no trump-russia conspiracy to commit espionage or violate other federal criminal law i believe this had to have been obvious no later than the end of 2017. in september of 2017 the carter page fisa warrant lapsed i'm sorry sir mr mccarthy your time has expired but we'll be happy to receive the thank you sir the complete written testimony i thank you um i recognize myself for five minutes um miss douglas uh the investigation as james comey revealed when he testified before committee um for the first time in open session about the trump investigation uh began as a counterintelligence probe um the mueller report devotes only one paragraph to that counterintelligence investigation in it mr mueller says from its inception the office recognized that its investigation could help could identify foreign intelligence and counter intelligence information relevant to the fbi's broader national security mission fbi personnel who assisted the office established procedures to identify and convey such information to the fbi it then talks about counterintelligence uh fbi agents embedded within mueller's team sending findings back to headquarters um we have yet to see those findings um can you tell us uh the nature of that counterintelligence investigation or a counterintelligence investigation uh where those findings would go within the fbi um whether counterintelligence investigations like criminal probes have a formal opening and a formal closing since the counterintelligence investigation doesn't result necessarily in criminal charges when does the counterintelligence probe come to an end and where do we need to go to find out answers thank you so i i do recall reading that paragraph in the report and uh based on the paragraph it sounds like there are intelligence components sitting within the mueller investigative team that is reporting other information that may fall outside the purview and the scope of the mueller investigation so it could be additional information that they're developing in the course of their investigation that has for counter-intelligence aspects to it that needs to be looked at independent of the mueller investigation so it could be another contact with the russian that they don't think really falls within the scope of the mueller investigation that they then will task out through an intelligence apparatus to an appropriate place either in a field office or to headquarters to run down possibly an investor a separate investigation would be spun up on something like that counterintelligence investigations do have an opening and a closing and they're not unlike criminal investigations in a lot of different ways you have to be able to articulate a predication for an investigation you have to initially kind of take it through a number of different steps to really affirm the allegation in the first place and then as you gather information relative to that allegation you may have an ability to increase the different tools that you use against it based on the amount of evidence information and intelligence that you're gathering under that case authority it could be a preliminary investigation and i know that you're familiar with some of that that there are limited tools that you can deploy against that or it could be a full investigation which allows you a much broader set of investigative tools but it there can be uh beginnings i mean there are beginnings and end ends of these investigations um i hope i explained the intelligence aspect pushing it back to other components that would actually take the lead and do further work on it outside the scope of the mueller investigation yes thank you um mr anderson uh the mueller report focuses really on two things it focuses on the russian hacking dumping operation and it focuses on the russian social media operation and the question of whether a u.s person's conspired with either it does not analyze whether for example financial motivations the president's desire to build a trump tower in moscow or the campaign chairman paul manafort's desire to make money from russian oligarch oleg deripaska or the national security adviser's effort to make money from turkey or other motivations to secure financing for trump properties motivated policies towards russia either during the campaign or thereafter would those be in the nature of counterintelligence concerns and what might concern the fbi about u.s persons of influence and administration seeking to make money from foreign powers even as they guide us policy uh thank you mr chairman first of all uh when it comes to russia and the svr gru or fsb they're number one number two and number three priority is this country they will absolutely exploit any uh avenue uh that they can when it comes to trying to get to the ends to whatever they're trying to do whether it's intelligence or it's looking to potentially extort somebody into action it doesn't surprise me at all that the russian government launched sophisticated cyber operations against our country during the times when we look at it in the report they're some of the best in the world at this quite frankly they will take that information and exploit it in any way they can when it comes to the actual individuals that have been approached or talked to in and around the trump campaign before he became president even afterwards it also doesn't surprise me from what i've read in the mueller report that they are going after or at least looking to appear to meet with numerous individuals around and inside the campaign that is an absolute classic tradecraft of russia and russian intelligence services they'll never have one point of failure if they're looking to try to obtain or pass information or potentially even influence information they'll make sure that they have numerous aspects or points to where they can try to get that done so they answer your questions specifically about that there are definitely situations where in some instances that as stephanie said you would have concerns about that and then you would either go out potentially depending what they saw and talk to the individuals that were being approached or potentially what other information you have you may then open up either assessments or some type of investigation to look at that it would definitely be a counterintelligence concern and and what's the concern when you have policy makers uh seeking to make money from an adversary at the same time they're making policy well there's a that that i think is pretty clear i mean you know in the business world it's a global business and market i understand that but when it comes to national security the country there's specific roles regarding all this with our clearances and also what we can and cannot do why we're a government employee those rules as the committee knows become more intense the higher you go within government and i think you you always have to look at when you're looking at russia there's a so-called president sitting over there that was a former lieutenant colonel in the kgb one of the most vicious intelligence services in history of this world which was disbanded right before he went into politics he absolutely understands how to run proactive intelligence and counterintelligence operations against our country so i think that's a high area of threat where people should be very concerned about that mr nunes thank you mr chairman um i'm concerned about anybody in the department of justice or the fbi uh current or former officials that would think it's okay to open up a counterintelligence investigation into political campaigns i think that's really at the forefront of what we've been facing here mr mccarthy are you aware of of all your 20-plus years at the justice department that there was ever a time a counterintelligence investigation opened up on any presidential campaign that you're aware of i'm not aware of a a specific situation like that we do have a history in this country of uh government interference and political campaigns in fact the the fisa law uh is a vestige of exactly the sort of thing that we're we're talking about in the in the 1960s and 70s um you know political spying and the notion that we needed to give americans a modicum of uh of some it was the reason for the not only creation of the fisa laws but the creation of this committee was to ensure that the intelligence agencies stayed out of politics and that was why we provided oversight and we don't have to get into this too much but as you know the trump team never received a briefing it seems like at some point they would have went to if they had concerns about individuals they would have went to the trump campaign and explained it to them especially since they had two former u.s attorneys on the staff and or on the on the team in both governor christie and former mayor rudy giuliani i want to get to um joseph mifsud because he seems to be the character at the beginning of this saga he's supposedly the one who was able to see or knew about emails and had talked to papadopoulos about emails now only go to what mueller says in his report he portrays him as having deep ties to russia detailing trips to moscow and extensive contacts with russian officials now he stopped mueller stopped short of calling mifsud a russian agent now james comey the former fbi director in the washington post a few weeks ago in fact does call mifsud a russian agent i'm not sure what he knows that mueller does not know however my my big concern about mifsud is that he was a malted diplomat he was worked closely with the italian government he's described in the press as a western intelligence asset by some in the press he worked at the london center that's affiliated with many operations in the uk has been a guest speaker at numerous foreign policy forums all over the globe i think most concerning to me two things are most concerning one is he was knowing to train or train with fbi officials in italy and also that he actually spoke here in the united states congress just steps from the not this committee this is the budget committee that we're in but just a few hundred feet away from the house intelligence committee in 2017 this was after you know he knew all of this supposedly and yet you know that he was invited by our own state department so mr mccarthy my question to you is if if mifsud truly is what james comey says as a russian agent we have compromises in the u.s state department we have compromises within the fbi possibly even the department of justice well you know jim comey has a lot more information about mithsis than i do i've been out of government for a very long time uh i do i do note that the mueller report is very careful i thought about the way that mifsud is described uh they do not uh they they say that he's got deep connections to russia they don't say that he's got deep connections to the russian regime necessarily or certainly to to russian intelligence services i thought it was interesting that we learned in the mueller report that mifsud was actually interviewed by the fbi and denied having told papadopoulos that they discussed emails the reason i found that interesting is if there's anything we learned from the mueller investigation it's that mr mueller was quite good at bringing false statements prosecutions if he thought that he could prove the witnesses who they were interviewing had given false information to the fbi no such prosecution was ever brought against mifsud so i just thought that was a an interesting fact as well and also in the mueller report in one of the footnotes they refer to a media story which i outlined in my opening statement in that same media report that they used to justify where memphis had worked they left out the fact that in that same media story he was described as a western intelligence asset why didn't that make it into the mueller report you're asking the wrong guy it's a little little peculiar i would think my time is up mr chairman i'll yield back mr hymes thank you mr chairman thank you to the panel um the mueller report highlights the counterintelligence risk posed by financial leverage that the russians may have had over individuals a variety of individuals close to president trump especially paul manafort the report explains that quote manafort had connections to russia through his prior work for russian oligarch oleg deripaska and later through his work for a pro-russian regime in ukraine manafort stayed in touch with these contacts during the campaign period through constantine kalimnik a longtime manafort employee who previously ran manafort's office in kiev and who the fbi assesses to have ties to russian intelligence we also know from reporting that manafort owed dairy pasqua substantial sums of money many of manafort's contacts with kremlin-aligned actors took place while he was chairman of donald trump's campaign among other things manafort quote instructed rick gates his deputy on the campaign and a longtime employee to provide kalimnik with updates on the trump campaign including internal polling data it appears that manafort believed that by sharing confidential campaign information with derry pasca one of putin's most loyal oligarchs he could resolve their quote disagreement originating from several lawsuits filed by dario pasca against manafort the ranking members opening comments that the contacts with russia were ordinary notwithstanding and and mr mccarthy with due respect your many decades of service uh to this country that is not what campaigns do uh and i sharing uh internal polling data with a hostile foreign power is not what campaigns do i'm willing to bet you or anybody else my next paycheck that not a single member of the united states congress the 535 of us ever asked our campaign managers to share our internal polling data with a hostile foreign power so uh mr anderson let me start with you how could the kremlin or its intelligence services try to exploit manafort's long-standing business and personal relationship with constantine kalimnik who the fbi assesses to have ties to russian intelligence uh and to deripaska how could they use that relationship what counter-intelligence risks are posed by such a relationship with the presidential campaign well there's a lot uh sir one obviously they would exploit if they did have financial leverage on that individual they would exploit every aspect of that the one thing i will tell you about russian intelligence services is if you read a book from 1940 to the same they are a in your face uh not a very polite bunch of people that will use any means possible once they've locked on into an individual that they deem necessary to get to whatever end they're going after so not only would they exploit financial information from mr manafort or anybody else that they could but they would also use that then to look at individuals around those financial transactions so in other words not only going directly at mr manafort but potentially going at individuals around those financial transactions that if for some reason that did not work against him they would look at other avenues to get towards that thank you um ms douglas let me ask you um a variant of that question how could russia's knowledge of manafort's elicit dealings for which he is now a tenant of the united states government which stemmed from his work with pro kremlin parties in ukraine be useful as compromise or compromising material as the russian government undertook a covert influence effort directed at the u.s public how could how could the russians use what they knew about paul manafort to their advantage well i think they did it very effectively um and one of the ways they they did it that it's immediately apparent is they actually tasked him and that's how that's one of the initial tests when you are developing an asset for intelligence collection can you elaborate on that you just said that the russians tasked the campaign chairman of donald trump's campaign can you just elaborate on how the russians they asked him to provide polling data and like you said i mean polling data isn't the keys to the kingdom right but it is a small step that illustrates his willingness to provide information to someone he knows he's beholding to financially right an ongoing lawsuit fees that are owed and he is willing to provide internal campaign information to a foreign government and to a person who was closely tied to the kremlin and i think that is a great illustration of how the russians work and paul manafort was very very uh forward-leaning on volunteering all of his his abilities his experience his connections he made all that available in addition but i thought that that was very interesting that they are tasking him and building upon that and if he would have stayed with the campaign i am sure they would have continued to task him thank you i'm out of time so i yield back the balance of my time thank you mr conaway thank you chairman i thank our witnesses former uh fbi director comey testified before this committee an open session that the fbi coordinates with the intelligence community as an investigative technique in its investigations it's since been become clear that the u.s intelligence community expended much time and resources in supporting the fbi's investigation into the trump campaign for alleged but unfounded collusion with the russian with russia regarding the 2016 election in december of 2016 nearly a month after the election president obama finally ordered a review of russian activities targeting the election why would the administration not conduct this type of comprehensive review earlier especially given the october 2016 public statement by dhs odni and the fbi regarding russian cyber activity why the timing sure i think that they did take some investigative steps is it's debatable whether they certainly whether they should have taken more i i think to hear them tell it they would say that they had to weigh the difference the the competing cost between what the reaction would have been if they had appeared to be putting their thumb on the scale in the middle of the campaign in an investigative way versus uh how do we stop russia from doing what russia was doing and i think you can you can certainly argue whether they made the right value judgment there so the uh is it appropriate then though for uh outgoing administration to use these extensive resources of the cia nsa and the federal bureau to conduct that assessment and publicly release that assessment but not give the uh the incoming and not consult with the incoming administration that that's what they were doing to my mind the the assessment is very peculiar in that having worked in the government for a very long time ordinarily the kind of an assessment that they were that you're talking about there would be something that would take well over a year to do certainly many months to do even under circumstances where the information was readily available to investigators who had who had things like grand jury power in order to conduct the investigation seems to me that in this instance there was a rush to get that out within a matter of days and then roll it out while president obama was still president all three of you have at least missed douglas and mr anderson have extensive um careers with the fbi is it i don't want to phrase the question telegraph the answer but troubling relationships within the hierarchy of the top fbi and their attitude toward this trump administration and the and the uh uh conflict of interest that that seems to have to most folks um have been in place uh we're worried about a uh a commercial transaction openly commercial transaction that the trump tower would have been in moscow no way to hide that there's no cutout entities being involved in between those but yet folks at the top of the fbi disdainful of the president incoming president conducting this investigation is that the standard for the fbi or do they do you today did you in the place police yourselves better than to uh to show those conflicts of interest among the folks that are leading investigations sure so i mean i think first of all in any criminal or counterintelligence investigation period it should be neutral you should be looking at a neutral playing field and developing the evidence to see where it leads you and it should be able to stand on its own so i think that is the way i worked it and was involved in cases for my whole career as far as all the stuff that's going on in the last couple of years it's obviously very dis concerning about the different accusations that are taking place i think that any of these investigations should have looked at specific facts and let the facts lead you where they go it should not matter one iota if somebody's a republican a democrat or an independent mr douglas what was your experience very very similar to bob's experience um you know we were even talking earlier we don't even know political preferences and we've been friends for two decades um it's just it's not and everybody comes into every position does a certain level of leadership fail if that's the normal normal way of operating how did it fail with respect to several of the top uh folks involved in the briefings of the campaign and other things going on how did it how did their how did it how did you let how did that happen where they had clear preferences for uh trump getting beat uh they had some sort of secret weapon how did the system fail itself uh i i have no idea uh i can tell you and we talked about this earlier uh pete strzok was my chief of staff when i was the assistant director of counterintelligence i've never saw that side of what i saw in the emails and text messages and those text messages and emails are unbelievably inappropriate and i think the corrective action that was taken from that was just but uh i can't answer your question congressman because i didn't see it i said thank you for sharing your back mr quigley thank you mr chairman thank you all for being here today a store we know all so well beginning in the spring and summer of 2016 the gru hacks clinton campaign manager john podesta's email the d-trip the dnc the gir then systematically released the hacked emails through their online personas lucifer dc uh dc leaks as as well as wikileaks they seem the russians appear to have timed the releases to maximize the effort to harm the clinton campaign to maximize the benefit to the trump campaign according to the report we also know in the report there's a lot of evidence that trump campaign knew about the wikileaks releases welcome them strategize about how to amplify the message as part of the campaign in fact uh donald trump jr communicated directly with wikileaks in october of 2016 in an effort to use the hackmail hacked emails as to the campaign's advantage a report indicates that the president himself knew about the planned dump of emails seems like an obvious question from a counterintelligence perspective what might the set of facts suggest about the relationship between the campaign and wikileaks what might you worry about if a u.s presidential campaign had four knowledge of the release more broadly what counterintelligence risk exists when a campaign uses this information about a political opponent that was stolen and released by a foreign adversary mr anderson uh thank you sir uh first of all it troubles me that no one if they did not communicate this type of information to some government agency just because of the facts laid out in the report and what you just brought up i think also there needs to be a heightened sense of counterintelligence relationships as administrations move into the white house i think in this administration unlike other administrations that i've seen or been involved in preparing briefs for the president or whoever to read these to understand the concerns of it i didn't see a lot of people within that uh at least from the layman's eyes looking in from the outside that even understood counterintelligence or understood that these threats were real i think there should be a lot of that the other point and i think this is an important point when russia is releasing information through different what i would call cutouts i.e wikileaks and other platforms this is not unusual in a lot of ways they're doing that to start to sew the web so broad and wide it's hard for us as an intelligence organization or group of intelligence organizations to start looking at who actually got that information how did they get for information and why are they using it that is done absolutely on purpose it would not surprise me if there is a lot of other entities that the russian intelligence services had teed up to maybe maybe displace more information that they never utilized so going back to your original question that's why it's so important and individuals that are giving information as stephanie said are being tasked and then receiving information that is the initial way that you vet any asset or any person that you're targeting for a possible either unwitting asset or recruitment in the future and that those actions can take anywhere from a few weeks to years depending how that organization is going to go after that person miss douglas i'd just like to add i think if if you're a a foreign power and you have a campaign or individuals who are willing to entertain [Music] receiving information that you were collecting for their benefit uh i think that is a tacit approval of that action and i think that's where we have to be careful of allowing uh people to communicate to either a foreign government a foreign actor that what they're doing which is illegal by hacking and collecting information and then releasing it giving that kind of approval by a head nod or a suggestion or uh you know any kind of inference that it's okay is it a tacit approval of that kind of behavior and i think that puts us at greater risk limited time i have mr mccarthy have you read the report in its entirety uh well i i should say i've read all of volume one because i knew that we were going to be discussing it today and i've read most of volume two i appreciate that uh you're ahead of most you read then for about all the context that took place coming over from the russian side at any of those points sir putting yourself in the place of those who received those contacts at any of those points would you have called the fbi well i will self personally i have called the fbi yes i i call the fbi for things probably a lot less serious than that i imagine but thank you um yeah you know i i do think however yes you feel about the report do you think someone should have called the fbi yes i think um there's no question and and my colleagues here of work counterintelligence i'm certain would tell you we always want information any information that would be helpful to us in apprising what the the the likely intentions of potentially hostile powers are where it gets where it gets dicey and where you have to be careful is if you are going to use investigative techniques that require a particular quantum of intelligence then you have to make sure that you satisfy that quantum of intelligence before you trigger that technique and that i think is where you you go from the from the mere collection of information to doing something that's more active thank you mr turner i yield my five minutes to congressman radcliffe thank the gentleman for yielding thank the witnesses for being here mr mccarthy uh in volume one of the mueller report bob mueller details what he calls sweeping and systematic efforts to influence the 2016 election by the russian government those details are largely set forth in two separate indictments one identifying 12 russian hackers associated with the gru and another one identifying 13 russian individuals and three organizations part of russia's internet research agency is that an accurate summary yes did the special counsel find that those sweeping and systematic efforts to influence our election begin before or after donald trump's entry into the 2016 presidential field if i'm remembering correctly he takes it back to 2014. was it also significantly before was it also determined that russia's sweeping and systematic efforts to interfere in the 2016 election not only predated donald trump's entry into the campaign but also included some actions by the russians govern the russian government that were decidedly anti-trump in nature yeah i think toward the end that in particular was true and was it based mr mccarthy on uh evidence gathered by a team of nearly 60 fbi agents and prosecutors over a two-year period by bob mueller's team to make an evidence-based decision not to charge any american much less anyone associated with the trump campaign with any complicity with any conspiracy with any collusion related crime in russia's election interference that's that's my understanding and yet despite the special counsel's finding that neither donald trump or anyone associated with his campaign conspired or colluded with or was in any way successful in meddling in the 2016 presidential election it's hard to argue that russia wasn't successful in their ultimate goal of undermining the outcome of our election in sowing the seeds of discord in the american democratic process we need look no further than this very room to see evidence of russia's success our country just endured a two-year investigation to determine whether or not the president of the united states was part of a treasonous conspiracy with a foreign adversary to steal an american election yet the same democratic party that started the investigation into that alleged conspiracy that the special counsel conclusively and unequivocally established never existed now convenes this hearing to talk about it some more so let's talk about some of the reasons why the russians might have been so successful in sowing the seeds of discord into the american public's mind let me ask you about some factors that may or may not have contributed to russia's success first the obama administration's decision not to advise candidate trump during a defensive briefing in early august of 2017 about suspected russian interference or infiltration into his campaign while simultaneously opening a probe of the trump campaign using foreign counter intelligence spying authorities do you think that might have been a factor that contributed to russia's success to russia's success in sowing discord into the body politic yes i don't know if russia goes tactic by tactic i'll say this i think russia succeeded beyond its wildest dreams if that is what its intentions were i don't i don't think that that necessarily means that uh particular entreaties by russians to people who were connected to any campaign is something that that isn't alarming and and shouldn't have been shouldn't erase people's uh hackles up so let me ask you the obama administration's uh intelligence community assessment that you referred to earlier which was used to tell the american public that not only did russia interfere with the 2016 election but did so because vladimir putin was trying to get donald trump elected do you think that might have been a factor in russia's success well i i think in terms of sowing discord into our body politics the fact that that particular conclusion does not seem to me to be compelling given what the evidence is and given what we understand putin's general approach the united states and the west is i don't think it helps to have people come out and say you know putin was was in trump's camp when it appears that if we look at everything putin does everywhere putin is in the camp of the people he thinks are going to lose because he thinks that's better for him the obama administration's use of fisa warrants obtained through verified applications based on the unverified steele dossier which the obama justice department and the fbi knew to be an uncorroborated clinton campaign opposition research document do you think that was a factor that contributed to russia's success i think we don't know everything we need to know about the fisa applications but from what i've seen of them i think they certainly should have been more forthcoming with the court about what the the provenance of the the uh dossier was and when obama admits the time of the gentleman has expired i appreciate the uh in chairman's indulgence since he asked questions for uh seven minutes and 27 seconds could i have an additional minute to finish my chairman and the ranking member's prerogative to go beyond the fight i understand that i'm just asking for your information we may have time for one last question well obviously i uh only have uh five minutes has expired and i've run out of time to stop listing all the other things that the obama administration did or didn't do to cause or contribute to the success of russia in undermining the 2016 election so since the purpose of this hearing mr cart mr mccarthy is to learn lessons from the mueller report do you think it's fair for a lot of the questions that this committee needs to be asking to understand and to hopefully prevent russia's success in undermining future elections ought to be focused on the administration of president obama rather than president trump i think it would be a very good thing for the country if we had a common understanding that putin has has it in for us whether this country is being run by republicans or democrats and that what his objective is is to destabilize the united states so that we can't pursue and protect our interest in the world which is good for russia i very much appreciate the chairman's indulgence thank you and i yield back mr heck thank you mr chairman add my expression of gratitude to all the panelists for their being here so by now we know that the mueller report included numerous examples of russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and we know that the special counsel in his public presentation closed his remarks by suggesting that absolutely every american should be concerned about this i know we all are instead however of addressing what fbi director ray described as an ongoing threat contrasted to that we have the president who has attacked the special counsel's investigation attacked the fbi generally tried to undermine the work product of the mueller investigation more to the point of this hearing the president has called russia's attacks at various times and repeatedly on our democracy quote a hoax and he is literally cited as we famously know with vladimir putin over our own intelligence agencies considering that past is often prologue we are all greatly concerned that similar interference will occur in the future so for my question which i think i want to start with mr anderson i want to briefly tell this story i had the great privilege to serve as chief of staff to a governor in washington state booth gardner several decades ago one budget cycle we didn't have the money to propose as high a salary increase for public employees as they sought that difference of opinion became quite manifestly contentious the governor accepted an invitation to go to our capitol rotunda to address the public employees for many months and when he went out there weren't hundreds there were thousands there and they lined the walls in several levels and it was difficult for him to give his remarks because they were expressing their understandable frustration in quite loud terms walking back to our office i turned to the governor and asked i don't understand why you did more affirmatively defend your point of view and i'll never forget what he told me he turned to me and he said denny that's our workforce if we are going to accomplish anything it is going to be with that workforce those are our people we are only able to do what we can do through them so my question mr anderson is uh as a former senior official at the fbi despite the public statements of stiff upper lip we're professionals we put our heads down we go to work every day is the bureau and most importantly our workforce those dedicated professionals completely immune from these attacks by the president of the united states and i know you're not there now but if you were there i'd be curious as to what your reaction would have been to that and what you think might be the reaction by the workforce and do you think that they would be concerned about their job or their work in light of frankly unwarranted attacks thank you congressman uh first of all i've never i've never seen anything like this uh in my almost 30 years law enforcement too uh i think the fbi for over 100 years has been through a lot of ups and downs but i i personally think it's taken a toll look the men and women of the united states intelligence community fbi they're going to go to work and give 110 every day and work 18 hours every day people don't see that but i do think this takes a toll and the one thing that i will tell you when it comes to russia and many other nation states to this country um they didn't just start on this thing back in 2014 which this report says and they didn't go away they're not leaving i can guarantee you they're still here looking at the next presidential election and figuring out how they can attack it through sigit humid cyber or any other way they can and i think overall i think that does take an effect miss douglas thinking more prospectively because our primary concern here is what we can do to avoid this kind of interference in the future do you believe that there would be a net gain or a benefit if we created an affirmative duty to report any time that there is this kind of contact with foreign representatives i think it would have to be very well crafted uh given that uh people come in contact all the time with foreign nationals it is a global world i mean representatives official representatives of a presidential campaign i think even then you you're gonna have to be very careful on how you would do that i i just think that there's uh so much interaction in the global world um even here in uh you know there's so many opportunities to meet people uh for the most part they're not malicious they're not intelligence officers uh i think it's you know possibly something to consider but again it would have to be very well crafted that it would be appropriate and uh would be something that you could actually do and be able to uh hold people accountable to so my my time has expired obviously still beg the question that i hope we'll get a chance to get into is what your recommendations would be to avoid this kind of interference moving forward thank you are you back mr chairman dr wenstrup thank you mr chairman thank you all for being here you know as a veteran i have always tried to put my country first and you know through all of this that we're talking about i think one of the things i'm most disturbed about is that an american political party would hire a foreign agent who works with agents of a foreign power namely russians to create a fake document to attempt to destroy their american political opponent and yet many an authority seemingly completely choose to ignore that that that's not part of the conversation you know in 2018 the committee's then majority found no evidence colluding collusion coordination or conspiracy between the trump campaign the russian government we did address russian interference and their tactics and what we would try to do in the future to disseminate that two years ago on this committee which was my second term on this committee things changed we were very non-partisan it changed and the division on this committee grew and i sat here and i said to the entire committee what's going on right now is exactly what mr putin wants we're giving him everything he has worked for and as you said i think it beyond his wildest dreams we have but through all this here we are and with a team of approximately 19 lawyers lawyers 40 fbi agents intelligence and analysts forensic accountants and other professional staff the special counsel's office which issued more than 2 800 subpoenas executed nearly 500 search warrants interviewed nearly 500 witnesses and made nearly 13 requests to for foreign governments concluded that the investigation did not establish that the members of the trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the russian government in its election interference activities mr mccarthy do you believe special counsel's office was properly resourced to conduct a thorough investigation i i think they had more than the resources they needed and had appropriate access to an investigative tools so far as i know i i can only answer these questions as a as a person analyzing it from the outside who has like some but you have experience in this arena and so your perception i have no reason to think that they didn't have everything they needed in the way of access and resources and i would i would suggest and you can agree or disagree they had more access and tools than any congressional committee has that's that's on you doctor well i believe that to be the case but with all these resources at hand i find it hard to believe the special counsel's office [Music] if if they had all these tools that they likely would have found more than circumstantial evidence of collusion if had it if it had existed in plain sight well let me ask you this how are confidential human sources and counterintelligence investigations vetted the fbi has a a generally speaking pretty i mean it can vary from person to person and these are very uh the human dynamic in my experience of dealing with informants never goes away so there are peculiarities and eccentricities that that you have to deal with on both the informant side and the agent side and it's often very difficult work for the agent because i was a prosecutor the agent has to take the brunt of uh of some of the more crazy stuff so that the prosecutors can you know focus on the case are they vetted once or they vet it over and over again are they vetted every time maybe someone else would like to answer that question they are vetted more than once they're vetted regularly um they're tested depending on what how you use an asset if you're operationally tasking an asset there are ways you can test your asset to make sure that they're providing credible information they go through a vetting system on a regular basis their files are reviewed at a supervisory level they can be pulled and audited for any purpose by headquarters and an other asset my time my time is short but i appreciate your answer so if the fbi were to run a confidential human source into a u.s political campaign or against individuals associated with the campaign would the fbi notify someone in the campaign to let them know that that was happening and if not why not ordinarily no if if you're investigating the campaign you wouldn't notify the campaign now there's a difference if it's not the if it's not the candidate but someone in the campaign you have no evidence that the candidate is doing this wouldn't you want to let the candidate know the nominee for president of the united states that someone in their campaign may be doing this it seems to me you're in a different position at that time well i but i do think that this goes to what some of the members of the committee have mentioned which is the idea of whether you do a defensive briefing or not i think if what you think is that you have some people who are in the orbit of the campaign who are problematic that might be something you'd give the the campaign a heads up in the connection of doing a defensive briefing if you've decided that everything in the steele dossier is true and the candidate is the problem i don't see how you would notify the the campaign since the candidate is the one person the campaign's not going to get rid of well if someone in my campaign was doing something nefarious and engaging with a hostile foreign entity i would sure hope i was informed i yield that mosul so my line of questioning has to do with the 14 pages in the mueller report that deals with papadopoulos's uh meeting with um uh myths um joseph misawitt according to the mueller report in late april 2016 papadopoulos was told by the london base professor joseph misfoot immediately after his return from a trip to moscow that the russian government had obtained dirt on and that's quote a quotation from the mueller report this is i had obtained dirt on a can on candidate clinton in the form of thousands of emails one week later on may 6 2016 papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the the trump campaign had received indications from the russian government that it would assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate clinton mr anderson it appears to me that uh from reading of the the mueller report that joseph misfit was cultivated and communicated sensitive information to um to george papadopoulos who by march 2016 had been publicly named as the foreign policy adviser to the can to then candidate trump why might this type of cultivation race flags at the bureau i would suggest that the fact that he was so engaged with papadopoulos that he was a proxy of the kremlin in that case uh in this case can you elaborate a little bit about um your thoughts about that meeting between papadopoulos uh and misfit and what you what red flags that would raise uh and how a foreign power would seek to leverage a relationship like that uh to its own uh intelligence gathering or policy objectives thank you for the question uh i think one of the things people need to realize is when foreign powers are actually going out individuals to try to gain access or potentially recruit or use them unwittingly it's not like you see on tv a lot of the times the people that are coming at people they intentionally i don't know if he was a source of the russian government or not but they will utilize individuals in academia they will utilize people in certain social sections they will utilize people outside of threatening environments to where you're meeting with an official of the russian government and so for people like me that have worked this for a very long time and seen thousands of these different types of cases that does raise the level of suspicion now the one thing that troubles me even more is once the tasking starts and as stephanie said earlier i cannot tell you when it comes to validating vetting potentially recruiting or just seeing if this is somebody that you should potentially spot and assess for later recruitment this is a big deal and they're going to watch to see what the information is given and then given back to that individual so from an academic side i can tell you that the russians intelligence services use this a lot yep and they also use it in different circles so miss douglas papadopoulos was told by joseph misfit that russia had clinton emails and crucially of russia's desire to release them anonymously well before that fact became public why might a foreign adversary like russia want to provide such sensitive information to someone like papadopoulos a presidential campaign campaign staffer and why might they they and what might they seek to gain from from having that right you know one of the things i thought was very interesting is papadopoulos said that he was of no interest initially when he met uh mr misford right until he told him that he was involved with the campaign and then all of a sudden there was this um re-engagement after you return from moscow um i you know he is one of the many uh areas where they're looking for opportunities and they're looking to establish relationships uh that maybe are not overly successful on that first once or twice with their actually have conversations but they they want to establish a relationship for the future george papadopoulos mate wasn't a heavy player in the campaign you know he was very early on with his assignment at the campaign when they started having conversations but the russians know that hey he's early on with the the campaign now he could potentially be with the administration in the future and we want to get in good with him now you know through uh misfoot and another russian national papadopoulos was introduced to members of the russian uh ministry of foreign affairs papadopoulos used his relationship with the russian ministry of foreign affairs to push for a secret meeting between donald trump and and and vladimir putin uh what sort of countervailing and risk counterintelligence risks might a secret meeting between a candidate trump and veteran battle or putin uh putin um generate well obviously uh pre-election uh trying to set up a meeting between a candidate and you know a leader of our post most significant adversary outside normal channels and papadopoulos putting himself in that position where he could actually arrange it honestly puts the campaign at even greater jeopardy thank you thank you mr chairman let's do it thank you mr i'm sorry ms douglas i uh i appreciate what you said you said something exactly right i love the fact that you and mr anderson worked side by side by each other and was not aware of each other's political views that's the way it should be for law enforcement professionals especially and when i listen to mr comey director of the fbi mr brannon director of the cia the director of national intelligence they sound like political hacks and i wonder how in the world could someone so political and so partisan be selected such position of leadership you two set a much much better example of that mr chairman i'm glad you had this hearing it gives us a chance to tell the american people the truth it's it took courage to hold a hearing that demonstrates that much of what people have heard for the last two years simply is not true and to emphasize what the mueller report clearly found the special counsel did not find the trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired coordinated with russian government despite multiple efforts by russian-affiliated individuals to assist the trump campaign i i'd like to emphasize something that i feel very strongly about and i think the american people feel very strongly about this it's unfair in fact i think it's un-american to make accusations about people without evidence to destroy the lives of and the presumption of innocence to destroy people's professional lives their destroy them financially to try them in the media when they don't have the ability to defend themselves the american people know these things aren't aren't fair and the mole report and hearings such as this gives us a chance to emphasize that i'd like to dive into what is one of the more troubling aspects of this episode and that is the fize application fize application is a very very intrusive tool it allows someone to essentially survey your email your text your personal contacts family and friends i'm going to use a word and heads are going to explode but essentially allows you to spy on u.s citizens and yet knowing the fi's application was based on the steele dossier mr mccarthy i'll start with you should the fbi have taken steps to verify the contents of the steele dossier prior to including it in the advise application i believe they should have i think that steele was in the position not of a source of information but an accumulator of he's he's in in this equation he's much more like a case agent than a source generally speaking for prosecutors in courts in any warrant situation whether it's a fisa warrant or not the source information are the people who see and hear make the observations that the court is being asked to rely on for purposes of probable cause it generally doesn't matter whether your case agent is credible it's whether the source information well and this is stating the painfully obvious the fbi should verify information before presenting it before the fisa courts we all agree on that before any court but before any court absolutely if you mean by verified corroborate yeah absolutely especially with fisa court though because there is no defender of the of the person being accused in this case and i'm i'm sure the three of you are familiar with steele dossier is that true i've never read this deal never read it mr anderson i have not read it either okay i've write it well i would okay mr mccarthy thank you i would challenge you or anyone who's read the steele dossier to tell us anything in there that we now know is true do you know of any accusation made in the steele dossier that we know now is true there are a number of assertions that are made in the sealed dossier which are um true but of not great importance like for example we know that carter page did go to moscow in july for example but but that's what he did there is the subject of a great deal of of uh of back and forth but whether he went there or not which the still dossier asserts is not i don't think in common well and so that's not an accusation because that's not a crime going to moscow it's none of it is a when you're dealing in counter-intelligence none of it is necessarily a crime my question is whether he's acting as a agent of a foreign power and and so my point being is that this thing which was almost entirely the basis for the fives application we now know that almost all the accusations in there are not true none of them have been proven true and and so that then begs the second question and that is to your knowledge and i'll ask any of the three of you because you surely have knowledge of this has the fbi ever used political opposition research funded by a u.s political campaign and including information from foreign agents in a counterintelligence investigation mr anderson are you aware of that ever happening before um i i'm not aware of anything it doesn't mean that it hasn't potentially happened before but i'm not aware miss douglas yeah i'm not familiar with any prior use mr mccarthy yeah may i just say i've taken information from the worst people on the planet i've taken information from terrorists i've taken it from murderers from swindlers when you do this kind of work the people that you get information from tend not to be you know the the kinds of people the question is do you what do you do with the information when you get it and the more suspect that the source of the information is the more and higher your obligation is to verify it before you use it in any way that's going to intrude on anyone's rights yeah yeah thank you my time has expired we'll talk again thank you mr castro thank you chairman i want to ask you about michael flynn and particularly his relationship and his actions with respect to russian ambassador kislyak and his attempt to undermine the obama administration's sanctions that were put into place in december 2016. michael flynn used secret back channel discussions with the russian ambassador to in effect undermine the obama administration's ongoing foreign policy so my question is what counterintelligence concerns arise from this type of back channel coordination between an incoming presidential administration and a foreign adversary why would the fbi be concerned with an incoming national security advisor conducting foreign policy before the new president has ever taken office and also without informing the state department well first of all one of the things when it comes to back channel communications on political or national security issues or views from the white house one of the things that russia and other significant nation states intelligence organizations try to have that created and the reason they do is they try to get the current administration whether it's the one that's currently in there now or whenever having their public face confused what either the state department's saying or people that are saying stuff through a back channel this is absolutely the exact same thing that was going on with the maria patina case which i was the expert for for the department of justice four weeks ago it are sentencing and they will do it at different levels so regardless if it's national security advice of the president which once the individual moves into office it's not unusual for them to be talking to a multitude of ambassadors the key here is russia wants to get the administration whatever administration that is off balance with what their real political views are and potential back channels and i would just obviously agree that it was it immediately put the existing administration uh in a horribly conflicted position and they didn't know it by the back channel in advance of inauguration it jeopardized how the u.s was viewed by the russians and also it probably assured the russians that they were going to get a more favored treatment by the incoming administration and even mike flynn says that when he when he says i didn't put any of this in an email or note because i thought it looked like we were undermining the current administration and indeed that's exactly what he was doing and you know the mueller report explains that flynn had a pre-existing relationship with russia going back to at least late 2015 when he traveled to moscow to attend an event organized by the russian state-backed media outlet rt at which he sat next to vladimir putin himself flynn also reportedly met secretly with ambassador kislyak on several occasions during the transition period in december 2016. and so my question is what do you make of this relationship in particular and given flynn's role as the head of the defense intelligence agency and the incoming national security adviser and how might russia exploit this relationship with flynn to affect united states policy you know i'll just speak from my own personal experience obviously having known and worked with mike flynn i would say it was a very surprising position for him to take obviously he had very high level access to information and then seeing that as a close business and personal relationship was concerning anyone else i would just say going back and this goes back this all goes back to the clearance process and having sustainable clearances above the secret level of tssci we have very well-defined reporting requirements i mean i would report yearly just to maintain your top-secret clearance as assistant director of counter-intelligence traveling around the world engaging with foreign intelligence organizations hundreds of contacts of individuals that would either talk to me stop by have a conversation and i think part of this is when it gets into the aspect of when individuals aren't reporting that and the second they start having clandestine or secret meetings it puts them in a very vulnerable position it leaves them open to blackmail and well it's a ve it's definitely a vulnerable position because there's nobody in the room with you that can say hey here's exactly how the conversation went so and these are all tricks of the trade when it comes to hostile adversaries and intelligence services thank you chairman i yield back mr crawford thank you mr chairman uh thank the witnesses for being here today in 2017 uh former cia director brennan stated an open hearing in this committee that russian active measures to impact u.s had been going on for decades in 2012 then candidate for president romney stated he believed russia posed the greatest threat to the united states to which president obama replied the 80s called they want their foreign policy back in 2014 then chairman now ranking member nunes warned of russian malign influence campaigns all of this acknowledgement of russia and their intentions and yet no response from the obama administration so there's a lot of conspiracy theory swirling around about russia collusion so let's just add this one is it possible that a group of politically motivated individuals at the highest echelons of national security decided to turn a blind eye to this activity feeling that it would in fact enhance their candidates chances of winning i don't expect you to answer that but i do expect you to consider it and with that i'll yield to mr ratliff ratcliffe the balance of my time thank the gentleman for yielding i want to follow up uh on mr stewart's uh line of questioning about the fisa process and the steele dossier's role in that according to sworn testimony given by former doj associate deputy attorney general bruce orr he said under oath that he had advised andy mccabe deputy director of the fbi uh peter strzok and lisa page at the fbi in early august of 2016 that christopher steele was in fact motivated and desperate to stop a trump presidency separately documents that have now been made public pursuant to a foia request indicate that a state department employee kathleen cavaleck advised the fbi that about concerns over christopher steele's credibility based in part on his assertion that this well-developed conspiracy with russia was being run out of uh the russian consulate in miami where russia does not have a consulate um so mr mccarthy i want to ask you to um tell me what you think about that information and whether and how that information about christopher steele should have impacted how this deal and whether the steele dossier should have been presented to the fisa court and you mentioned it but i think it's worth mentioning again to also address as part of that whether or not it was appropriate to represent christopher steele as a source of information in that application yeah my main overarching problem with it is that i think it was objectionable to take somebody who was in the position really of a case agent and refer to him and treat him as if he were a source when he did not make the observations that the court was being asked to rely on for purposes of probable cause now if you want to take the position that i'm wrong about that then i think the second thing that has to be said is that the more remote that somebody is from the observations you're asking a court to rely on the more you have to do in the way of being transparent as far as what that person's biases are potentially it's one thing to say that you know somebody who who sees something criminal happen brings a lot of baggage to the table but they either saw what they saw or they didn't and the and the circumstances surrounding that can can tell you a lot more than their bias can if you're talking about somebody who's remote from that and here we're talking about somebody who may be three four five hearsay steps remote from it i think you have a higher obligation to be straight with the court about what that person's baggage is in in terms of bias motivation economic motivation whatever and i a just a rule of thumb and i think any good federal judge would tell you this if you need to write a footnote that takes a page and a half in order to avoid writing the sentence and he's connected to the clinton campaign then you should probably disclose that he's connected to the clinton campaign thank you um ms douglas or mr anderson anything about what mr mccarthy just related that you would disagree with or want to clarify you know i'll i'll just add that on the counter intelligence and on the counter terrorism side we have we take information from sources that aren't right there and it's been critically important in a lot of cases especially in the counterterrorism world where you have a person who's receiving information or hears of information that you make every effort to validate and corroborate and is that source trusted and that's where you really have to you have to look to see has that source provided reliable information in the past and i am not defending the steele dossier and i don't even think that comes up in the mueller report actually but i would just say that the fbi did have reliable reporting excuse me from steel in the past and you know maybe that gave them some assurance to it and then also i i think it's important for everyone to know the steele dossier wasn't stapled to a cover sheet for the fisa application the fisa application has more information than just the seal dossier and i i do think that that is important to know real quick sir just two things one is the court needs to have complete transparency in any pfizer title three about any information full stop it should never be anything other than that and the last thing i would say is after a pfizer title three is running and you can use either nowadays and counterintelligence depending what you're doing if you find out something about the information you supply to the court after it's running and it's inaccurate it is incumbent upon us to go back to the court and explain that to the court that's the only other two points thank you i appreciate the gentleman yielding and i yield back mr maloney uh thank the witnesses for being here just to return um for a minute to paul manafort in the issue of sharing intelligence excuse me and sharing internal polling data consider the following from the mueller report quote because of questions about the polling data after it was sent to kalimnik the office could not assess what kalimnik or others he may have given it to did with it uh close quote further the report notes that quote gates believed manafort sent polling data to dara pasca so the deripaska would not move forward with his lawsuit against manafort close quote manafort also briefed kalimnik on the trump campaign and manafort's plan to win including campaign messaging and a discussion of battleground states including michigan wisconsin pennsylvania minnesota what are they what are they what are the counterintelligence concerns about that that the chairman of a presidential campaign would be providing that kind of information i think paul manafort is trying to sell himself right so i mean he clearly talks about his time on the campaign being good for his business his plan was to go out and monetize his expertise after the campaign and and i'm excuse me no i'm just saying i think he is providing polling data he is talking to kalimnik he is doing everything he can to put his name out there with oligarchs which are very much part of the intelligence apparatus for the russian government this is the senior person on the trump campaign at the time and i'm intrigued by your point about tasking and i'd just like you to return to that for a minute because isn't that really the magic moment isn't the magic moment when you've done all this work and you've been cultivating people like this and you tiptoe up to them and use all these un offensive uh contacts to get near them and then you give them something to do that's wrong that's inappropriate and they know it's wrong and they do it is that when you got them yes of course and it just continues to increase and you know that's why i said i mean the trump administration is so lucky to have paul manafort out of there because manafort was not going to stop at polling data because it's a test right if he'll do that he'll do the next thing and the deeper they get in the more they gotta gotta keep going right and and so it's fair to say had he stayed on as chairman they would have kept tasking him right i would definitely assume that and that's how you get in deeper and deeper and deeper not fair to say yes and and it wouldn't just be him right it would be others that they're attempting and endeavoring to do this with i mean it was very apparent that the russians were in communication with a number of trump associates uh and trying to establish these relationships you know who knows how far they would have gotten with certain people but manafort made himself available he thought it was good for himself financially he thought it could get him out of hock financially with some of the debts that were already owed as far as this lawsuit and you know he continued to really advertise his availability to them fair to say that's a counterintelligence nightmare mr anderson well it's not it might not be a nightmare but it's definitely something to be extremely concerned about because as as was just discussed that tasking will continue to whoever until you say no and that's when the extortion starts right and so that's what we talked about this several times in this committee it's uh bob's your best friend right up to the point that you don't give me what i'm asking for right mr mccarthy i'm very struck by your uh answer to mr quigley's question that you would hope that someone in the position of the trump campaign officials would come and come to the fbi he said you want him to come to the fbi right and in fact one of the reasons that you said you wanted that was because you like the information fbi always wants more information i understand that but isn't it also the case that the reason that person comes to the fbi is to inoculate themselves against the very charge that they're playing footsie with a foreign intelligence service isn't that right yeah and in fact in fact if they did that you would need a counterintelligence investigation because you'd be working in partnership with the americans uh in concert with their own government against that foreign uh interference isn't that fair well yes although on the on the government side of it you also have to be very careful that they're not playing both sides you can get played that way too and that happens more often probably by whom by the person who comes in to report to you fair enough but in this case it was true in this case it was part of a systemic effort we now know have you ever seen what you're saying they just told the fbi as you yourself said you wish they had right there wouldn't have been a counterintelligence investigation at that point right well but what you're saying is true i can't i'm having trouble following because i i've read the report um i don't think there's we're skipping a step here i don't think that there's evidence that kalimnik is a russian asset there's a lot of reason to be concerned about it um there's a lot of also information that kalimnik was an asset for the state department the connection that kalimnak had russia what about the trump what about the trump 20 years ago what about the trump tower you guys are saying he was tasked how do we know he was tasked there's no evidence that he was tasked with i'm not asking you about columbia excuse me my time's expired but uh with the chairman's indulgence the trump tower meeting or any of the any of the improper contacts that we now know were part of this effort by the russian intelligence services my point is sir if the trump campaign had simply picked up the phone and called the fbi and said we're worried about this it would have it would have gone a long way to inoculating them against the the concern that they were working in concert with a foreign intelligence operation i i couldn't agree more with that and and i think anybody who thinks that they've been approached by a russian asset should notify the fbi thank you mr chairman mr heard thank you mr chairman i'd like to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from california ranking member nunes thank you uh mr hurd appreciate that i just want to take time to clarify a few things um is it a crime for any american to appear on rt and take money from rt i'm not aware that it is no i'm a little confused as to i don't want to put words in any of the witnesses mouth but maybe it was from folks up here on the diocese but we have numerous former government officials and current government officials that appear on rt all the time and take money from it i'm a little alarmed that people would make some type of reference that the head of our the former head of the dia who goes to the dia to tell him hey i'm gonna go and meet with putin i'm gonna get paid to go on rt goes there does it then reports back somehow now i don't know that other former government officials are doing that same thing when they take large sums of money but to hear people you know whether it's i i don't want to put words in any of your mouth but i i thought that that's what i heard that it wasn't okay for for the former head of dia to go and give a speech like all former politicians and presidents do did i hear that is it is it okay for general flynn to go to rt or is it not i mean i think people do it all the time in the private sector and go give speeches i think as long as that's what it is it's it's fine i mean i i know that general hayden a friend of mine friend of this committee for a long time i mean he was i don't know if he was paid by rt or not but he did many appearances on on rt um the the other thing that is a little alarming to me uh is this talk that general flynn by talking to the russian ambassador when he's the incoming national security adviser would be somehow targeted by the fbi uh or any counterintelligence capability in this country when he's just talking to the russian ambassador even if he's if he doesn't agree with the obama administration on sanctions because if that's the case i mean john kerry should be under a full-blown criminal investigation for violating the logan act right now should john kerry be under violent under investigation right now for violating the logan act mr anderson i have no idea what john kerry is doing i mean well it's been widely reported that john kerry has had numerous meetings with uh the iranian regime during the trump administration i i would have to see a lot more about that sir i have no idea i mean as far as going back to your original question uh sir as far as like the incoming national security advisor talking to the russian ambassador on its own i mean that's not something that's going to raise a counterintelligence flag you have to look at the totality of what's going on i don't understand anything outside of this report that went on with mike flynn who i also know and the ambassador but that wouldn't on its own trigger any type of national security flag well it may not trigger an investigation i think you have to be mindful of how that looks to the russian government and that's why i said it could be a counterintelligence concern right it may not trigger an investigation but i just think it's preposterous for me to think that a three-star general uh the architect of of killing terrorists really bad al qaeda terrorists is somehow uh connected to the russian government and i mean you know for him talking to the russian ambassador i just think is that's what we expect i would expect no matter if it's democrat or republican administration coming in that whoever the national security team is that they would talk to the russian ambassador or any ambassador for that matter i also don't think as much as i disagree with john kerry the former secretary of state i also don't think that he should be investigated for violating the logan act right now just to just to get that on the record however uh some on on this side of the aisle on the left and the media have continued to bash general flynn for talking to the russian ambassador at the same time they say nothing about secretary kerry meeting with the iranians i don't think it was just talking to the russian ambassador i think that's what the difference is here i think general flynn reached out in what he considered to be an official position prior to the inauguration of the trump administration and decided to do foreign policy work in the midst of another administration and that that is no that is no different than what john kerry is doing right yeah i'm sorry i'm sorry so you would want to investigate john kerry no no i'm i'm not saying anybody gets investigated here but i am saying it is a counterintelligence concern and it's just like where we are saying that yes no criminal charge has been filed relative to mueller's findings it still does not mean that there is not a national security threat well i i don't think i'd be putting john kerry under a counterintelligence investigation any time soon i have one more question on uh tasking you guys mentioned that manafort was tasked to deliver polling information i'm i'm a little troubled as to what the difference is between somebody asking for polling information versus a political campaign hiring a former british spy to go out and meet with what we now know to be or supposedly reportedly and from notes of the state department meeting with high ranking former svr gru officials in the russian government to get dirt on trump that's a tasking i mean that's a campaign pain for it how is that any different matter of fact i would say the other is worse we may not like how political campaigns are run but i don't think any of that's illegal any response i think it's very disturbing that the clinton campaign used to steal i think it's disturbing that the russians reached out to the to the trump campaign um there's a lot of talk about dara pasca what a terrible guy daryl pasquet is i agree he's a terrible guy steele also worked for him you know i mean you're we're in a situation where for 30 years since the fall of the soviet union this government bipartisan has taken the position essentially that russia's a country we can work with the bush administration used to call them a strategic partner in connection with certain things the obama administration wanted to reset relations with them trump wanted to chase the panacea of having better relations with them um if you're going to have that approach it wouldn't be my approach but if you're going to have that approach you're going to have a lot of people having a lot of contacts with russians and we have a lot of people having contacts with russians and a lot of it's really inappropriate thank you mr chairman yield back thank you uh mr uh mr welch thank you very much and i thank the witnesses uh the mueller report describes efforts by the kremlin to establish a back channel and you spoke about how when they're uh mr anderson they're always looking for many points of contact so they don't have a single point of failure but for example in january 17 2017 uh mr demetria of the head of russia's sovereign wealth fund and obviously close ally of mr putin met with trump's surrogate eric prince in the seychelles prince later relayed what dimitri have told him to steve bannon and then separately in late november of 2016 demetria began communicating with rick gerson who is a friend of um jared kushner and over the next few months uh dimitri have worked with gerson on a plan for reconciliation between russia in the united states which gerson then funneled to kushner the mueller report suggests that this memo which was essentially drafted by the russian government in which dimitri have told gerson was approved by putin may have influenced trump's first phone calls as president can you explain that this concept a little bit more of back channel and what sorts of counter-intelligence risks can arise from such back channels the reason i ask is we're having a back and forth here understandably about political motivations and in campaigns campaigns tend to push the limits but what appears to me to be unique about this is that russians have information which becomes a tool for them to advance their policy interests as opposed to ours mr anderson yes sir thank you uh two points one is you're absolutely right one it's for them to be able to put it be put in a position to advance whatever they're looking to gain from the united states instead of us but two it's also there to cause confusion and discord right because as this different opposing policies or back channels start to go up through the different channels it causes discord within those different organizations and up eventually to whoever is trying to get the official policy through whether it's at the state department or at at the white house the one thing you will see and i've seen it in in in this report is with russia going back to the point about looking at different channels to try to make those things happen you actually start putting people against each other even inside the same office because they don't understand that what is the official channel versus what we're hearing from the back channel so when you say within an office you mean like the uh the fbi or the cia or office of the president department big bigger you know office of the president uh um the state department other areas within our country and they'll do it not necessarily just right around the individuals who are located within there making the policies but they'll also do it outside of that and last point i'll make is one thing i think we really need to do is look larger also when it comes to russia attacking our political infrastructure than just what we're looking at right here because i can guarantee you again i referenced the one trial as the expert in a few weeks ago for doj that is identical to what we're talking about it's the same type of political backed channels right miss douglas thank you would you care to elaborate on this again the focus for me is not campaigns pushing the limits so much as uh candidates becoming compromised by some of the actions that they take or information that they share uh for instance having a business in transaction involving multi-million dollar potential profit obviously creates an incentive to protect that investment do you want to comment on that yeah and i mean i think it's important and i think the report lays out how well putin really puts to work all these russian billionaires uh with outreach and connections to a number of associates and friends of family and friends of friends and that's a good example the reconciliation plan really is a kind of a strategy document by dimitrijev who's very closely aligned with putin i think he refers to putin as his boss and a friend of jared kushner's and putting those two people together to come up and work on this plan which they then present present internal to be used for this call let me let me just follow up on that because my understanding is that it was our official policy during the obama administration to oppose uh the expansion into the ukraine and then there was a con there was an ongoing debate this carried over into this administration about whether to provide uh significant new armaments for the ukraine fighting the russians so the two seem to be in conflict yeah i mean just i think just having that kind of external input into a very early stage administrative strategy appears to be very unusual thank you i yield back thank you mr carson thank you chairman and thank you all um when the june 9 2016 meeting at trump tower was proposed to donald trump jr he was told that the crown prosecutor of russia offered to provide the trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate hillary and her dealings with russia as part of russia and its government support for mr trump his response if it's what you say i love it in other words the son of a u.s presidential candidate agreed to accept assistance from a foreign adversary to undermine his father's political opponent what counterintelligence risks does this set of facts pose and secondly what would russia's intelligence objective be offering such damaging information on a political opponent and lastly what other similar techniques used if at all um were effective and why might they be effective so first as we've said before i think it's the ability to get access to the administration that's where it starts right you're talking to people that are around the president or potential president of the united states from that point on you have a voice inside that you can filter information to the second point is is that i think russia looked at this way in advance on how to potentially target these different um incoming administrations in in the current president's administration the people that were around him were not savvy at all in my opinion to counter intelligence threats or national security issues they're coming from the private sector and corporations and i think they took advantage of that in a lot of these instances i don't think the russians in any way needed to recruit anybody they needed to be able to get in front of somebody and supply information so that that information then would be conveyed up to the president yeah i i would just add that i think by taking the meaning and i don't think you need a lot of training for this by taking the meeting you've made yourself beholden to putin in terms of however he wants to characterize it down the road so that even if nothing inappropriate happens at the meeting you have that vulnerability as well and it it tells a great story of how the russians work it shows that a prior relationship that the trumps had basically worked with another prior relationship to reach out directly to donald trump jr and dangle this potential piece of information now the meeting resulted in nothing but the fact that they used connections that they knew that trump had in moscow through business dealings to basically weave their way to get in front of very very senior level uh people in the campaign manafort trump jr and jared kushner shows kind of how how they work they use personal exp personal relationships business relationships and then they try and piece it together and like bob said i think the the uh the one thing that's illustrated is the fact that they were to they were able to access such a high level thank you um one of the topics of discussion at the june 9th meeting were the u.s sanctions imposed under the magnitsky act how might russia have leveraged the trump campaign's acceptance of russia russian help to attack hillary clinton as an opening to seek access to and influence over trump and his associates in order to affect u.s policy regarding sanctions i think part of that's more of the same i think the biggest thing is access in most of these types of situations i think the acceleration of access to somebody as high as these people were as stephanie just said doesn't happen as quickly a lot of what you're seeing here is because as i said before i think people aren't looking at it as a counterintelligence threat or neces necessarily a national security threat they're obtaining that and the reason i'm saying this congressman is because i think that accelerates the process how this usually works it takes months to years to get access to individuals that will eventually go up into a level where somebody can relay information i think one of the biggest things about this though is the acceleration of this process because they were able to get so high so quick thank you for your service i yield back chairman mr ratcliffe hey chairman um mr anderson i both appreciated and agreed with your comments during my last round of questioning about the need to update and correct ongoing fisa applications i want to ask you about the obligations as it relates to exculpatory information um as you know in the criminal case we have what's called the brady rule where the government has an obligation upon request to provide any exculpatory information to a defendant that the government may have obviously in a counterintelligence or title iii it's a different proceeding where the defendant isn't represented but we know that in this case the fbi has asserted that the underlying predicate for this counterintelligence investigation was george papadopoulos in a conversation that he had allegedly with an australian diplomat if the fbi had uh exculpatory information or a contradictory information information that contradicted that underlying predicate would you agree with me that the fbi had an obligation not to withhold that and to provide that to the fisa court i think the fbi one should have vetted both the information as best they could and then two i think there should have been discussion with the doj and the fisa court about that information and what if there was no discussion with the doj about uh that information would that have been improper i don't know if it would have been improper but i don't think that would have been the true transparency that those type of hearings need especially as i think one of the congressmen brought up earlier this is a significant power when you're looking at pfizer title three authority mr mccarthy what's your take on that you know in in our world i i'm in the same world you were in for a long time which is criminal investigations there's some laxity involved in how much you have to disclose with respect to exculpatory information for example in the grand jury but i think the big difference here is that the criminal process has a way of keeping people honest that that unfortunately the counterintelligence process doesn't so even though when you go to get a search warrant or an arrest warrant from a from a judge in a regular criminal case you get to go in secret they're in the sense that they're sealed proceedings and there's no one there representing the defendant but everybody knows or assumes in the equation that there will eventually be a prosecution in which case everything will be revealed the defense is going to get complete discovery of what you represented to the court and they'll be able to go to work on it in the fisa process the only due process an american who is suspected of being an agent of a foreign power ever gets is if the fbi complies with its rules and procedures and the fisa court holds it to holds them to it in that proceeding i shouldn't confine it just to the fbi the justice department as well to my mind and i think this is this is reflective of what most people in that equation think and what the fisa judges seem to think there's a higher obligation to be transparent knowing that that that process that you get in the criminal in the in the criminal thicket where everybody's going to get discovery of of what you did in the court is not going to happen um let me in my remaining time ask you mr mccarthy you've been had a number of questions about um the need or the desire or whether or not it was appropriate to advise donald trump about russian efforts to interfere in his campaign during a defensive briefing we know that a defensive briefing took place uh was conducted by the fbi in uh on august 17th of 2016. if i may i i've heard that before i i i happen to have been in a meeting at trump tower that day and i know with a bunch of other people they were going over to get a briefing that candidates get candidate defensive briefing right but it was not like it was not the targeted defensive briefing that they were talking about in this committee's report that that lynch and comey and mccabe were talking about in the spring of 2016. okay but to my question the earlier you said the reason that at whatever time candidate trump may not have uh received a briefing about russian interference efforts would be if they had uh already determined that the steele dossier was true or that he was the subject of a criminal investigation but we know that that wasn't the case because we know that the fbi director told the president president trump well into early 2017 that he was not the subject of a criminal investigation he was not under investigation so what reason would the fbi have had in 2016 what legitimate reason would they have had in 2016 not to advise candidate trump or president-elect trump um about russian interference threats i i don't think they had a good reason uh i think it would have been preferable if they had done a defensive briefing i'm familiar with former director comey's testimony about this and i would just point out that he pointed out i think it was in testimony to this committee that not everybody on his advisory team agreed with his idea of telling the president or the president-elect that he was not a suspect simply because in a very technical sense his name was not on any file and he was not listed as an interceptee on any fisa and the point that was made to him which he ultimately rejected as i understand it was that the way the investigation was structured they were looking at the campaign and they were taking evidence about the campaign and since it was trump's campaign obviously he was a subject of what they were looking into so to tell him that he was at the subject seemed like it could be misleading so i i leave i don't i think they should have been more forthcoming with him about his status in the investigation and i think it would have been preferable if they had done a defensive briefing i agree with you and with that i yield back miss demings thank you mr chairman thank you to our witnesses today mr anderson page 10 of the mueller report notes that the special counsel's office learned that some of the individuals they interviewed or whose conduct they investigated including some associated with the trump campaign deleted relevant communications our communications are communicated using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data are communication records in such cases the office was unable to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communication or fully questioned witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts given these identified gaps the office was unable to rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on or cost it or in case or cast in a new light the events described in the report yet the special counsel could not necessarily know if the person on the other side of the communication likely in a foreign country might have saved those messages and coming from a law enforcement background this is particularly concerning to me how might a foreign power like russia leverage knowledge of a u.s person deleting communications with an agent or other individual working on behalf of the russian government thank you for the question i think this is a huge part of our new new world we live in there's uh numerous different encrypted apps that people use in the private sector nowadays there's hundreds of millions of people that use those apps i think from an uh counterintelligence hostile adversary point of view anytime that information is transmitted to someone that can have access to then deliver it to an intelligence service there's an issue because that person is not going to delete the information that person is going to keep the information and most likely put it into a pool of information where it's correlated and that they can use it unfortunately though in my career in the last probably six to seven years between counterintelligence and the executive assistant director this has become a much bigger issue because you cannot go back whether it's a person in a criminal investigation in a drug case all the way up to a serious espionage investigation the last point i'll make ma'am is as i do think when we look at the safety of our country when it comes to people in certain political positions i think that we need to have more standards about what type of communications they can actually use for this matter and you talked a little bit about this earlier but in its heyday the soviet kjb collected reams of information on its surveillance targets do you believe the kgb successors such as fsb or svr or the gru continue these practices yes and i'll tell you just from my own experience you know 30 some years ago when i started in law enforcement the only way you could find out about somebody was hard footwork going out knocking on doors and actually physically talking to them nowadays with social media and cyber techniques and artificial intelligence is available to not only the open public but more sophisticated versions of that to hostile intelligence services they have a pretty good idea of what you like what you don't like who you want to hang out with where you're going to go for coffee and it just makes them much easier of a target so i would tell you that the modern day version of what some of us have done 25 30 years ago provides much more available information to target somebody thank you and finally we've discussed the concept of blackmail or several points at several points today but can you explain how the use of blackmail or leverage including financial leverage over government officials by foreign powers can pose a counter intelligence threat danger and i believe that should be of importance to all of us in this room now it is uh very much so russia and there's a few other services that use this extensively and they'll use either financial blackmail personal relationship blackmail blackmail about potential criminal violations that nobody know about that they actually know about as i said earlier in the hearing the one thing that you will notice with all of these type of progressions at first it starts off almost nonsense incidental asking tasking access phone books whatever and it will move through that continuum the blackmail historically doesn't really start though until you say no once you say no depending what they have they will use any means possible to include destroying your life they could care less about anybody in this room's life just because we're an american and they will use those points to target their subjects to get them to do what they want to do thank you so much mr chairman i yield back stefanik thank you chairman schiff i want to ask a few questions of mr mccarthy regarding the opening of the counterintelligence investigation and protocols of notifying congress protocols that were not followed we know now that the fbi opened its counterintelligence investigation into the trump campaign in july 2016 but they did not brief the gang of eight until march 2017 just days before former fbi director comey publicly announced the investigation during a march 20th 2017 open hearing before this committee so my question to you mr mccarthy is conveying sensitive information such as the opening of a counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign is exactly what quarterly briefings from the fbi fbi to the gang of eight are intended for is that correct i believe so i don't see what would be the point of having the gang of eight i agree with you do you think that the fbi director in this case director comey should have been allowed to decide when a ci investigation is quote unquote too sensitive for the gang of eight i don't think the fbi director should do that because otherwise you can't have congressional oversight i agree with you with that as well so you would agree when i say that the fbi should not get to pick and choose which investigations particularly those focused in a u.s political campaign are brief to congress i i think that's true and i think from what i understand from director brennan he thought that he was obliged to to comply with his gang of eight disclosure requirements um is it appropriate for the fbi in your opinion to publicly announce the subject of an ongoing counter-intelligence investigation in an open setting before fully briefing congress on the matter no i don't think the counterintelligence investigations are classified i don't think the fbi when it can should ever confirm the existence of an investigation counterintelligence investigations classified that's like a double no-no and there's no reason that i can think of to announce publicly the subject of such an investigation or to say that there be an assessment at the end of crimes being committed we know now that director comey failed to follow established doj procedures during the conduct of this investigation in your opinion why do you believe that director comey decided to publicly announce the investigation in march 2017 instead of following the protocol and immediately briefing the gang of eight during his quarterly briefings um i know director comey for 30 years i have a lot of respect for him and i think he goes about in my experience he went about his business in in good faith i'm sure if he had a reason if he did something he probably thought he had a good reason for it i don't agree with whatever the reason was but i can only assess what he did i can't get into his head i want to highlight that i've introduced legislation requiring the briefings to the gang of eight to congressional leadership when there is an opening of a counterintelligence investigation of a federal campaign we deserve to know this it is clear that in this case in 2016 the process and procedures were circumvented this should have been brief to the gang of eight and i think that's one of the critical questions that we need to continue asking in our overstate oversight capacity so with that i yield back before i i um yield to mr christian murthy i do want to mention um and this is through no fault uh of ms stefanik the while i can't comment on the gang of eight briefings the contents of the gang aid briefings the timeline you've set out is not correct but i can tell you that um once james comey was fired we no longer uh continued to get gang of eight briefings on this constellation of counterintelligence investigations and we have not had one since which is a real problem um and to this date we have requested from the fbi and from the director a briefing on the status of the counterintelligence investigations we do not know to this date whether they are ongoing we do not know whether any of them have been closed we do not know what those findings are but we are determined to find out will the chairman yield yes regarding the timeline it was clear in the open hearing in in front of this committee that director comey testified that he chose not to brief the gang of eight on the opening of the counterintelligence investigations this has been widely reported this was an open hearing and we've worked across the aisle on language to be included in the intel authorization act to ensure that any counterintelligence investigation in a presidential campaign is briefed so i hope you would agree based upon the testimony of director comey that he circumvented the process and in our oversight capacity i agree with you we need to have an update to make sure that they're following those procedures but i think we need to strengthen um not just the the typical way of doing things but put it in law so that they are required to brief us mr monica i would only say that that was not his testimony um that the first time that he was briefing the counterintelligence investigation uh to us was uh contemporaneous with his disclosing it to the public i did not say that in my statement will the gentleman yield i said days before so in march of 2017 and the representative is not accurate and and but i cannot go into the timeline but i can't say that that's not accurate i hope the members of the public would go back to director comey's testimony and follow the facts and and just look at his direct testimony to this committee which stated that he did not follow the proper protocols and procedures of briefing congressional leadership on the opening of the counterintelligence investigation and i yield back um mr krishnamurthy thank you for your service thank you for being here today and thank you chairman i want to focus on security clearances this is an issue that comes before the oversight committee and i'm shuttling back and forth this morning between these two committees so i'd like to ask you about this particular topic in order for any person working for the president to obtain access to the nation's most sensitive secrets that person must undergo an fbi background investigation and obtain a security clearance and one of the things that the fbi investigates is the candidate's contacts with foreign nationals and whether those relationships pose any risk that the candidate may be compromised by a foreign power it has been widely reported that jared kushner's security clearance was initially denied last year because of serious concerns about foreign influence private business interests and personal conduct there has also been reporting that jared kushner did not report all of his foreign contacts on the forums these are the sf-86 forms he completed related to his security clearance application what counterintelligence risks arise when an applicant is not fully forthcoming or honest in his or her security clearance application mr anderson uh thank you sir well i think it's it's extremely important to have all the documented information in a thorough investigation before issuing any security clearance especially when you get above the secret level and the top secret fci information which you know that's almost every major meeting in the national security realm in the white house so i think that's very uh that's very important i also think coupled with that the mandatory financial disclosures and other information that's required every five years and in some cases and in the fbi's organization there's a polygraph i've had six of them in my career uh to just make sure that the individual that's entrusted with the ability to see that information uh is safe for our country okay but what if they don't let me let me ask miss douglas what if they're not forthcoming or honest and how can a foreign power take advantage of that particular situation well i don't know all the specifics around mr kushner's clearance issues but i think there's potential if if you are trying to hide or be deceptive about your contacts that that could be something a foreign intelligence agency could take advantage of right so it doesn't you know those forms are incredibly detailed it's a global world so people have you know many many foreign contacts these days especially somebody like mr kushner who has global businesses right so can you walk us through give us a specific example like what would a russian agent try to do if he or she knew that mr kushner did not report a certain foreign contact well i mean on any kind of information that you're not being truly honest with if you can be compromised based on your dishonesty about something that's something a foreign intelligence agency can take advantage of and then what what is the impact of that if that individual that you are trying to manipulate has access to top secret materials right i mean you could potentially say that then if that person is compromisable are they in a position where since they have access to very sensitive information are they willing to provide information to you uh in order not to be uh disclosed as being un dishonest with an sf-86 or something and have you seen this in your career where such a situation ever developed where a russian entity or even any other foreign entity try to take advantage of someone in that type of situation you know i've seen instances where people have not disclosed sensitive foreign national contacts but i have not seen an instance where the foreign actor has taken advantage of that fact because they don't want it disclosed either so they're not going to jeopardize that they're usually already in a relationship i've not seen exactly your description of it but i have seen individuals in certain former espionage cases that i actually briefed at this committee years ago that they were looking at aspects on ways to get towards them around their clearance issues i've not seen them actually follow through with different aspects of it as stephanie said and what um type of reform would you make in that type of situation to prevent that type of situation from arising well i mean it's kind of hard to to uh force someone to tell you something if you don't even know that it exists right so it's kind of hard to hold somebody accountable to something that you don't even know about i just think that there has to be very significant diligence on it it has to be explained very forthrightly up front so that people understand that they could be in jeopardy and i think that that's clearly articulated actually that you could be in jeopardy of even getting a clearance if for some reason you're not disclosing a personal or an ongoing and continuing relationship that should absolutely be a consequence thank you thank you mr chairman thank you um i have some follow-up questions um on the fisa application mr mccarthy what was the time of the first fisa application when was that first uh sought before the court mr chairman my recollection is it i think october 21st which i think comes from a document from this committee if i remember october 21st of 2016. and at that point the counterintelligence investigation had been open for several months already is that correct the fbi's investigation formally opened as i understand it at the end of july so that investigation certainly was open for over two months so the fbi counterintelligence investigation was opened irrespective and having nothing to do with the fisa application it had to do with carter it had to do with george papadopoulos receiving information about russian possession of stolen clinton emails yeah in the in the parlance of of the justice department and and the fbi we sometimes refer to title iii investigations or fisa investigations if as if they were their own separate entity but they actually tend to be part of a larger investigation but in this case the the theory that the counterintelligence investigation of those around the president is flawed from its inception is in itself flawed because the fisa application didn't take place until months after the investigation was open correct i don't understand your question well some argue that we should ignore everything bob mueller has to say we should ignore everything the russians did because they have problems with aspects of the fisa application but the fisa application was opened months after the investigation began correct correct it didn't initiate the investigation correct also correct in fact carter page was not even with the trump campaign anymore at the time the application was filed isn't that correct i don't think that's relevant but it is uh as i understand they had formally separated you i assume you know this when you it is somebody's phones and stuff you can go backwards as well as it is certainly relevance is not mr mccarthy if you're making an accusation of spying on the trump campaign that a fisa application in fact of carter page didn't begin until carter page was no longer with that campaign isn't that accurate no i think that if you're getting access to somebody's communications under circumstances where that access will afford you the opportunity to go backwards so that you can read their communications while they're in the campaign and do you know that to be a fact mr mccarthy are you speculating about that i i know it to be a fact that when you get authorization you get to go backwards do you know whether that's the case here are you speculating i am i don't have any direct knowledge of the investigation you're quite correct i'm speculating from the outside you think um the justice department officials that signed off in the application were acting in bad faith no i think they made a mistake uh do you think mr rosenstein who signed off on one of the applications was acting in bad faith i think he made a mistake do you think the judges who signed off i believe there were three or four judges who signed off the applications were they acting in bad faith i don't think anyone was acting in bad faith on the fisa court so all of them just made mistakes yes that's right that happens yeah um and the uh the steele dossier how does mr mueller rely on the steele dossier in his report i you know it's it's 200 pages i at the off the top my head i can't think of anything that he relying on it for in terms of a of any kind of important conclusion short answer is he does not correct i don't think so i just don't want to i don't want to give you a sloppy answer off the top of my head mr mccarthy um when did you learn that there was a counterintelligence investigation of the trump campaign you know i i don't know i'd have to i mean i again i learned as a as a member of the public i don't have any inside personal information so i would have to go back over things that i had had written and read over time to try to pin it down and when did the public learn of the existence of the counterintelligence investigation of the trump campaign i know director comey testified here or before this committee on march 20th of 2017 it seemed to me at that point in time that what he was what he was directing his remarks to at least in part was evident from the intelligence community assessment that came out in january so it was it seemed clear to me reading the public version of the intelligence community assessment that that the intelligence community had not stopped investigating russia's interference in the election you're correct uh mr mccarthy the first public disclosure of the counterintelligence investigation the trump campaign took place in mr comey's open testimony in this committee of march of 2017. right that would have been months after the presidential election correct yes if the personal animus reflected in the private emails between mr strzok and ms page um reflected official actions to scuttle the trump campaign wouldn't the trump investigation have been disclosed before the election not after i i don't know that the i don't know that the bias that you detect from the emails would have had anything to do with when the investigation the the emails are if if if fbi agents were determined to scuttle act unprofessionally and scuttle the trump campaign would they not have disclosed the fact that they were investigating the campaign of a presidential candidate for links with a foreign adversary mr chairman i'm not trying to be difficult i i never have said that they were trying to scuttle the trump campaign i don't know that there's evidence that they were trying to scuttle the trump campaign so i don't want to be in a position of agreeing that that is my position because it's not the fbi was very open however the investigation of one of the candidates secretary clinton correct yeah well that was a public it was a criminal investigation that couldn't help from but be public because of the way it was referred to the fbi and the other investigation is a counterintelligence investigation which is classified and they're not allowed to talk about they're really two different things well they're not really supposed to talk about a pending criminal investigation either are they no you're right if there's no charges the government should not speak until the government speaks in court you're not supposed to talk about investigations until you formally charge someone and then they have the full array of constitutional protections that they get to defend themselves so in terms of the public actions taken by the bureau during the presidential campaign they had the effect of disclosing and discussing the investigation involving hillary clinton but not donald trump correct no i i wouldn't go that far because in beginning in i think it's september um you get you start to get these public reports that steel and fusion gps are putting out and the ishikov article i'm thinking of in particular which i think is like september 23rd refers not only to information from law enforcement people and counterintelligent people but i think it quotes a letter i don't know if it quotes it as a letter but it quotes remarks from uh from then senator reid with respect to the investigation and pushing the fbi to to to you know get on with an investigation there's no public acknowledgement by the fbi of any investigation of donald trump or his campaign prior to the election isn't that true you mean a formal as opposed to leaked information a formal public announcement that there was an investigation no correct mr mccarthy also said that putin doesn't have a preference for candidates except for those who expects are going to lose what other examples do you have for that declaration apart from the last campaign well i think in in would i tried to direct my remarks to mr chairman was was russia's current activities in the west i wasn't trying to be just specific to our elections and i think that putin does have to have a pattern particularly in western europe of giving support to upstart populist parties which are unlikely to win but could make life very difficult for the for the well it's not just that they're likely to lose exactly i mean if mr orban had a challenge do you think putin would support mr orban's opponent i don't know what putin would do really miss mccarthy really okay um you don't think mr putin would have a preference for a candidate who talked disparagingly of nato or wanted to see nato um the united states leave nato yeah no no i don't want again i'm not trying to be difficult here i think putin would be very happy to have the support of a candidate who would do whatever russia wanted and if he was going to be fortunate enough to get that kind of a candidate into power sure i think he'd be delighted by that and he'd be delighted by a candidate for u.s president who uh was open to removing sanctions over russia's invasion of its neighbor correct i would think so and he would be interested in the candidate who was interested in doing business and making money in russia during the campaign would he not well it would depend on whether that was the one issue that would come up i imagine in the totality of it if it turned out that the candidate was going to be very difficult for him in other areas if for example our military spending were to be ratcheted up so that we were more of a threat to russian interest he would have to weigh that like anyone else has to weigh the good and the bad but a candidate that uh has all of these attributes wants to undermine nato wants to undermine sanctions wants to make money in moscow that would be a candidate the kremlin would be very eager to support it would it not yeah i think you would think if that was the only part of the ledger that we were talking about and on the other side there wasn't another side of the ledger where there was going to be an increase in military spending and an increase in support of of actors who were opposed to russia's interest he would have to weigh everything i don't think putin is a as i understand it is a very sophisticated actor i don't think he acts on you know one particular aspect or one particular item on a menu i think he looks at the totality of the circumstances and ms douglas do you have any quarrel with the special counsel's conclusion that the through the social media campaign and the hacking and dumping of stolen clinton against the emails that putin and the kremlin were attempting to help the trump campaign uh and hurt the clinton campaign i think that was very clear from the very beginning and i agree with mr mccarthy that this started back in 2014 and the reason it probably even before then because they were so intent on not having hillary clinton as the president and i think they did it ended up being very much to the benefit of the trump campaign and mr anderson do concur that the both the assessment of the intelligence community as well as mr mueller's report that the russians had a clear preference for mr trump is borne out by the evidence yes let me ask you about what i started out with the issue of moscow trump tower here candidate trump was attempting to consummate a deal the special counsel estimates would have made hundreds of millions of dollars for his family business um while claiming no business dealings with the russians when that transaction was revealed when the fact that the business deal went on through the middle of the presidential campaign was disclosed and emails were produced showing michael cohen reaching out to dimitri pescov someone close to president putin mr pesco would later issue a statement denying that there was any russian follow-up on that outreach that turned out to be false the russians did follow up on the trump business outreach what does it mean that the kremlin how do you interpret the kremlin issuing a false statement in support of the president's own false statements about the deal well i think probably the kremlin issues a lot of false statements um i think uh but why why would the kremlin have an interest in covering up for the president united states uh in concealing efforts by the president and his business to seek kremlin help during the campaign to make that deal happen why would the kremlin be interested in covering that up i think that they very much want a good relationship with donald trump and to them that means supporting him and the deception that was undertaken on the part of michael cohen when he lied about the uh the length of time that those negotiations were underway mr anderson um the report outlines a lengthy conversation that mr cohen had with someone in the kremlin to try to make the deal happen um would it be your expectation that the kremlin would be recording that conversation oh absolutely and so during the campaign and after mr trump became president if the kremlin had a tape recorded conversation with the president's lawyer in which the president's lawyer is exploring making this deal during the campaign at a time when the president is denying any business dealings with the russians were the russians in a position to publish that tape if they had it uh to embarrass the president united states uh i think if it behooved vladimir putin and russia they'd do almost anything so the answer your question would be yes if they had it and they could use this to exploit some type of weakness is that what the russians mean when they talk about compromite having compromising information yeah anytime you're talking about compromising information it goes back to what we said before mr chairman it could be financial it could be a conversation it could be a compromising position they'll use whatever they can and would it be compromising uh if a foreign power had recordings of the president's associates engaged in a business deal that the president was denying potentially sir i'd have to know more about the deal but potentially if they had conversations they could exploit and how how do the russians exploit the use of that kind of information uh it depends in in the past i've seen where russia's mailed audio tapes or agents of russia's mail audio tapes or pictures or financial documents to individuals that we've investigated in other either counterintelligence or espionage investigating investigations letting them know that they have this information and potentially could use them against them sometimes they don't they just do it anyway and in a circumstance like this could the russians make the president or is people aware that they had such recordings uh and we're prepared to use them if necessary i don't know if they would do that right off the bat usually that's towards the end of a spectrum of trying to obtain what they want so the answer is potentially but i don't think they would do it necessarily right off the bat how do the russians use financial leverage to compromise people a variety of ways a lot of times they'll either give individuals payment in a variety it doesn't necessarily mean cash it could be other valuables and in some instances they'll try to get them to live beyond their means so if they cut off those payments that individual then is in jeopardy of losing whatever is dear to them does the existence of the financial relationship in itself become a form of compromise it's you'd have i'd have to know a lot more about that because as uh was brought up earlier by stephanie i think in the global business marketplace you have to look at the totality so that i'd have to know more there are any number of uh um facts in the mull report about efforts to establish back channels with the russians uh discussions about using russian diplomatic facilities for secret backed channels um with those post serious issues uh in any kind of security security clearance process they absolutely could depending what was being discussed and what the individuals were doing with the information that they were pushing and then obviously uh depending on the level of the information what i mean level classification level of information that they're talking to individuals from a foreign country you know finally with respect to mr flynn um a national security adviser or adviser designate is having a secret conversation with a foreign adversary and endeavoring to undermine existing u.s policy and that is dishonest about that what are the counterintelligence implications of that well obviously the key here is the deception the deception makes the person vulnerable it's not even the act the fact that somebody has a multi-million dollar business in russia doesn't compromise them the fact that they're trying to hide it or be deceptive about the extent of their relationship could possibly make them vulnerable and just like the case with mike flynn it's not the fact that he had that conversation whether it was appropriate or not appropriate it's the fact that he he chose to be deceptive about it that could make him vulnerable if if the national security adviser is talking with the russian ambassador or anyone else for that matter let's say the russian ambassador um would you have to would you have to presume that the russians might be recording a conversation on the russian end of course and so if u.s officials are like the vice president are representing certain things that are not true and the russians know they are not true and the russians possess a recording of that are the russians in a position to compromise the administration yes they are if somebody is is not telling the truth about the conversation if you come out and are honest about the conversation it's hard to blackmail someone if you're being honest about what you've done but if you're not being honest about what you've done that's what makes you vulnerable mr nunus any funny questions yeah thank you mr chairman um one of the things that uh if we go back to the beginning there's been a lot of talk about when did this investigation begin now that's a that's a open-ended question because you know we can say that this investigation could have begun in 2015 because we know some of the same players were having run-ins uh with individuals that have questionable ties to either western intelligence or possibly political campaign operatives but officially they've said that it started at the end of end of july when the public became aware of it i guess it all depends on whether or not you believe the washington post and new york times or yahoo news because you had christopher steele who we now know was an fbi paid informant out not only briefing multiple news agencies but if you're to believe those same news agencies they also had sources within the fbi and the department of justice now you all worked there is this normal to have an fbi informant christopher steele who's been hired to investigate the trump campaign by the fbi hired by the clinton campaign to investigate the clinton campaign i mean to investigate the trump campaign then talking to media talking to people within the state department is this normal activity on by the fbi or department of justice no i think steele was ultimately um the the reason that was given for his termination as an informant was contacts with the press because that was a violation of his understanding with the fbi but we shouldn't just leave it at steel because in those same articles if these reporters are to be believed there's multiple sources within department of justice fbi or senior intelligence officials i think i thought you were just asking me about informants officials should not be talking about investigations to the media right so we have if the stories are believed i catch it with that we have an fbi informant who's both working for the clinton campaign and the fbi investigating trump leaking to multiple news outlets we have multiple people within the fbi and doj leaking to news outlets i'm you know at some point here i'm just shocked that there's more there's not more former doj and fbi officials who aren't out there saying look this is wrong i mean you know i don't know how any republican unless something like miss stefanik's uh bill passes um i mean i this counterintelligence uh department over the fbi i think is in is in big trouble i mean the fact that you know you guys are sitting here uh former fbi officials and not saying that it you know basically making the case that it's okay to use these very special powers to target a political campaign it really troubles me i'll just leave it at that let me uh i want to just finish up on the trump tower moscow because there's a little talk about trump tower moscow and how that concerns some of you would it concern you that fusion gps who is the democrat campaign operative arm dirty operations arm um they were also working for russians were you familiar with that mr mccarthy are you familiar that fusion gps was working for russians yes they were working for the katsavs in connection with the prevazon litigation which is a forfeiture action that was brought by the department of justice in connection with the killing of magnitsky and the fraud that that flowed out of that were any of you familiar that fusion gps was working for this these entities no sir i was focused on the mueller report for this discussion okay so would it would it so now that you know that fusion gps is working for russians another thing that needs to be put on the record here is is that not only was were they fusion gps hired to oppose the magnitsky act to dirty up bill browder uh who i think many people know was a friend of magnitsky and smear him really but when glenn simpson admitted the time that he would testify before this committee that he met with the group that met at the trump tower i'm back to the trump tower meeting he met him the day before the day of and the day after so you have glenn simpson who's working not only for the clinton campaign to dirty up trump he's also working for the russians to dirty up anybody who doesn't oppose the magnitsky act he's meeting with all those individuals now you as counterintelligence former counterintelligence people would that raise any flags to you at all that a clinton campaign operative arm is is who's working for these same russians happen to be the same russians that are meeting with at trump tower offering supposed dirt i i think it's not in a vacuum so it's it's not just about president trump's campaign or secretary clinton's campaign it's about the context to americans of information so regardless of whose campaign it was if there were significant concerns or things that we thought that could raise to that i i think it'd absolutely be worth looking at yeah and one of the things as i stated in my opening mueller doesn't talk anything it doesn't talk about fusion gps at all even though of all their questionable contacts with the russians including the fact and i'll just you know close with this for the record after we discovered all of this we brought glenn simpson back and numerous other fusion gps employees and they played the fifth before this committee and refused to answer the questions so if that doesn't raise questions i don't know what does but with that i want to thank the witnesses for appearing today and i yield back thank you just remind my colleagues that fusion gps was originally hired in the presidential campaign by the conservative washington free beacon this concludes our hearing i want to thank the witnesses again for their participation and the committee is adjourned you know together is um you

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Id: uTUwL_vRoHE

Length: 172min 51sec (10371 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019