LIVE: Ex-FBI Director James Comey testifies on Russia probe

misled the court about the author and the reliability of the document and over and over and over again it was used to keep an investigation of american citizen alive that we now know had 17 irregularities what do we do we just say well that was bad that's the way it goes does anybody get fired does anybody go to jail and i'm saying this to my democratic friends if it happened to us it could happen to you every american should be worried about this this is not just an abuse of power against mr page and the trump campaign this is a system failure and you could be next so the joint effort of this committee in my view should be to make sure this never happens again starting with finding out who did it who's responsible apparently everybody's responsible but nobody's to blame is not the right answer so my goal is that we can have a deep dive and understand how this happened and working together to assure the american people it never happens again to any political campaign of any party and that the fisa system can survive this very sad chapter we're turning the page on a very dangerous chapter in the history of the fisa program we're trying to start a new and the only way we can start anew is to find out what happened and hold people accountable we're not prosecutors here there are people out there who do have prosecutor prosecutor authority we'll let them decide what to do independent of us but it is a responsibility this committee to try to restore trust in a program that we all need and we will start that endeavor seriously today and continue until we get the bottom of it i have two documents i'd like to introduce for the record i have a office of an intelligence attorney statement this is the doj lawyer that signed off on the fisa application and the letter says the attorney advises that had he s slash she been aware of the significant errors and emissions identified by the oig inspector general and the errors in the woods process he she would not have signed the carter page visa applications the oi attorney further advises that he she is not aware of any additional errors or omissions in the page fisa applications on the crossfire hurricane investigation more generally than were that were not identified in the oig report this is yet another person saying if i know then what i know now i wouldn't have signed this report horowitz did a really good job rosenstein and sally yates said to this committee who signed the warrant application if i knew then what i know now i would not have signed this application this is the lawyer that prepared it saying the same thing thank you senator feinstein mr chairman sir uh may we have copies of that document please yes we'll submit it to everybody thank you thank you very much thank you very much mr chairman we are here again today as part of the chairman's examination of crossfire hurricane the fbi's russia investigation the president has long claimed that the investigation of his campaign was a witch hunt and a hoax contrary to the president's claim of a witch hunt the department of justice inspector general michael horowitz confirmed in a detailed report that the fbi was justified when it opened the investigation into ties between the trump campaign and russia the fbi learned in july of 2016 that the trump campaign appeared to have advanced knowledge of russia's plans to release quote thousands of emails end quote to harm hillary clinton and help trump the fbi learned this one week after wikileaks published 20 000 emails that russia had stolen from the democratic national committees hacked computers the dnc hack and the possibility that the trump campaign knew of russia's plans to interfere in the 2016 election by releasing stolen emails created a significant counter-intelligence concern mr comey has said that the fbi quote would have been derelict not to investigate end quote and i agree special counsel robert mueller assumed control of crossfire hurricane after mr comey was fired by president trump mueller's findings confirm that the fbi was correct to investigate mueller found that the russian government quote perceived it would benefit from a trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome end quote and that the trump campaign knew about welcomed and quote expected it would benefit electorally from russia's interference mueller also uncovered numerous contacts between the trump campaign and individuals linked to russia for example mueller found that trump campaign manager paul manafort gave internal polling data and campaign strategy to constantine kalimnik a russian intelligence officer the senate intelligence committee of which i'm a member recently issued the bipartisan finding that manafort was quote a grave counterintelligence threat end quote because of his ties to russian intelligence so think about that for a moment the president's campaign manager had ties to russian intelligence and could have used them to share confidential campaign information mr chairman of course the fbi should have investigated unfortunately the president and his allies have been trying to rewrite the russia investigation since the day it concluded they have seized on errors in the fbi's applications for fisa surveillance on carter page to assert that the entire russian investigation was corrupt those errors were serious but the errors and the so-called steele dossier and this is important played no part in the broader russia investigation this was confirmed by inspector general horowitz and former deputy attorney general rod rosenstein who told the committee that none of the mueller report's findings of criminal charges rely on the steel dossier none of them president trump and his allies also claim that the russia investigation was a political witch-hunt overseen by investigators who hated the president but inspector general horowitz found no evidence that political bias impacted the crossfire hurricane and none of the 10 witnesses the committee has interviewed during the chairman's investigation provided such evidence either we should not ignore or excuse what happened in 2016. fbi director ray and the intelligence community have warned that russia is interfering in the 2020 election with the aim of denigrating vice president biden we should condemn russia's current and past interference not downplay it and we should insist that the president reject russia's interference as well thank you mr chairman thank you senator feinstein is mr comey our technology working today mr comey you know put him up on the screen uh mr comey could you speak please that would actually i can hear you okay great thank you uh um will he be on the screen okay can you count to ten for us please sure one two three four five six seven eight nine ten well you did your part uh i don't there we go eleven must have been the magic number thank you very much for being with us could you raise your right hand please do solemnly swear that testimony you about to give this committee is the truth the whole truth nothing but the truth so help you god thank do thank you uh you'd like to make an opening statement you may if you'd like i have no opening statement i'm ready for your questions well one thank you very much and i'll um take a little more than five minutes here but we'll try to try to plow through it uh mr comey on a scale of one to ten with 10 being the top of the line break how would you rank rate the crossfire hurricane investigation in terms of being done thoroughly by the book an investigation the fbi should be proud of i'm not sure i can apply a number scale but i would say in the main it was done by the book it was appropriate and it was essential that it be done okay so you're proud of it overall i'm proud of the work there are parts of it that are concerning which i'm sure we'll talk about but overall i'm proud to work okay sounds good okay when did you first learn of the existence of the steele dossier sometime towards the end of september of 2016. okay do you agree with mr horowitz that the dossier was central and essential to the carter page fisaworn application being approved i agree that it was important i can't tell you whether it was essential and by that i mean that it wouldn't have been granted without the steel information let's go through the application there are two parts to the application uh was there an effort to get a warrant approved without using the dossier yes my understanding is in the summer they asked doj whether they would support moving forward on a warrant application and they said no right correct that's my understanding from the horowitz report then you add the dossier all of a sudden they say yes to the warrant application is that a fair statement i think it's fair to say that doj decided to move forward after the steel information was part of it yes so i would say that it was central and essential based on that now here's what i'd like to ask the contacts between mr page and alleged russian operatives are one part of the application is that correct that's my recollection okay did mr page deny knowing people that you accuse him of having contact with i don't remember i think the horowitz report says that in the fall of 2016 speaking to an fbi source he denied knowing certain people but that's about all i recall well here's the facts he denied knowing these people and the fbi has yet to find any evidence that he was lying the people that he did have contact with did he tell the fbi that he was working for the cia and that's why he had contacts with these people i don't remember that do you do you now agree that the cia confirmed that mr page was in fact helping them i know from the horowitz report that the cia confirmed he was what they call a contact so the fbi in august of 2016 had information from the cia informing the fbi that in fact mr page was a resource did you not know that i did not know if his the nature of his relationship with the cia i know what i'm telling you is what i read in the horowitz report do you think it would have been fair for the fbi to tell the court that mr page had a reason to be talking to these people because he was working with the cia would that have been a fair thing to tell the court i don't agree with your characterization of what mr horowitz found so i'm talking about you as a director the the fbi has in his possession in august 2016. information from the cia confirming what mr page said that he in fact was assisting the cia which explained the contacts that was never given to the court should they have been informed of that because that's exculpatory to mr page i believe mr harwood's found that they should have at least considered information you're the director of the fbi would you wish that had been done if you had known about it i'm sorry senator what had been done that you had informed the court that mr page was in fact working with the cia and that explains these contacts do you think out of a sense of fairness the court should have been informed of that fact again i don't agree with your preamble i don't think the record established that he was working with the cia i think garwood's found he was a contact which was we've got the we've got we got the email from the cia confirming that he was a source for the cia are you aware of the fact that that email later on was doctored again i don't accept what you said i don't think the record establishes he was a source for the cia i am aware from what why is mr klein smith facing criminal indictment i only know what i've read in the public record that he was accused of the director of the fbi you didn't know that your own agency had information from the cia verifying what mr page told you that these contacts had a basis in fact because he was working with the cia did you know that mr kleinsmith doctored the email for it to read that there was no association between paige and the cia that he changed there was to there was not how do you feel about that i know nothing about mr klein smith only what i've read in the past well how do you feel in general about an fbi lawyer doctoring information exculpatory to somebody being surveilled any false statement in the course of an investigation is deep but you didn't know anything about that okay in october when the warrant was submitted the application was submitted uh what effort had been made to verify the dossier in october i don't know specifically i know that counterintelligence division was working to see how much of it they could rule in and rule out how much time did they spend ruling in and ruling out regarding the dossier you don't know you signed the application whose job is it to make sure the facts are right when you present them to the fisa court well the most basic level the affiant whoever is signing the affidavit did you sign the affidavit no i signed a certification which is required of the fbi director okay does the fbi director have any responsibility to make sure the facts are right when they're given to the court not in connection with the certification but in general the fbi director is responsible for everything that's being done underneath the fbi director what we're trying to find is who gave the who provided the application to the pfizer court and why was it so flawed can you give me a group of people we can look at to hold accountable for misleading the court who would who should we be looking at to understand the process in general and in this case you would start with the horowitz report where he recounts all the many people involved in the review production and delivery to the court of this application but you don't know as the director of the fbi who actually prepared the applications is that correct i do not okay all right so in october it's clear um mr comey there was no effort to verify the dossier before it was given to the court do you agree with that i don't know the answer to that well that's the answer uh in in january of 12 2017 the warren application was renewed did you sign that i signed a certification in connection with i think one in january and one three months later are you aware of the fact between october and january the fbi had found that the russian subsource was on the payroll of mr steele was suspected of being a russian spy by the fbi all the way back to 2009. i don't remember learning anything additional about steele's sources how can it be mr director that the fbi finds in its file that the man that prepared the dossier for steel was suspected of being a threat to national security and it doesn't make it up to you i don't know i could speculate but i i don't know i haven't spoken i don't want you to speculate we'll we'll try to figure this all out ourselves uh do you know who christopher steele was when did you find out who he was when the steele dossier was brief to me sometime like i said i think late september were you ever told that he hated trump and he wanted him to lose and he very much down on donald trump as a person not that i recall now you don't remember bruce ohr briefing the team about steel's biases that you have to really watch this guy i don't know who's or ever giving me do you remember uh friendly foreign governments putting us on notice that he tends to exaggerate he goes off on crusades did that make it to recall that okay thank you all right so should the court have been informed in a perfect world that the primary sub-source was a suspected russian spy at a minimum they should the team of the fbi and justice should have discussed whether to inform the court about that were you aware that in december 2016 the cia cia tells the fbi they characterized the dossier as internet rumor they don't recall being foreign to that were you ever told by the cia to be careful with the dossier and still that that this is not good craft here i don't remember being told anything like that okay all right so let's fast forward now the warrant application is renewed in april 2017. you signed it in january the 12th you didn't know that the primary sub-source was suspected by the fbi being a russian spy all the way back to 2009 you didn't know that the cia had told the fbi the documents internet rumor are you aware of the fact that the sub source was actually interviewed by the fbi in january 2017. i don't remember anything about interviews of the sub source so as the director that was this an important case for the fbi or is this kind of a run-of-the-mill thing the overarching investigation was very important the paid slice of it far less given i mean you have a sitting president of the united states by january 2017. you have a dossier that's salacious as hell that accuses the president of being involved in all kind of sex escapades in russia and a bunch of other stuff and you keep using that document over and over again to get a warrant and here's my question every time you found information to put the reliability dossier in question you seemed everybody seemed to ignore it just plowed forward so i want to know in january where you're not aware of the fact that the fbi interviewed the primary sub-source is that your testimony i do not remember being told about any interview of should you have been told about it i can't answer that because i wasn't and so i don't know what the considerations were well here's here's what happened the primary sub source told the fbi in january 2017 after the docu dossier had been used twice to get a warrant that the sub source says has no idea where some of the language attributed to him came from that the context never mentioned some of the information attributed to them and that he did not know the origins of other information that was supposedly from his contacts he said the statements were word of mouth and hearsay conversations had with friends over beers and were statements made in jest that should be taken with a grain of salt did any of that ever get to you okay do you agree that's pretty important information concerning the reliability of the dossier it's information that should be weighed in light of a variety of circumstances it's inherently exculpatory the person who put the document together is telling the fbi it's bar talk is is grain of salt they tell the fbi and they keep using the same document you know how they described to the court the sub source you know what they told the subsource in the application uh the court about the subsource that he was truthful and cooperative do you think those terms to the court truthful and cooperative fairly reflect the interview the fbi conducted in january and march i know the inspector general found the disclosure was inadequate in that in that regard not only mr comey is it inadequate it is criminally inadequate you have a document central to getting a warrant against american citizen it is falling apart the cia says this internet rumor the person who prepared it was on a jihad against trump on the payroll of the democratic party the primary sub-source was a russian agent when that person was interviewed by the fbi he disavowed the reliability the document to the point that it should never have been used again and my question is how could the system ignore all that and how could it be used again in april and again in june do you know how that's possible again i'm not going to respond to your preamble i think mr horowitz found that it was not disclosed in a variety of facts were not disclosed he didn't find intentional misconduct but he found concerning failures to disclose all i can say is there a duty by the fbi to inform the court of exculpatory information there is a heightened duty of candor which includes exculpatory information and anything that might be relevant to the court's consideration for mr page for the court to know that when he said the people he met with was a result of him being associated working with the cia do you think that would have been beneficial to mr page again because i don't agree with your predicate to the question i can't answer that well we got emails and i'll be glad to show them to you about the association between the cia and mr page do you think it would be only fair for the court to be told that the primary subsource disavowed the document as being rumor bar talk you take half of it with a grain of salt do you think the fbi owed it to the court and mr page to tell the court about these stunning revelations i think mr harwood's found and it seems a reasonable conclusion that they should have been found how could the director of the fbi not know all of this how is it possible that the system gathers so much exculpatory information this internet rumor according to cia that the actual interview of the subsource disavows the reliability document that the actual subsource was expected russian spy how could all that happen and not get up to you the director of the fbi of one of the most important investigations in the history of the fba how is that possible i can only speculate because it didn't and as i said the investigation overall was incredibly important the piece you're focused on is obviously important but a much smaller slope it's very important to miss the page it should be important to every american if you is there anybody there advocating for mr page during the warrant process no it's a next part of the application meaning there's only one side representing i i just want to understand this it's an ex parte event it means that the cops have a duty to tell the court when they find things beneficial to the person under investigation and over and over again between october and june all the information found about the dossier made it less reliable not more reliable and you kept using again and again and again and the question was their bias at what point in time do you put two and two together that the people behind this hated trump and the reason they ran all these stop signs they didn't want to take no for an answer so do you recall getting an inquiry from the cia excuse me the intelligence community in september 2016 about a concern that the clinton campaign was going to create a scandal regarding trump and russia i do not you don't remember getting a uh investigatory lead from the intelligence community hang on a second let me find my document here september the 7th 2016 the u.s intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral of fbi to fbi director james comey and direct assistant director of counterintelligence peter strzok regarding u.s presidential candidate hillary clinton's approval of a plan concerning u.s presidential candidate donald trump and russian hackers hampering u.s elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server you don't remember getting that or being taught that done okay that's a pretty stunning thing it didn't ring a bell but uh it did come to you uh let's just end with this you get this inquiry from the intelligence committee to look at the clinton campaign basically trying to create a distraction accusing trump of being a russian agent or a russian stooge or whatever to distract from her email server problems and how far fetched is that mr comey when we now know that the democratic party through fusion gps hired christopher steele a foreign agent who had a very strong bias against trump who hired a russian sub-source who the fbi believed to be a russian spy to compile a dossier that was a bunch of crap to be used against an american citizen working for the trump campaign you already knew that seems to me you'd want to investigate other allegations but you're telling me that you don't recall this i'm sorry senators your question yes you don't recall this inquiry i just read about september the 2016. now as i said it doesn't again do you remember being told by the um investigate the intelligence community remember the episode with trump in the hotel with the hookers and the dossier yes i remember that portion okay that was that's pretty hard to ignore do you remember in december the intelligence committee basically said a use a u.s intelligence community report contained information about the falsity of the details of trump's sexual activity in moscow and assessed that they were the product of russian intelligence services infiltrating infiltrating a source into steel's network so this is from the horowitz report in other words the intelligence community had assessed that the dossier's description of assessed sexual escapade was actually a russian disinformation campaign did you know that when it comes to not familiar with what you're reading from i don't know whether cindy horowitz report i guess what i'm saying is that the horus report has information they had in the file that the whole scenario with trump in the sexual escapade was russian disinformation and you knew that and you never told the court to me that is something that the court should know if in fact the russians had infiltrated steel's sources to create this myth about sexual misconduct of the president that to me seems to crowd for slowing down and stopping not keep using the document all i can say is that you've believed it would be a dereliction of duty not to look at trump russia i'm not here to argue that nobody should look i'm not here to argue that it was somebody other than the russians who hacked into the dnc it was the russians what i'm here to say is there were ample evidence of the other side being involved with russia to create a scandal around trump they hired a foreign agent on the payroll of the democratic party who hired a russian spy to create a document that was absolutely full of misinformation and complete lies did you know there is no russian consulate in miami and the dossier mentions that there was one shouldn't the court have been told that part of the dossier is not reliable do you also know that michael cohen's adventures in prague never happened the dossier asserts that michael cohen went to prague on some venture for trump in russia and it never happened and they know it never happened they had information from a foreign government saying it's not true and they never told the court they never corrected all the misinformation in the dossier it was used over and over again and they never told the court about how unreliable it was is that a small thing or a big thing anytime there are material omissions and an application to a judge of any kind but especially in an ex-part it's a very important issue did you have a duty to look at the any allegations regarding clinton and russia i don't know what you mean well you say you had a duty to look at allegations about the trump campaign being involved with the russians you've got a letter now from radcliff saying that there was a they intercepted information about an effort in july where hillary clinton approved a cam an effort to link trump to russia the mob did you have an investigation look and see if whether that was true i can't answer that i've read mr ratcliffe's letter which frankly i have trouble understanding okay thank you very much thank you mr chairman um the president and his allies argue that the fbi should never have investigated the trump campaign's ties to russia however special counsel mueller and the senate intelligence committee found that the trump campaign manager paul manafort gave internal polling data and campaign strategy to a russian intelligence officer the senate intelligence committee issued the bipartisan finding that manafort was a grave counterintelligence threat i'd like to put in the record this report of the senate select committee on intelligence uh mr chairman thank you very much would you agree that a direct tie between a presidential campaign manager and a russian intelligence officer is a grave counter intelligence threat yes could you tell us why please because someone who's occupying a role in the heart of american democracy running a campaign is in a position to supply information about that campaign and the workings of our democracy to a foreign adversary that's the definition of a counterintelligence threat so you would agree that this type of counterintelligence threat does warrant investigation yes of course the senate intelligence committee determined that manafort's presence on the campaign and proximity to trump created opportunities for russian intelligence services to exert influence over and acquire confidential information on the trump campaign does the possibility that russian intelligence services are exerting influence over a presidential campaign create a counterintelligence risk that warrants investigation yes as the senate select committee on intelligence found last month correct thank you special counsel mueller found that michael cohen trump's personal attorney pursued the trump tower moscow project on trump's behalf during the campaign is there a counterintelligence concern when a candidate for political office pursues a lucrative business deal in russia at the same time he publicly claims to have zero interest in russia yes because of the ability that offers the foreign adversary to have leverage over that individual correct and does this type of counterintelligence concern warrant investigation it may depending on what facts you have to predicate the investigation thank you you told the inspector general that you received no requests from the obiden the obama biden white house to investigate members of the trump campaign you've also said that if president obama or a member of his administration asked the fbi to investigate the trump campaign your answer would be not only no but hell no did president obama or vice president biden ever ask you to investigate a political rival or to go easy on a political rival why would that have been problematic because it would compromise the independence of the justice department and the fbi's work if it's a criminal case or a counterintelligence case it would introduce politics into what should be a fact-driven process thank you u.s intelligence has assessed that russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former vice president biden end quote and quote boost president trump's candidacy end quote fbi director ray has said that russia's anti-biden efforts have been very active president trump has said that he would take damaging information on a political opponent from a foreign adversary and that he would not commit to informing the fbi he publicly asked china to investigate joe biden and was impeached for pressuring ukraine to investigate biden as well are you concerned that trump will embrace and use russian interference efforts to his advantage excuse me as he did in 2016. well i'm a private citizen now so as a private citizen yes and he said that he would thank you thank you mr chairman thank you senator grassley yeah thank you for your appearance here on january the 6th to 2017 the obama administration issued its intelligence community assessment on russian interference in recent elections that assessment included nxa which said that the fbi had identified and unidentified sources relating to the steel reporting and russia investigation prior to that in december 2016 the fbi had identified steele's primary sub-source and knew that he was a subject of counterintelligence investigation you either knew or should have known that the primary sub-source was subject to counter-intelligence investigation when you made efforts to include the steel dossier in the assessment did you make any effort to ensure that nxa identified that some sourcing may have been from a suspected russian spy or otherwise unoff substantiated if not why not i don't remember any information reaching me about any investigation of a source of steels and i know now from the public record there was some investigation back in 2009 that can cut both ways so i don't know how the people working on the investigation thought about it the primary sub source was a suspected russian spy the sub source disavowed elements relating to the dossier he was subject to a counterintelligence investigation and offered people money for classified information shouldn't you have investigated the primary sub-source instead of trump page flynn papadopoulos and whatever else i'm not able to answer that question because i don't know the details of the investigation back in 2009 okay thanks to declassified footnotes from the inspector general we know the following one the fbi knew the russians had the intent to target steel two we see that they had the opportunity to do so by various contacts steele had with russian intelligence assets three we see the success of those efforts because some russian disinformation made its way into the steele dossier it looks like both the democratic national committee and russian intelligence services manipulated the fbi under your watch how could the world's premier law enforcement agency miss all of these signs i'm sorry i disagree with a lot of aspects of your preamble so i can't answer that one well it sounds to me like you should have known and uh it's it pretty much speaks for itself that maybe you aren't on top of things the way you should have been question number four on february 14 2017 you met with pres the president and he allegedly asked you to let flynn's case go in any of your meetings with president trump did you inform him that the flynn case was supposed to be closed on january the 4th 2017 and if not why not i don't think i had any conversation with president trump about flynn's case except for that february 14th let it go conversation well if you had that conversation then couldn't you have informed him that the flame case was supposed to be closed on january 4th 2017. i don't know why that would be a relevant fact for any conversation about flynn lying to the fbi on january 12 2017 email to james clapper you stated that quote we have concluded that the source crown is reliable on january the 12 2017 the fbi received a report outlining inaccuracies related to steele's reporting about michael cohen the report also assessed that the information was part of a russian disinformation campaign that same day you signed a fisus renewal the fbi received another report on february 27 2017 that also stated parts of the dossier were false and subject to russian disinformation you signed another fisa renewal on april 5th 2017. steel is clearly not a reliable source why did you say otherwise and why did you approve the fisa application in light of the evidence what i said about mr steele that you read at the beginning of your preamble was what i believed based on what i had been told and the rest of the reports you've listed i don't remember learning about them or being told about them so i can't comment on whether they're accurate or not did you ever speak with president obama or vice president biden about any aspect of crossfire hurricane if so what did you discuss i don't remember any discussion i remember sometime in the summer of 2016 i think august during a meeting in the situation room i told the president that the fbi was endeavoring to understand whether any americans were working or associated with the russian effort to attack the election i didn't talk about any names but i believe i alerted him to the general nature of the work did you ever speak with president obama or vice president biden about any aspect of the flynn case if so what did you discuss i remember the flynn investigation coming up once i think it was january the 5th when president obama held me back to urge me to do the case in the normal way and to let him know if there was any reason that he should not be sharing sensitive information about russia with the trump transition i assured him that i would keep him informed and i would conduct the investigation in that way during the january 5th 2017 meeting between you president obama vice president biden sally yates and susan rice did you mention that flynn's calls with the russian ambassador appear quote appear legit i don't remember using that word if i used it i would have meant authentic and not fabricated i wouldn't have meant appropriate but i don't remember using that word and my time's up are we coming through there at the hearing you're all you're good okay well mr chairman i i'm afraid listening to this from the beginning that it seems more like a political errand for president trump's re-election effort and perhaps for some others on the committee i think it's offensive to all the americans who pay taxes i realize the president does not but the senate apparently has no time to address the deadly covet pandemic that's surging again it's taken more than 200 000 american lives instead it seems chairman your party republicans are obsessed with two priorities first a mad rush to confirm a supreme court nominee on the eve of a presidential election just a few days before the supreme court can you rule out the possibility that the crossfire hurricane investigation was predicated in part on russian disinformation i think so i think both your colleagues on the senate intelligence committee and the mueller report and the inspector general found it was predicated based on credible information from a friendly foreign nation's ambassador so you're saying even though we know now that the sub for the steel investigation for the steele dossier was a russian agent um that doesn't in your view taint any of the basis for that uh investigation first think i don't agree with your predication with respect to the fbi's investigation of the subsource but the investigation wasn't open based on anything from steel it was open based on information from an allied ambassador about something a trump foreign policy adviser said in london about a russian offer to the campaign of dirk on hillary clinton it wasn't until two months later that the steel material came to the team the steele dossier was used to secure a fisa warrant correct correct back in january of after the election the intelligence community submitted a report intelligence community assessment do you recall that i do the rca from january sixth i think or fifth i think i think that's i think that's right you recall a discussion between you and the cia about whether the steele dossier should be included as part of the intelligence community assessment i remember some interaction with the my fellow leaders of the intelligence community agencies that were part of that assessment i don't know whether it was over email or on the phone about how that we were contributing this material to the effort and how they were going to approach it you don't recall that director brennan said it should not be included as part of the ica because it has not been verified i don't know whether it was brennan i remember being told that the group's view was it was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included but it wasn't sufficiently corroborated to be in the body of the intelligence community assessment so they put a brief summary of it in an annex mr comey you're aware that when we try to reauthorize laws like the foreign intelligence surveillance act which is essential to our ability to protect the national security of the united states there are members of this body and people on the outside who question whether congress should have that authority the intelligence community should have that authority because they think those tools will be abused are you familiar generally with that yes i've participated in those reauthorization debates throughout a lot of my career i know you have does it concern you as at all as a former leader in the intelligence community as director of the fbi that the questions that have come up as a result of the horowitz inspector general report the information we know now about the flaws in the crossfire hurricane investigation including the use of the steele dossier the inclusion of less than complete and accurate information by an fbi attorney as part of the predicate for that does it concern you that the questions that have been raised here will make it harder perhaps even impossible for congress to come together and reauthorize important tools like the foreign intelligence surveillance act yes and it concerns me even more that the inspector general found mistakes in every fisa application that he reviewed well beyond the particular case we've been talking about so yes it concerns me senator durbin thank you mr chairman thank you mr comey mr comey is personal debt an important consideration when an individual is seeking a security clearance yes why because a person's financial situation could make them vulnerable to coercion by an adversary and allow an adversary to do what we try to do to foreign government officials we find are indebted and that is recruit them to our side so go ahead i'm sorry so it's a serious issue in any background review so someone with substantial personal debt may be vulnerable to influence by a foreign adversary yes a government official director comey it's been publicly reported that president trump has a debt of over 421 million dollars personal debt most of which has to be repaid in the next few years my source new york times september 27th so as a general matter are there serious risks when someone with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt personal debt has access as the president does to all of the country's classified and sensitive information it's a serious concern when anyone seeking or with a clearance has that kind of financial vulnerability i don't know the circumstances because of the president's case but in general yes if the president disclosed his income tax returns we might be able to know a little more let me uh just say this this is an important committee with a great history i've said that before and i mean it i can certainly point to many times in history where the senate judiciary committee was the leading committee investigative committee when it came to the united states senate i think it is entirely appropriate that we are meeting today to discuss russian influence on american elections i can't think of anything more insidious than vladimir putin trying to affect the outcome of the american election and overruling the verdict of democracy by the american people it is a great issue it's an important issue there's one problem today we're focusing on the wrong election today we're focusing on the election of 2016 instead of the election of 2020 the one that is merely five weeks away fbi director ray testified earlier this month that russia is quote very active in the 2020 election director ray said russia is exerting quote malign foreign influence in an effort to hurt the biden campaign direct quote that would seem to be something that the senate judiciary committee might be interested in not only that there's a possibility of interference with the american people voting for president united states but that interference comes from a foreign source russia and they really have their favorite in the race and their favorite appears to be the incumbent president and yet we are not taking a look at that today we are going back on a trip down memory lane to four years ago to decide whether or not certain documents were handled properly and i will concede the fact some were not but let's be honest if we were doing our job we'd be talking about the 2020 election whether american law is adequate to discourage the russian intervention and what steps we are taking as a nation to protect the integrity of the election process we are not doing that because the agenda here is all about a dossier written five or six years ago well that may be of interest to some but not to most of the american people and i think it really comes down to some fundamental questions why if we are embarking on this escapade into 2016 and what preceded the russian interference in that election of 2016. why did we decide as a committee on a partisan basis to reject my effort to include subpoenas of trump campaign manager paul manafort and so a russian agent constantine kalimnik if we wanted to know everything about 2016 why wouldn't we subpoena them but yet on a partisan roll call this committee decided not to not interested don't want to get into probing it we have lots of questions today of director comey as to whether he read every document when he read it if he did what impact it had on him but when it came to these two key witnesses whose names appear over and over and over again in the russian interference of the 2016 election this committee on a partisan roll call rejected my effort to extend subpoenas to these two individuals is there some information we don't want to know from those two people i think there's a lot of questions that have gone unanswered i also want to make it clear this notion about the steele dossier let me ask you this director comey was the steele dossier the reason that the fbi began looking into russian interference in the 2016 election no are you aware director comey that none not one of the 37 indictments and 199 criminal counts resulting from the mueller investigation relied on the steele dossier i had read that i think that makes the case that all of this attention on the steele dossier is fascinating as that document may be did not have direct relevance on the conclusion that the russians were interfering in the 2016 election or the indictments that followed from the mueller investigation thank you i'm sorry my time up no oh thank you uh let me ask if i might on a statement made by the attorney general let's see if i can find this to be sure i got this accurately on may 18th attorney general barr gave a quote at the department of justice press conference he said what happened to the president 2016 election and throughout the first two years of his administration was abhorrent it was a grave injustice it was unprecedented in american history the attorney general went on to say the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of this country were involved in advancing a quote false and utterly baseless russian collusion narrative against the president end of quote then he went on to say the proper investigative and prosecutive standard prosecutive standards of the department of justice were abused in my view in order to reach a particular result director call me would you comment on those that statement made by attorney general bar about the men and women in the justice department he says that a lot i have no idea what on earth he's talking about this was an investigation that was appropriately predicated and opened that had to be opened and it was in the main conducted in the right way picked up by the special counsel led to the indictment of dozens of people and a finding by your colleagues in the senate that the head of trump's campaign was a grave counterintelligence threat to the united states of america because he was following information to a known russian intelligence officer the notion that the attorney general believes that was an illegitimate endeavor to investigate that mystifies me thank you director comey thank you if i could just respond a bit to what senator durbin said about the committee i'm not here to suggest that the russians did not interfere in the 2016 election they did would they try to interfere in 2020 they would they are is china trying to interfere yes so we have briefings about this i'm very concerned about it but what brought us here today is that i supported legislation with my colleagues on this side of the aisle and your side of the aisle to make sure mr mueller could do his job without political interference well after two and a half years and 25 million dollars and 60 fbi agents that job is done not one person has been charged with colluding with the russians in the trump world not one now when we look into the work product and i've asked mr mueller to come and tell us about the mueller investigation he has chosen not to come if you want mr weissman to come i would invite him the committee is trying to save the fisa system the fisa warrant applications occur against carter page should make every american concerned about how off the rails this system got that the document necessary to get the warrant against an american citizen the key document was prepared by somebody on the democratic payroll who hired a russian suspected spy and all the information in the dossier fell apart over time and the court was never informed of the exculpatory evidence that was coming in and what astounds me the most is that the director of the fbi in charge of this investigation involving a sitting president is completely clueless about any of the information obtained by his agency just though suspicion over the document that the sub-source was a suspected russian agent that when he was interviewed he said it was all bar talk hearsay should be taken with a grain of salt that the cia told the fbi in december this is internet rumor none of that made it to the court none of that and he didn't know any of it how is it possible that an investigation at this level that none of this information that's damning to the case against mr page never makes it to the top and you want us to reauthorize this program with a system like that everybody's responsible but nobody's responsible somebody needs to be responsible for misleading the court excluding information to the court that was exculpatory that would have mattered how would you like your client to be treated like this so my point is i am trying my best to understand how the warrant application failed so many times how the court was abused over months and nobody seems to be as concerned about it as i am well count men about being concerned about russian interference in 2016 and 2020 but if this committee does nothing else it is up to us to find out how it got off the rails how an fbi lawyer could doctor a document that was exculpatory to the to the subject of the investigation be charged with the crime how could that happen is there no checks and balances in the fisa process is there no duty to be candid with the court when you find something exculpatory how do you present a document full of information there is no consulate russian consulate in miami you had information the whole sexual escapade thing was russian disinformation and it never made it to the court how are we supposed to trust this system without fundamentally changing it and holding people accountable one last question do you uh director comedy alternatively knowing then what you know now about all the things that we've come to find would you have still signed the warrant application against carter page in october january and april no i would want a much more complete understanding of what we write thank you very much uh senator lee you know mr chairman it's a technical thing but when you speak over the witness your voice blocks out what the witness said so we don't know what the witness said okay so i think it would be helpful if you allowed the witness yeah to answer yeah in in a regular hearing with the witness here we can hear what the witness is saying and could you repeat your pornographer put it down fair enough you block them out as soon as you talk over him i'm sorry repeat your answer i'm sorry the answer was no not without a much fuller discussion of how they were thinking about their disclosure obligations to the court thank you very much thank you senator whitehouse thank you mr chairman this is an issue that's concerned me for a long time the foreign intelligence surveillance act has some problems those problems have been on live display today they've been on live display over the last few years i've been working over the last decade to try to reform them i i've forced a number of bipartisan approach proposals to do precisely that most recently with the lee leahy amendment one that passed the senate that would have passed the house but the vote for it was was canceled i hope still to get that passed it is a dangerous thing to provide enormous investigative power of the united states government with as much authority as it has and then to put that in a private secret set of proceedings these have worried me for a long time we've got to reform them i remember mr comey when you were first nominated to be the fbi director i had been in the senate for a few years by then i hadn't had a lot of previous interactions with you but i knew you and i felt i knew you well i remembered fondly some interaction i had with you as a young prosecutor you visited the u.s attorney's office in salt lake city and you gave us a really encouraging uh speech in which you give your heartfelt sentiments about what it means to be an assistant united states attorney i remember specifically your admonition that it's important in a job like that where you have to see things that as you put it people shouldn't have to see it's important to love someone it's important to dot your eyes and cross your t's and uh i remember something inspiring you said he said if somebody woke me up you at the time you were serving either as the deputy attorney general or the head of the criminal division of the department of justice i'm not sure which um you said in the middle of the night if someone woke me up and they would say who are you i would identify myself as an assistant united states attorney because deep down that's who i am that inspired in me for many years uh a level of commitment when representing the united states government to make sure that i was thorough and you inspired me for that reason when you were nominated to the position of of fbi director even though i had some grave concerns with the fbi and how it was administering fisa at the time i trusted you i believe that you would act in good faith when i asked you in my office and later in committee hearings first in your confirmation hearing and then in our all of our subsequent oversight hearings what you would do to help make sure that the fisa process was respected and not manipulated you gave me your word and having established that brief relationship with you all those years earlier i trusted you i have to say today i'm very disappointed to see that those promises uh announced to me seem very insincere now mr comey with all due respect you don't seem to know anything about an investigation that you ran so so how can you now as a private citizen and former fbi director show up and then speculate freely or regarding any alleged ties between president putin and president trump i heard you say just a moment ago now i hope i misunderstood you please correct me if i did i think i heard you say that you speculate still speculate they might have something on president trump because of how president trump refers or doesn't refer to president putin in public this of course takes into account nothing about the fact that sources you've relied on in the past have turned out not to be accurate you didn't identify the inaccuracies subsequently to the fisa court it acknowledges nothing about the fact that there are perfectly reasonable explanations as to why one leader would refer to a foreign leader in a certain tone or the fact that this is the same tone that he uses and referring to other world leaders particularly those world leaders in parts of the country where we've had some issues so so honestly how can you as a private citizen now come to us and in your capacity as former fbi director and speculate so freely regarding these alleged ties when you don't seem to know anything about this investigation that you ran sorry senator i i can as a private citizen because i have eyes and ears and i've ever said in response to the question that's how it stops me watching the president in helsinki take putin's side against his own intelligence community and lots of stuff like that and so i separate the two i agree with you there are serious reasons to worry about the fisa process when the inspector general found errors in every fisa application and that's a really important thing to dig into and i respect this committee looking at it so i think about those two things okay okay i'm glad glad to hear that we share that in common that's something we can build on that's fantastic why do you not think that you had a duty to provide all the information to the foreign intelligence surveillance court i mean you signed the renewal application did you not i signed the certification which is very narrow what does that mean what the heck does the the the certifications mean if you weren't required to know and in fact did not know what was in there and if you it didn't have any duty to provide all the information to the court what does that certification mean i was trying to say senator when you started speaking again the certification is narrow that the fbi director has to sign but that doesn't change the fact that the fbi has a duty of candor of heightened candor to the fisa court and it wasn't met according to the inspector general here that's a separate question from whether the fbi director should have been briefed on the individual portions of the carter page investigation i know people care about that much more important why were there material omissions not just in this application but in all the applications that the inspector general looked at so i think that's a really important question okay we have to remember that the only reason the the people who did this i'm confident number one the circumstantial evidence uh suggests that there likely was a political motive in fact one of the reasons we know that is that in various documents that we've obtained we can see political motives coming into consideration but in many instances those individuals didn't believe they had any chance of getting caught they believed hillary clinton was going to win had she won in all probability none of this would have come to light how should this strike the american people the average american citizen knowing that any american citizen could get caught into the same type of trap could get become the subject of an investigation rooted in the foreign intelligence surveillance act it would never come to light if in this circumstance where there was always a possibility that it would come to light and it did come to light because the individual who was connected to the investigation became elected president of the united states despite the best efforts or perhaps the expectations of those conducting in the investigation how should they have any confidence in the fisa process when certifications were provided but the full information wasn't when the duty of candor to the court wasn't met when no one seems to take accountability for anything and this entire process is handled in secret with a malleable standard leaving it almost without accountability should the american people have any confidence in the foreign intelligence surveillance court or in those government lawyers appearing before it i'm not going to address your long preamble which i have a significant disagreement with the american people should always want to know how the government's power is being used especially when it's being used in secret how is it checked how is it overseen how is it balanced and we know because you've been around a long time too that periodically we discover problems in any ex parte process the american people should have confidence in the oversight of the inspector general especially and of this committee and your counterparts in the house to demand those answers i think that's totally appropriate okay mr chairman i see my time's expired you don't install a wasp nest in your child's bedroom and then express surprise when the child gets bitten by wasps you don't adopt an ex parte process and then express surprise and outrage when it goes completely unsupervised and off the rails this is an issue that's neither republican nor democrat it's neither liberal nor conservative this is a constitutional issue this is a moral issue and we've got big problems we need to pass the lee leahy amendment and we need to reform or eliminate the foreign intelligence surveillance act thank you senator whitehouse thank you um mr chairman i am um particularly sensitive to the problem of selective declassification because i had to go through being on the receiving end of a lot of selective declassification during the intelligence committee's investigation of the torture program and i will tell you it is extremely frustrating to have uh information declassified in that case out of the white house that you know can be exploded completely blown up by other information but that other information hasn't been declassified so you can't answer the false implication from selectively declassified information so from that background i am really concerned that we are treating this ratcliffe letter as something at all serious or credible and mr chairman i hope very much that nobody from this committee had any hand in generating this letter we are recipients only i hope because if we had any hand in this that's a real problem um i will point out that with respect to allegation bullet one talking about tying trump to putin and the russians hacking of the democratic national committee that's actually an established fact with respect to the point about a proposal from a foreign policy adviser claiming interference by russian security services that is an established fact and the u.s presidential candidate donald trump and russian hackers hampering u.s elections is also an established fact so what else you have around here is what looks like just something that got spun up by a political appointee and is now being offered through this committee as having any credibility and i think that it's a this rings just innumerable bells about the dangers of selective declassification so there's topic one i've got a problem with selective declassification in our proceedings here second i've got a big problem with access to documents you and i have talked about this you know that i've made public statements about how the fbi appears to have had a policy for damn sure a pattern of refusing to answer questions refusing to answer qfrs and many cases to republican senators but for sure to democrat senators you took that claim seriously enough that you organized a meeting for me with the deputy attorney general to explain this policy or this pattern of not answering questions that was on june 15th as i recall and here we are nearly into october and you know how many answers i've gotten since that meeting zero none not a single one so when it comes to our questions it looks like it's a total stone wall in this case on this matter the doj has given the chairman unprecedented access to information including deliberative documents stuff that they wouldn't give us even if they were answering our questions and classified information which usually is a mayor's nest to get through 18 separate productions of highly sensitive documents totaling 1 550 pages so this particular question seems to be getting high-speed special treatments out of the doj when in other areas we get a complete wall of silence and uh shutdown and the last is i'm told that there are even private briefings to republicans only on this matter in which democrats were not invited to participate again if that is true a combination of selective declassification dis honorable and unfair access to documents and partisan private briefings does not get us off to a good start going back to my letter to you of june 4th about the hazards of this investigation so i just needed to say that i agree with you mr chairman that it is worth looking into the question of what is wrong with the fisa process that allowed these repeated errors to happen across a whole array of cases but it's also interesting to read the gleason brief where a retired federal judge on behalf of a federal judge accused the department of justice under attorney general barr of running political errands for the president in order to protect a political supporter and friend of his mr flynn and we have exactly zero attention being paid to that that is a fairly serious matter of interest i think equivalent to the matter of interest in fisa but nothing the current fbi director is talking about present russian interference in this election right now as we speak to try to get president trump reelected where's the hearing on that where are the documents on that where's the declassified material on that none of it and you know i'll go back to the what i considered because i don't have any information because the fbi has given me none what appears to have been a bogus tip line in the kavanaugh investigation maybe it was maybe it wasn't but a question about whether that was a bogus tip line i think is something that is worth answering and yes it is important that the fisa process was abused but if an fbi investigation was abused in the kavanaugh hearings that's also an important matter so i don't want to deprecate the importance of what we're doing here but i do think it stands in a very sharp contrast to other issues with the fbi that are continually swept under the rug and continually stonewalled the question that i have is something i've raised before and i'll ask director comey because he's done a lot of investigations you and i have done investigations as well chairman you've been a prosecutor if you have an investigation and if you determine as an over in your oversight as a supervisor that there is a flaw or an omission or a false statement in a warrant application obviously you should not file that warrant application with the court the problem is that the committee's questions on the republican side have always ended there you would not sign the warrant if you knew that was the case the problem with that is that you then go on to the next step and that is just because there was a flaw in a proposed warrant doesn't mean you end the investigation you're not in your head we both agree at the end of the day what you then do is you go back and you look at whether the investigation was otherwise predicated with all the false city or whatever removed and everything accurate that needs to be in there done and if then the investigation was otherwise predicated and if then there was otherwise probable cause to continue director comey do you not then proceed with the investigation with a cleaned up warrant rather than let somebody get off scot-free because of an error that never reached the court you'd certainly want to go through i think that's called the frank's process to understand whether you still have sufficient basis to establish probable cause with the mistakes and omissions corrected and that is a standard fbi practice correct standard prosecutorial investigative practice across across the board thank you hey uh respond and turn over senate cruz number one senator wright uh white house has reason to be concerned about some testimony given in the house by a department of justice official about environmental policy and we will keep plugging away with me and you and senator lee because it's a legitimate inquiry just to to be clear chairman yes i'm very concerned about the antitrust right investigation and who was behind it and why it seemed to violate so many rules and norms yes and when we get around to senator lee and senator klobuchar's antitrust investigation which was supposed to be today but has been i gather and definitely postponed i would hope that we have those documents but the list that i gave to deputy to the deputy attorney general of all of the qfr's that i've not had answers to and of all of the questions and letters i've not had answers to goes well beyond that one issue of the del rahim investigation of fake investigation and right would seem but we'll see of the uh auto companies yeah and just to make it clear to the public at large because the carter page warrant application was incredibly flawed doesn't mean you can't look at other things the question for me has always been okay let's look at all things trump and the dossier the accused carter page is having a relationship with manaport and that's where he's passing all this information carter page never taught the metaport as things that the court should know allegations being made we now know that the dossier was a result at least in part of russian disinformation that the fbi took russian disinformation from a political party paid for by a political party and got a warrant against an american citizen and that's pretty stunning and we got to do something somebody needs to go to jail or get fired over that now the question has always been did the fbi have the same zeal looking at trump let's put it this way everything trump got looked at people's lives were turned upside down 25 million dollars was spent and nobody's ever been charged with colluding with the russians on the trump side were there was there any suggestion maybe the other side is was involved in trying to create a russian trump problem for political purposes we know that christopher steele was on the payroll of the democratic party we know that he was working for fusion gps we know that his primary sub source was igor the russian spy if they were willing to do that would they be willing to do more we know in july there's an intercept out there from russian intelligence analyst that the clinton campaign is concocting a strategy to tie trump to russia all i'm suggesting is did they look at that and director comey has told me he doesn't remember getting an inquiry from the intelligence community about a september concern about the clinton campaign trying to change the subject from the server to trump russia he doesn't remember that so what kind of system do we have we look at all things trump all the time and when we get to sculptor evidence we keep looking when we told it's not reliable we keep using it and when there's suggestions that the other side may be up to no good we just ignore it that's why the radcliffe information is important to me i haven't been privately briefed by anybody but i'm beginning to understand there was a two-tiered system here when it came to trump there were no rules plow head ignore everything life you need to alter documents when it came to clinton seems to be a completely different standard knowing that the campaign had on its payroll a foreign agent who hired a russians by to get dirt on trump that is the concern i have and we can't live in a world where you turn the world upside down against one campaign and give the other campaign pretty much a complete pass regarding russia senator chairman since you've responded to me may i have a moment back to you yes you may i'll be brief the only thing i will say is that if you look at the ratcliffe letter the only thing that it really says is that if it's to be believed at all there was a plan within the clinton campaign to point out that trump and the russians were scheming in the election or the trump campaign and the russians were scheming in the election okay great so that predicated fact seems actually to be established truth if you believe the ssci report and if you believe what director ray is saying right now and what the fbi has said all along so it's really hard to call um a campaign's effort to blow the whistle on the other side's communications with russia and russia's efforts to support that candidate with the actual efforts to yeah to do that i mean they're they're not the same thing thank you i have a completely different view of what okay but you had a chance to say yours you gave me no that's fair and i'm grateful for yield back and i thank i i all i know is that the cia felt obama needed no about this and uh i take it completely different that this was an effort by the clinton campaign to tie trump to russia not because of anything they found because that was part of their political strategy uh senator lee you want to say something yeah uh since the nitro subcommittee was brought up i just wanted to respond to that point uh as you know senator whitehouse we had originally scheduled the oversight hearing uh for today because of this conflict with this hearing today um that couldn't occur i've been in constant contact with assistant attorney general macon del rahim um who is an outstanding lawyer one that i've known for 20 years and who i trust now i know you and i perhaps see that differently making delrahim is eager not only willing but eager to come and testify and to set the record straight again on on these issues he has in fact responded to your letter i don't know whether you've read that response yet or not he also told me last night i believe there are more documents that he's uh either just sent you or about to send you i'd like to know you know instead of just smearing him by saying that he's being evasive tell me what questions you've asked that he hasn't answered to my knowledge he has responded to you you may not like his responses but i'll get i'll get you the list please do yeah yeah could we yeah well we'll we'll resolve this but i gave a list to the chairman some time ago when i and i support assume that else is passed on to you i think it's important that we do this and i don't want to be in a situation in which he comes in and i don't have the chance to do the preparation for a meaningful hearing yeah i i totally get that uh mr chair maybe you can help us get this hearing about being the ranking on that subcommittee because i was willing to do it tomorrow i'd be willing to do it any day next week it looks like we're going to be back uh we'll be back both senator whitehouse and i are going to be back the week after that for the supreme court hearing um i just think it's really important that we go forward there's major tech investigations going on and we were going to have both the head of the ftc and the head of the anti trust division so i hope we can schedule this i thought it was really unfortunate this got cancelled because of this hearing yeah well i think this hearing's important and i agree what your warning is important and we'll we'll get there somehow we'll get there senator cruz thank you mr chairman uh returning to mr comey mr comey you testified earlier today that you have concerns whenever the fbi doesn't operate in a quote competent and honest way in your judgment was the way that the fbi handled the russia investigation the surveillance of the trump campaign the carter page fisa application the michael flynn investigation was that handled in a competent and honest way first senator because i there was no to my knowledge surveillance of the trump campaign i think the overall investigation of the russian interference and whether americans were associated with it was conducted in an honest competent independent way so mr comey you're saying it's competent and honest i assume you've read the horowitz inspector general report which found 17 significant errors or admissions and omissions in the carter page fisa application so in your view 17 mistakes lying to the court is competent and honest well i've read the report i don't believe he concluded there were lies to the court but there are significant and important failings in the way in which the carter page fisa was prepared and renewed all right mr mr comey let's go directly to lies the the inspector general report concluded that mr klein smith an attorney who worked for you in the fbi deliberately altered an email he had emailed the cia to ask if carter page was a source the the cia came back and said yes he was a source and mr kleinsmith your lawyer altered that email to add the words not a source to make the email say precisely the opposite of what the cia said and that fraudulent document was then used as a basis for a fraudulent submission to the fisa court you believe that is honest and competent mr comey i don't believe you've offered an accurate summary of the horowitz's findings mr comey i have the report right in front of me page 254 describes how the lawyers specifically the words and not a source had been in certainness inserted in the response directly reversing what the cia says was it practice in your fbi to fraudulently alter evidence that you submit to federal courts it was not the practice in the fbi to fraudulently alter anything as presented to federal courts well it is difficult to say that that an investigation that featured fraudulent evidence is competent and honest but let's move on to something else the predicate of much of this investigation was the steele dossier which has now been totally discredited as garbage when did you learn that the steele dossier was being funded by the democratic national committee in the hillary clinton campaign again i believe your predicate is inaccurate but i first learned of the steele dossier in late september of 2016 and understood that it was funded by political opposition to president trump or canada trump i didn't know the specifics of which part of the opposition but i knew that it was political opposition research funding when when when did you learn that i think about the time i was briefed on it so about the same time probably third week of september so you were personally aware that that the political opposition whether the dnc or hillary clinton or whatever whatever campaign bucket it was coming from it was the opposing party that was funding it you were specifically aware of it in september why didn't you tell the fisa court why did you admit that over and over and over again on applications you submitted didn't the court deserve to know that my recollection is the fisa court was alerted to the possibility that it was a politically biased reporting your recollection is is false the fisa court was not told that it was funded by the dnc that's one of the omissions that your fbi did repeatedly to the federal court all right go ahead that's not what i just said so what did you just say i said my recollection is the court was alerted that there was potential political bias in this reporting political bias is different from saying it was funded by the hillary clinton campaign you just testified to this committee you were specifically aware of that and yet you repeatedly did not inform the court of it when you were getting an order to essentially weaponize the the democratic opposition research all right next question when did you learn that the primary sub source so the basis for this garbage steel dossier was a suspected russian asset i don't remember ever being informed of any prior investigation of the any of steel's sources including the primary sub-source so you're not aware of it today i'm aware of it today because i've read it in the public sphere and i've read a summary memo that the department of justice sent to the judiciary committee i would note the primary sub-source was subject to fbi investigation a counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011 and i will read some of what the investigation was the primary sub source approached two individuals who were about to enter the obama administration and indicated that if quote the two individuals at the table did get a job in the government and had access to classified information and wanted to make a little extra money the primary sub source knew some people to whom they could speak is trying to recruit spies against the u.s government you have a russian agent that is the basis for an fbi investigation and the fbi is the one who had investigated them your testimony is you didn't know did did it occur to you to ask did you did was did you ask any questions or do any due diligence on this at all i don't remember anything about the the facts that have been revealed recently about the subsource and as i said earlier i think that cuts both ways but i don't know how the people running the investigation thought about it well you didn't tell the fisa court that either and i suspect the fisa court would have had a very different assessment if you had told them that the basis for your application was what you were being told from a suspected russian asset all right let's shift to another topic on may 3rd 2017 in this committee chairman grassley asked you point blank quote have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the trump investigation of the clinton investigation you responded under oath quote never he then asked you quote have you ever authorized someone else at the fbi to be an anonymous source in news reports about the trump investigation or the clinton administration you responded again under oath no now as you know mr mccabe who works for you has publicly and repeatedly that he leaked information to the wall street journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it now what mr mccabe is saying and what you testify to this committee cannot both be true one or the other is false who's telling the truth i just can only speak to my testimony i stand by what the testimony you summarize that i gave in may of 2017. so your testimony is you've never authorized anyone to leak and mr mccabe when if he says contrary is not telling the truth is that correct again i'm not going to characterize andy's testimony but mine is the same today all right i'm going to make a final point because my time has expired this investigation of the president was corrupt the fbi and the department of justice were politicized and weaponized and in my opinion there are only two possibilities that you were deliberately corrupt or woefully incompetent and i don't believe you were incompetent this has done severe damage to the professionals and the honorable men and women at the fbi because law enforcement should not be used as a political weapon and that is the legacy you've left senator blumenthal oh i'm sorry oh i'm sorry senator klobuchar i didn't see you apologize thank you very much mr chair uh thank you very much uh director comey for being here once again um i think a lot of people are wondering why we are having this hearing right now um and i think most people would think we should be talking about other things except maybe president trump and i understand the chair's statements about wanting to move on fisa reform i will point out the republicans have been running the senate for the last four years they have their own internal disagreements on fisa the president has been president for the last four years and i haven't heard him talking about fisa reform repeatedly as one of his major priorities i'm sure if he wanted to make this a major priority within your party it could have gotten done but instead we are having this hearing right now and i will get to mr comey in a while i'll note that he has appeared before this committee many times if you look at all of these reports about what he did in his time in office i don't agree with everything that he did but i do know as being his classmate in law school i could call him anytime and ask him things but i also know that he had to respect a lot of people that worked for him and so if i look at legacies we all have mixed legacies we all have things that we regret we have things that we're proud of but i know that one of his legacies with that he did have support for law enforcement i know it from people in minnesota um and i would note that he was fired when were you fired mr comey may 9th 2017. and where were you when you found out that you were fired by the president in los angeles for a diversity recruiting event i found out on television um and i know that you went all around the country talking to law enforcement is that right during your time as head of the fbi yes and are you proud of the work that the people did in the fbi enormously it was one of the highlights of my entire life to be associated with them thank you so what i'm thinking as people watch this not that many people are but if they are what they're thinking is what are you guys doing first of all there is an election coming up in a few weeks and as senator durbin has pointed out there are a lot of concerns right now about russia not about what mr comey uh was involved in that investigation years ago but what's happening right now we have director ray himself the current fbi director appointed by president trump saying russia is very active in the 2020 election primarily through what we would call malign foreign influence in an attempt to undermine joe biden to denigrate vice president biden that's quote mueller we know this the russian government interfered in the 2016 election and the trump campaign knew about it we know that we have director coats saying that russia is the former director coates is the most aggressive foreign actor no question quote from coates former senator here the warning lights are blinking red again and then we have the cia world intelligence review we assess that president vladimir putin and the senior most russian officials are aware of and probably directing russia's influence operations aimed at denigrating the former u.s vice president supporting the u.s president and fueling public discord ahead of the u.s election in november so that's the hearing that we should be having right now or as was pointed out by senator whitehouse we could be having the hearing we were supposed to be having right now which is the head of the antitrust division of the justice department and the head of the ftc while we've got fraud going on during this pandemic we could be asking them about innocent people being hurt we could be asking them about as senator whitehouse has pointed out what in the world is going on over at the antitrust division why they devoted so many resources to marijuana mergers and we could be asking them the results of their tech investigations which is now basically 20 of the stock market those are pretty important things or we could instead of being here rehashing this of someone who is asking someone who is fired but from their job by the president along with so many other people we could be trying to figure out what we should be doing for the american people during this pandemic people a day 850 people day dying from the coronavirus 800 businesses close every single day but here we are rehashing this so to me if anyone watched that debate last night sent i believe that's why we're having this hearing because we're just a few weeks out we may as well be pretty blatant about it if anyone watched the debate tonight and saw last night and saw the president in all of his heckling glory i think what they saw was someone who is trying to undermine our elections spreading falsehoods about voting by mail when in fact so many people in this building and republican governors across this country have said it's perfectly safe to vote by mail refusing to condemn white supremacy in front of the entire nation that's not something you clean up the next day all of this is done to wreak havoc right before an election so that's what i think we should be talking about today but instead we're here with you director comey so i will ask you some very quick questions when you were fbi director did you become aware at some point prior to the 2016 presidential election that russia launched a sophisticated effort to disrupt and interfere in the u.s election yes and as the fbi and intelligence agencies were learning about that threat did you also become aware of efforts by the russians to pass information to the trump campaign that they believed would be helpful yes is it true that there were more than 120 contacts between the trump campaign and individuals linked to russia i think that's a number i recall from the senate intel report and the mueller report somewhere in that area do you agree um with the trump administration intelligence officials that i just quoted including your successor at the fbi that president trump appointed that russia is emboldened and trying it again yes i accept what chris wray the fbi director said he's a person of integrity which makes his life difficult now but the american people can trust him does coordinating with a foreign power as part of a political campaign especially a foreign adversary like russia pose a serious threat to our national security yes and why do you think since again we have chosen to to have this hearing literally weeks before the election throwing aside all other subjects that we could be devoted to at the time why do you think that nearly 500 national security experts including former military leaders have said that the current president has demonstrated that he is not equal to the enormous responsibilities of his office why do you think that republicans democrats and independents have said this because those are people whose spine is a commitment to integrity and they see an absolute absence of that with the current commander-in-chief and it concerns all of them without regard to their politics as it should thank you thank you mr comey uh we'll uh if okay do senator sass and give the mr comey about a 10 minute break and restroom break is that okay mr comey yes sir sir okay great and just one response to senator klobuchar who i consider a friend i'll be honest with you you wouldn't be having this hearing and everybody in the world knows it the horowitz report which is damning was never never appeared before the house judiciary committee y'all don't care as a party you seem to be only worried about trump in russia and when there's evidence coming out of every corner of the world that the russians played the fbi through a dnc operative that's just of no consequence let the american people know if you were in charge we wouldn't know any of this senator sass thank you chairman uh director comey i think that the horowitz report is not just saddening and infuriating it's also really embarrassing uh as somebody who cares deeply about the fbi and its culture and its workers we got a whole bunch of american patriotic heroes who work inside that institution and they have lost standing uh they've lost respect in the eyes of the american people a lot of trust has evaporated i've fought hard to defend the fbi and its culture and i was embarrassed to read the uh horowitz report when you read it what are the top two or three things that you're embarrassed by well i think i share your reaction senator sass the collection of omissions failures to consider updates to communicate between the team trying to figure out what's true and what's not true with the steel material and the team investigating carter page is embarrassing it's sloppy it's i mean run out of words there's no indication and the inspector general would say it if he found it that people were doing bad things on purpose but that doesn't make it any less concerning and embarrassing but doesn't that point at you i mean you and i have spoken multiple times over my five and a half years here or i guess from arriving here in january of of uh 2015 through to your departure in 2017. you and i had many many discussions about the future of cyber and information operations against not just the united states government but against institutions more broadly that would so distrust and you and i agreed that the fbi had not just an incredibly important mission in that space but a really hard mission there was a lot of work to be done to be sure we were prepared to play defense against the kind of cyber and information operations that we're now talking about here today and we said you and i agreed on this that public trust was at risk and as we listen to you testify today repeatedly you say things like i was unaware there's this passive voice about how all these things happened in the bureau it was your culture you were the leader you were to maintain and and build up that culture and you understood the nature of the challenge isn't the horowitz report chiefly an indictment of you personally oh two things are true and i hope you don't hear me to say i'm not responsible i was leader of that institution so this reflects on me entirely and it's my responsibility that's a separate question from whether i was briefed on a particular aspect of a particular investigation but no i'm not looking to shirk responsibility the director is responsible i i appreciate that that that's a real answer but my question wasn't just about the particular investigation that's the headline of today's hearing it's that the ig horowitz ig horowitz's report talks about a fisa process that is riddled with errors every single place they looked it was crap you were in charge how is it possible that the fisa process is that bad i have defended the fisa process i've fought against many of the particular reforms that some of my colleagues have wanted to advance because i believed the checks and balances in the system were real you were responsible for those checks and balances where were you yeah that's a great question i think all of us me in particular took comfort in the complexity of the layers and layers of review and oversight associated with visa and i actually think given that they found problems in every fisa application that what we thought was a good thing was actually a bad thing and i hope they're looking at returning the model to one closer to criminal wiretaps where a single agent and a single lawyer are responsible and they feel the squeeze of signing their name what happened to us i think through a lot of years of creating oversight his responsibility was diffused instead of concentrated in individual human beings i hope that's something the inspector general and the director are looking at but i share your concern it's a really important question i think that's insufficient i i have a lot of neighbors in nebraska who believe there is a massive deep state conspiracy i don't believe most of those conspiracy theories but it is really hard to understand how that many special agents and i want to be clear the vast majority of special agents are wonderful hard-working humans who have lots of opportunities to earn more money and have more schedule control if they were doing something else the fbi is filled with men and women who do great stuff for the american people so i want to fight hard to defend against impugning so many of them and yet it appears that at the top of your organization there was a culture where many of the people who should have been doing the hard work to make sure the checks and balances were fully carried out didn't think there was really any chance they would get caught and so they could be sloppy to malicious a lot of people in this room and and watching at home or who read the the horowitz report can have different views about how much of this is incompetence to evil but somewhere on that continuum there was a whole hell of a lot of people at the top of your organization who didn't ever actually think they were going to be held accountable what what did you do to manage the fisa process so that you don't just have the passive voice that we've heard in the vast majority of your answers today i was unaware this happened this was a an individual particular error but it didn't speak systemically but the truth is you are responsible for systemically and systematically managing that culture what did you do to make sure the fisa process would work first senator the notion of a deep state i hope people who think that would take a look at the fact that the inspector general found mistakes in fisa applications across counter intelligence counterterrorism all manner of cases very difficult to reconcile that finding with the notion that there's a deep state but it does indicate there's a problem with attention to the requirements of preparing an adequate fisa i clearly didn't do enough i believe that our process which i kept myself closely informed about was robust well staffed had great manuals and all those sorts of things i was clearly wrong about that and had too much confidence in that oversight regime and i think based on my experience that the problem may well be deceptively simple the responsibility was spread among dozens of people instead of being focused the way it is in a criminal case but the leadership in your office didn't have oversight of the dozens of people who would sign off on the most important investigations the bureau has done amazing things in its century of existence and there have been lots of high profile investigations but this one was obviously one of the most high profile investigations ever conducted and the people at the top didn't think that they would actually have their work checked mr chairman i continue to believe uh that we have to explain to the american people why the fisa process is important the the russia challenges that we've faced in 2016 and that we clearly are facing again in 2020 are a big deal but the much bigger deal is the chinese communist party attacks on the american election that are coming over the next decade putin is clunky as heck and how he does everything he does when the ccp does all that they are capable of doing it's going to make russia interference look like child's play and the fbi and the broader intelligence community have a vitally important role to play in helping protect the american people and we have to explain to the american public why the fisa process is so critically important and we have to reform this culture i'm a big amy klobuchar fan in lots of ways um but i disagree with that line of argument that the that this broad hearing topic isn't important the reality is we're headed toward a world where if we don't fix the national security branch and the counter intelligence pieces of the fbi we are not going to have an intelligence community that's going to have the trust of the american people when they're going to have to employ bigger and more um far-reaching digital tools in the future thank you thank you and uh senator coons i think we want to have questions before we pray because is it okay we didn't mr company did i just respond because since my name was invoked sure i was invoked pretty positively pretty positively i appreciate i have no issue with having this hearing and i think it's something many people up here agree my only point was there's been years to fix it since this happened and we weren't running in the senate that was my point yep so and i'll turn over senator coons then we'll take 10 minute break i just want to put a fine point on this an fbi lawyer altered a document in a fashion to be damning to an american citizen that's not sloppy that's a crime and when does it become obvious to anybody that the people in charge of crossfire hurricane had a deep-seated bias against trump they thought he was an idiot they thought his supporters were smelly the person who altered the email claimed to be part of the resistance when did it becomes obvious that the reason this thing was so screwed up that the reason every stop sign was run is because they didn't want to take no for the answer that is obvious to me that's not in every other faisal application there are problems with woods procedure but we haven't found one where a lawyer altered the document and every time it was excretory information it was withheld from the court and what kind of system is it that the fbi director has no clue about the most important investigation maybe in the history of the fbi if you want to believe that and just write this off i think you do so at your own peril and mr chairman just to underscore your point every one of the 17 material omissions was against president trump and against the campaign they weren't random they were all politically oriented against the president they were trying to take down senator coons thank you mr chairman thank you mr comey for your testimony today and for uh engaging with us in this vigorous and thorough review of matters that occurred now four and five years ago but that remain relevant and important but i want to remind all of us the context in which this hearing has taken place we have 34 days to our presidential election more than half the states have already started voting we're in the middle of a pandemic an economic crisis a time of heightened racial tension and concern about criminal justice and instead of dedicating the next week or two to finalizing a next round of coveted relief we're going to be spending our time at least here not looking at election security for 2020 not um dedicating our time to the next round of pandemic relief but participating in a rushed and partisan process to confirm a next supreme court justice it is important to remind folks that our elections are being attacked at this very moment that we know from recent testimony by the current fbi director that there continues to be foreign interference in our elections um and so i think at some level there is irony uh in light of the fact that last night we had a presidential debate in which our currently serving president said and did things to undermine some of the legitimacy of our upcoming election let me start with just a few questions about that if i might uh mr comey um current fbi director ray has said the fbi has not seen evidence of any coordinated voter fraud effort over 30 million people voted by mail or absentee four years ago in 2016. in your time as fbi director did you see any evidence of widespread or coordinated voter fraud no and last night repeated allegations were made by president trump of mail-in voting being subject to widespread fraud do comments like this uh work to undermine democratic legitimacy and in any way serve the interests of our opponents um who are seeking to spread disinformation and attack mail-in voting well i'm not gonna i'm not gonna think i'm qualified to respond on the particular comment obviously our adversaries especially russia have as their primary goal dividing us and dirting up the democratic enterprise let me just say to the core issues that have been discussed and debated here i've joined senators leahy and lee in an amendment to try and promote fisa reform i agree that we need our fisa process to be sound to be transparent to be something the american people can believe in and i think the inspector general's recommendations address some of these key issues and give us a roadmap for a number of the things that have to be addressed but i i also frankly i'm concerned about the way in which the current fbi director has been under relentless criticism and assault and there seems to me to be uh from our president a politicization a backwards-looking series of attacks let me just ask you a few questions about that if i might president trump has repeatedly referred to something he calls obama gate he has said it is worse than watergate are you aware of any evidence that president obama or former vice president biden has committed any federal crime did you ever see any evidence that president obama or vice president biden targeted any individual for investigation based on politics or their political views never there was a january 5th 2017 meeting at the white house was peter strzok at that meeting in the oval office no and at the meeting did either president obama or vice president biden suggest prosecuting lieutenant general flynn under the logan act would you remember that if that suggestion had been made to you i would remember it because it would be highly inappropriate for a president or vice president to suggest prosecution or investigation of anyone and it did not happen at that meeting on january 5th at the white house and i remember this is in 2017. did president obama give any indication that he wanted to direct the course of a criminal investigation into general flynn's conduct and when you left the meeting did you believe politics would play a role in the flynn case no i knew it would play no role so during your time at the fbi under the previous administration were you ever pressured to take an investigative step or support a conclusion that was not based on the facts in the law no but only weeks after his inauguration my recollection is president trump asked you to drop the investigation into lieutenant general flynn and to let this go is that accurate yes february 14th so my concern broadly speaking is that we have seen politics injected into our justice system uh countless times over the last four years is there any doubt in your mind that lieutenant general flynn lied to the fbi about his conversations with the russians none i mean i saw publicly pled guilty to it twice can you explain why lying to the fbi strikes at the heart of our criminal justice system because the fbi's ability to figure out what's going on in a criminal investigation or a counterintelligence investigation is at the core of our ability to protect the american people if we don't hear the truth see the truth gather the truth we can't achieve the mission there's been a lot of discussion today about the so-called steele dossier did the crossfire hurricane team rely on information from that dossier in its decision to open the investigation no was the team even aware of the information when they opened the investigation no it was i think it was two months later that the steel information came to the crossfire hurricane team so when you said earlier that this was an appropriately predicated and opened investigation it's because of that difference in time and sources and the basis on which those decisions remain correct as the inspector general found in opening it we complied with the policies and regulations that govern the opening of a counterintelligence investigation we should have been fired there ought to have been a hearing if we didn't investigate given the evidence that we were given by a foreign friendly foreign government and last when he testified to this committee in june rod rosenstein suggested he did not believe that any of the 199 criminal counts that resulted from the mueller investigation relied on information provided by steele do you have any reason to doubt that assessment i have no reason to doubt that i just want to thank you for your appearance before us today there are many urgent things we could and should be working on together it is my hope we will get back to them i do agree the fisa process requires transparency and improvement but frankly i think there's a connect the dots game going on here that doesn't connect and i am gravely concerned about ongoing efforts uh to denigrate and politicize the fbi today thank you mr comey for your testimony today thank you we're going to take about a we'll come back at 12 45 and give the the witness a break and uh see at 12 45 senator holly will be next thank you uh appreciate the break mr comey are you with us yes sir okay could you thank you very much uh was that a sufficient break for you you're okay yes thanks very much thank you very much uh senator hawley thank you mr chairman mr comey we've heard a number of things this morning we've heard you say a number of times that the oig found problems in fisa applications across the board but of course it was only this fisa applications these involving carter page that you signed off on that drew an unprecedented rebuke from the fisa court which i'm sure you remember let me just quote from that fisa court order the frequency and seriousness of these errors in a case that given its sensitive nature had an unusually high level of review at both doj and the federal bureau of investigation have called into question the reliability of the information proffered and other fbi applications do you remember that that order from the court it came after i left as i recall but i remember reading about it yes and have you ever known the court to issue any other such order that you're familiar with yes you have known the court to issue orders rebuking the fbi for misleading it in the past yes uh shortly before 9 11 there was significant criticism by the fisa court of the quality of fisa applications and the court said that the frequency and seriousness of the errors and this in applications led it to doubt that the reliability of all fbi applications in all other cases i don't remember the exact words but something similar and as i recall they banned at least one agent from appearing in phi's applications well that's not what they did here i mean in this case the fisa court said that they had reason to doubt the reliability of fbi applications across cases because of the level of misleading information that you personally signed off on do you regret your role in this unprecedented misleading of a fisa court i don't regret my role i regretted it why not i'm sorry why don't you regret your role in the unprecedented misleading of a fisa court well i regret that the fbi supplied information to a fisa court that was inaccurate incomplete and should have been updated do you regret that you signed off on it well i regret that it happened the only reason i'm hesitating is the what the fbi director does in connection with a fisa is actually very narrow but put that to the side it's important that it be accurate and it wasn't did i regret that very much listen uh you said this several times i frankly don't understand it the certification that the statute requires is a certification by the fbi director as to the contents of the application you signed off on it the fisa court said it was so misleading that it now had reason to doubt the fbi's truthfulness across the board are you responsible for these certifications or not i don't believe you're actually describing the statutory requirement for are you responsible for these certifications or not answer my question i sign certifications on every fisa that the fbi sends over to the fisa court including these are you responsible for this misleading evidence given to the fisa court yes or no yes in the sense of command responsibility no in that i didn't have personal knowledge it would have led me to understand that we weren't supplying complete information let's talk about what personal knowledge you have when you certified the first carter page fisa application you believe that mr steele was working for the democratic party didn't you i don't remember whether i knew the democratic party i knew that he was working for political opponents of president trump now let me remind you of your testimony under oath on december 7th 2018 before the house oversight committee in which you set in i quote steele was retained by republicans adverse to mr trump during the primary season and then his work was underwritten after that by democrats opposed to mr trump during the general election season end quote now surely you recognized at the time that relying so heavily on a biased source would undermine public confidence in the fbi's activities didn't you no i did not why wouldn't you you told the same committee the house oversight committee december 7 2018 and i quote when you're the leader of a justice agency that's you the appearance of bias is as important as the existence of actual bias you also said a reasonable appearance of bias can corrupt the americans people's faith in your work as much as actual bias can do you stand by those remarks very much but you nevertheless allowed the democratic party to leverage the federal government's most invasive intelligence capabilities against president trump and you personally signed off on it you also knew at the time that other officials in the department of justice had serious concerns do you know who stuart evans is i do mr evans was a lawyer in the national security division of doj under president obama wasn't he i think he was i don't know for sure i think he was a career official at the department of justice involved he was a lawyer in the national security division of the department of justice before the first carter page fisa application mr evans raised serious concerns about the ostensibly partisan nature of the information provided by mr steele did he not i don't know that he did the inspector general reports it on pages 136 and 137 of this report and you knew of those concerns before you signed off on the fisa application didn't you i don't think i knew before i remember reading the footnote that attempted to inform the court of potential bias no actually the inspector general found on page 139 of the report and i quote on october 12 2016 evan's concerns about steele were briefed to comey in quote and yet you signed off knowing knowing that the research was funded by the democratic party knowing that senior officials in the department of justice national security division had serious concerns you signed off nonetheless let's talk about what else you knew or didn't know when you certified that fisa application did you know the allegations in the steele dossier came from sub sources not from steele's own knowledge i believe i didn't know he had a network of sources and sub sources correct did you know who this primary subsource was no did you ask who the primary subsource was no did you ask the fbi to take any steps to identify that source before submitting this application to the fisa court i don't know whether i asked i knew there was an effort underway to try to replicate steele's source network so we could figure out what to make of steel's reporting well what the attorney what the inspector general concluded was that comey told us this is page 153 that the application seemed factually and legally sufficient when he read it and he had no questions or concerns before he signed it surely you realize that the source's identity and his motives this sub source who we now know may well have been a russian agent that that would affect his credibility correct i thought it was important that we were informing the court of any potential bias from any source and i remember reading language in this in that initial filing that addressed that potential bias issue with respect to the steel reporting so you're i'm sorry your testimony now is that you inform the court of potential problems with the sub-source political motivations uh connections to foreign governments the fisa court was informed about that no i'm sorry i understood your question to be about whether we informed the court about potential bias and steel's reporting i didn't know the identity or any information about sub-sources so you personally authorized an unprecedented surveillance on an individual associated with the presidential campaign during that campaign's ongoing time period october of 2016 you signed off personally on two further applications based on information from a source that you believed correctly worked for the democratic party and the source's information it turns out was coming from a suspected russian agent yet you did nothing to try to verify any of this information you brushed aside the concerns of high-level national security lawyers at the department of justice how are the american people to trust you or the fbi following abuses like this i disagree extensively with your predicate i think the fbi is an organization that is honest competent independent and also flawed because it's made up of human beings well i have to say i'm not i'm not necessarily worried about the fbi as a whole i'm worried about you and i'm worried about what you certified to a court that led the fisa court to conclude that it had been misled repeatedly and that due to the nature of that those repeated misrepresentations it could no longer trust what the federal bureau of investigation the agency you led what it said in subsequent cases that i suggest to you is an incredible dereliction of duty indeed a betrayal of your responsibility as director of the fbi uh if i could uh mr chairman just one last thing i want to follow up on the letter from uh to uh to chairman graham from john ratcliffe which i know you've seen mr comey as you mentioned it earlier mr radcliffe says on 7 september 2016 u.s intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to fbi director james comey regarding u.s presidential candidate hillary clinton's approval of a plan concerning donald trump and russian hackers as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server end quote did you open an investigation i don't know what that refers to as i said earlier that does not ring any bells with me when i read that you did not receive any investigative referral of this nature i don't remember it i don't i don't remember receiving anything that's described in that letter i i have to say mr chairman i realize my time has expired i find it extraordinary that a referral from the ic to the fbi regarding hillary clinton's campaign and potential illicit activity received no no attention from the fbi so little attention the director doesn't even recall it and yet the director and others had plenty of time to go and seek surveillance warrants during an ongoing presidential campaign warrants so flawed that the fisa court has now said it can't trust what the fbi says in future cases this is an extraordinary abuse of power and it's time we help people responsible for it thank you mr chairman thank you senator blenthalt thanks mr chairman uh mr comey thank you for being here today uh thank you for your service to our nation and thank you for your families as well your wives in particular i think that this hearing is likely to attract as much attention and land with the same giant thud as the previous two hearings because the american people are really focused on the direct and imminent threats to our nation the pandemic continues to kill almost a thousand americans a day due to the cruel indifference and callous neglect of this administration people are continuing to lose jobs millions are unemployed and our small businesses are struggling and here we are re-litigating a controversy that is four years old involving an investigation into russian interference that occurred in 2016 when the really imminent and urgent threat is russian interference ongoing at this very moment the security director security center director william avenina warned publicly quote russia continues to spread disinformation in the u.s that is designed to undermine our democracy and i can say that the information we've received in briefings is absolutely chilling we've received that information in confidential classified briefings that i wish could be made known to the american public with the same kind of alacrity that documents have been dis declassified in this proceeding the american people deserve to know about that threat which is ongoing and they also need to know about the threat of white supremacists the current director of the fbi has said again publicly racially motivated violent extremists are a quote national threat priority a national threat priority a security danger to this country they are the same white supremacists that the president united states last night said should stand by that statement is one of the most abhorrent and horrifying in my lifetime mr comey in your time as fbi director did you see an uptick in white supremacist activities in the united states and if so with what kinds of consequences yes is my recollection and the consequences were potential acts of violence intimidation of people of color all the things that come with a criminal group with an aim that is at its heart evil racism did you regard it as a national security threat in the way that mr ray has articulated yes it was assigned to our counter-terrorism division which focuses on national security threats do you think that more resources should be devoted to this threat hard for me to answer since i've been gone now for close to four years you can never have enough people with eyes on a problem that poses a violent threat the way these groups do i've introduced a measure called the no hate act along with a number of my colleagues uh senators durbin orono warner kane gillibrand and others and there's a measure on the house side as well that would seek to address this growing imminent threat of white supremacy impact and violence rather than telling them to stand by and i commend you and the current director mr ray for focusing on it i want to turn to the uh statements that uh earlier you made in response to senator durbin's inquiry about the 425 1 million dollars in debt that has been disclosed as owing by the president you've done a number of national security background checks and in the course of those background checks my understanding is that a standard question relates to debt owed by individuals is that correct yes that's correct and the reason for that question is to indicate and disclose whether or not that individual has concealed any of that debt correct one aspect of exploring their financial situation is that why is it that those facts are important because deciding whether someone is trustworthy with national security information involves understanding whether they're vulnerable to exploitation by an adversary by a criminal group so if somebody owes a lot of money and is trying to hide that that allows adversaries to gain leverage over that person and maybe force them to do something they shouldn't do it's a two weeks to try and recruit foreign government officials to become assets of the united states government and so adversaries do the same to us so the president united states of course is not subject to any background security investigation uh as most high-ranking officials are but it is the concealment of that debt not only its gargantuan size but the hiding of it that potentially makes him vulnerable blackmail or extortion or other improper influence correct that's right but even if it were fully transparent there'd still be a concern about vulnerability that the adversary could try and cut a secret deal to reduce the debt even if the public knows about the debt so any individual in a position of responsibility who is concealing a debt as well as the debt itself makes him or her more likely to be an asset under the influence or subject to extortion by a foreign government correct it creates a serious counterintelligence concern that you'd want to address in in deciding on a clearance suitability for an employee thank you very much thank you mr comey thank you senator tillis but just follow up on senator blumenthal's questions would you be concerned about a counterintelligence threat or a compromise if a candidate's family member was receiving millions of dollars from a corrupt company in the ukraine that a candidate's family member was receiving millions of dollars from the deputy mayor of moscow that a candidate's family member was getting a being and a half dollar investment portfolio from the china bank would that concern you if i was told the fbi i'd be concerned about any effort to exert leverage over a government official potential government official or someone close to them in an effort to influence them thank you very much senator tillis chairman if i may just clarify uh the the question you've just raised is a hypothetical relating to a non-gov current non-government official what we have here and what the records reveal quite starkly is that the president united states our commander-in-chief is vulnerable to leverage and manipulation and even possible blackmail i understand your point and uh you have right to make it the point i was making is very real is not a hypothetical these things happen senator tillis thank you mr chairman uh thank you mr comey for being here um mr comey we i'm not going to ask some questions that have already been asked by prosecutors and lawyers whose preambles and predicates you have rejected so instead of getting a non-answer i want to go more from a management perspective we had general horowitz before this committee inspector general horowitz and he identified as you're aware of the 17 errors in emissions and i um as i look at some of the errors and omissions do you think we know one that was identified as a crime what do we do with the remainder i mean do you accept uh general hurwitz's reports and his findings do you think that they were valid i do and i hope that it was followed by a root cause analysis which any enterprise ought engage in to figure out so exactly why did this happen and how should we change to make sure it doesn't happen again well let's say that you came in as the the new director of the fbi after the prior director had their organization studied we found these errors in emissions if if it didn't rise to a level of a crime in your opinion do you think it at least should have prompted terminations and disciplinary action on the part of these are all highly trained highly educated highly experienced professionals in the fbi and by the way the majority of them are great people but it's a big organization but what about the remainder i mean it you're the new director you've gotten this report from the inspector general what do you do what is your remediation plan i've heard you say that you would want to streamline the fisa process let me get a question in on that but what would you be doing right now to address the 16 other errors and emissions that occurred under prior to your watch i'd be doing two things looking wide and looking narrow wide to see what the systematic problems are looking narrow to try to understand so when these employees made these decisions what were they thinking severe misconduct turns on whether someone was intentionally engaging in wrongdoing and there's a range of misconduct short of that you'd want to assess that with respect to everybody with personal knowledge and then make your judgments based on that you were quoted i want to read this so i don't get your words wrong but you were quoted as saying the fisa process was followed and that the entire case was handled in a thoughtful responsible way by the doj and the fbi you went on to say the notion that fisa was abused as nonsense do you still stand by that i don't i don't think it was abused but i think i was wrong in having confidence in the fisa process and in the layers of oversight and review i was too confident in this extensive really very complicated system the uh what would have prompted you on the front end to think that it was okay i think that you already said in prior testimony that there were things in the fisa process that should have been approved why under your watch weren't we already trying to do those kinds of changes well my confidence was based on the fact that it was regular oversight by the department of justice regular audits of our cases and then i also understood that the complexity of the process agents would complain to me everywhere i went it's too hard to get a fisa too many people have to check off on it too many people have to review my work so knowing the process which included regular audits gave me confidence as any lead as a business leader or government leader that we have a sound healthy process and that was wrong mr comey one of the things that worry me about this is we're talking about an investigation of someone who was running for president of the united states i like senator sasse had resisted some of the the changes that my colleague senator lee was putting forward but i felt like i had confidence in a process that clearly i shouldn't have and even the fisa court has expressed their concerns with the information presented to them but you know what i really worry about i worry about people that would never have a hearing on their case before the senate judiciary committee i mean we're here because we're talking about a high profile elected official but do you have any concerns at the same sorts of lapses that were used here and i do think people should be held accountable and prosecuted do you have any concerns if we go back over the over the course of the fisa process that we've had innocent people out there subjected to the same process and potentially wrongfully received a warrant and surveillance sure it's a reasonable concern the inspector general did a look across dozens of cases and found mistakes i think he said in every case that's a serious concern that there's a systemic problem now that doesn't mean that the warrants wouldn't have been issued otherwise but that's besides the point there was an issue and if i were still there it would be something i'd be thinking about every day and i suspect chris ray is well mr comey i've got another question i remember general inspector general horowitz uh i asked a series of questions because in in the report uh when he talked about a possible political motivation for the behavior of some of those involved and and identified in the investigation i asked him about you know did he see any evidence of a political motivation he said that was murky but if you've gone through it and i'm sure that you have um do you believe that that this whole process was absent any political bias against the president of the united states that it was just void of political bias just a paperwork error or a business process that needed to be streamlined or how do you feel about that murky description that general horowitz gave to the motivations of people we've seen all the emails and the communications uh viable results how do you feel about that do you honestly think that this process at the at the operator level was truly devoid of any political bias i do i'm not just saying that i'm saying that because i read horowitz's 400 page report where i think the most important finding is in case opening and the conduct and the investigative decisions there was no evidence found of political bias go ahead if horowitz finds something he knows how to say it and he found the opposite and so that's why i say that but why would why would inspector general horowitz who i think is you know a very capable inspector general go so far as to say it was murky you you say that there's there's uh no doubt but we have him say it was murky based on the same information that i read in the report i don't know where i'm sorry i said i don't know where the murky comment comes from i'm talking about the report itself which i've read very carefully a number of times and he makes that finding we found no evidence of political bias in any phase of this investigation okay just final question mr chair i did start about a uh 45 seconds late i know hunter biden was appointed to burisma in 2014 the board uh while you were the fbi director and and uh vice president biden was in in office did you have any concerns uh or did did you have any concerns about that with uh or express any concerns with vice president biden i never learned anything about it i i didn't know anything about it when i was fbi director thank you mr chair could i see that please senator ron would be next but i just want to make sure um senator hirono thank you mr chairman the chairman noted that he is committed to trying to save the fisa system and in fact oig horowitz dug very deep into the crossfire hurricane investigation and in a 400 page report as mr comey noted he found no evidence of political bias but he did note a number of changes that should be made to the fisa application process and in fact fbi director ray is doing those changes and so if we are committed to making changes to the application process and we all share that concern the hearing today should be focused on whether or not the fbi in fact is making those changes that inspector horowitz flagged out in his very thorough investigation mr chairman we understand that dni radcliffe issued a statement claiming that the declassified information selective declassification declassified information he released yesterday about hillary clinton from russian sources quote is not russian disinformation end quote and yet he acknowledged that the information he released may be quote a fabrication i find it just amazing that we have dni radcliff issuing this kind of information practically on the eve of an election making an allegation in fact pushing out russian disinformation which he acknowledges and mr chairman i think we should have him before this committee so we can question him the intelligence community special counsel mueller and the bipartisan senate intelligence committee all found that russia interfered in the 2016 election and mr chairman you have acknowledged that we all know this and we also know that their interference was in favor of donald trump and they clearly did not give any weight to russia's effort to smear hillary clinton and this committee should not either and more important i do associate myself with the comments made by the democrats on this committee who are wondering along with the american people why we are going over the same thing that we've already you know that we've already gone over that has to do with the the premises underlying the cro excuse me the crossfire hurricane investigation so we know this is being done somehow to bolster donald trump's reelection campaign through innuendo and misinformation which even today russia is pushing up so we should be concerned about what's going on in the 2020 election and i have to say thanks to president trump and my republican colleagues here we are sitting here millions of people are without health care millions of people are without jobs and rather than dealing with the very real concerns of the american people in the midst of a pandemic we are having this hearing to go over ground that we've already covered let me get to some questions to mr comey i noted that dni radcliff released a an allegation that he obtained from russian sources which he himself said is admitted as much not reliable mr comey as the former fbi director do you think it is appropriate for dni radcliff to release this information right before the election it's hard for me to comment because i don't fully understand what he's doing there the goal of the intelligence community which includes the fbi should be to stay out of influencing elections except to discharge our duty to protect our democracy and ensure that foreign adversaries aren't operating in the united states mr comey you know that what russia is doing right now is to use this kind of disinformation to interfere with our elections so they're engaging in malign foreign influence as described by fbi director ray and i'd say putting out this kind of information that makes a certain kind of allegations about hillary clinton is the kind of disinformation that russia is engaging in right now and there i know you're aware that russia is very good at using social social media the use of proxies state media online journals etc in fact there's they're really focused on those kinds of interference at this moment so the kind of information that dnr ratcliffe released would that be consistent with russia's disinformation efforts mr comey i don't know enough to say senator i'd say we can draw our own conclusions earlier this month one of the top prosecutors working on u.s attorney john durham's investigation into the origins of russia's russia's probe resigned she reportedly left out of concern that the team was pressured for political reasons to issue a report before completing its work and just last week we saw attorney general barr disclose previously classified evidence relating to mr durham's ongoing investigation into the origins of the russia probe a release designed to bolster president trump's re-election chances we also saw the justice department coordinate with the white house on multiple press releases about a just open investigation into allegedly discarded ballots in pennsylvania you testify just now that these kinds of actions raise concerns about bias appearance of bias and here we have the attorney general making these kinds of disclosures do you think that these actions reflect a bias or appearance of violent bias on the part of attorney general barr it's difficult for me to say about the particulars that i don't know well enough but i can say generally attorney general barr has embraced a concept for his role that i believe is at odds with the nature of that department it needs to be trumped by all americans there have been all kinds of articles about attorney general bars politicization of the attorney general's office and do you think that that is a concern for all of us and why it ought to be a concern for all of us because we need that institution and we need that institution to be seen as separate from our tribal warfare because it has to be trusted by jurors and cops and witnesses and judges of all political stripes we have to be seen as the department of justices outside of all of that and when the attorney general starts acting like the personal lawyer for the president it threatens that and that is a priceless thing that's under threat and we've already seen a number of the career professionals at the doj resigning even though i acknowledge and i want to i want to acknowledge all of the professionals who continue to do their jobs in the doj just one more question mr chairman you've been asked a number of questions about the 400 million dollars that president trump owes how important is it that the american public should know who that money is owed to and do you think that we should require all presidential candidates to disclose significant sums of money that they owe to entities or even countries my opinion on both of those questions is worth no more than any other americans we should all want to understand what's going on with our leaders so we can make a sound choice when we vote in november and i'll just leave it there i think you testified is particularly important for those of us who hold offices of public trust to disclose those to whom we owe large sums of money because we are then opening ourselves up to various kinds of influences that would not be good for our country thank you very much thank you i just want to make a brief comment we'll go to senator ernst as to the radcliffe revelations why do they matter i don't know how accurate the underlying intelligence is i know that people have said it wasn't russian disinformation but is it true or not is not the question for me the question is how can it be that on september the 7th 2016 the intelligence community asked the director of the fbi the assistant director of counterintelligence peter strzok to look into the regarding u.s presidential candidate hillary clinton's approval of a plan concerning u.s presidential candidate donald trump and russian hacking hampering u.s elections as a mean of means of distracting the public from her use of your private mail email server the only thing i'm suggesting is that's a pretty big deal everything trump has been looked at with russia apparently nobody looked at this apparently this was just under the rug and the point we're trying to make here is there is a double standard as obvious as night and day and this is if anything the smoking gun uh senator ernst thank you mr chairman i appreciate that um director comey and this is for everyone watching as well um fisa warrants aren't just the normal run-of-the-mill search warrants they seek to access information that we consider most private and when talking about the carter page investigation the steele dossier was the basis for this fisa warrant and no one's doubting that the steele dossier is of course the opposition research report compiled by christopher steele who was hired by fusion gps acting on behalf of the clinton campaign a dossier that was essentially opposition research on donald trump and we thought it was just that until last week when attorney general barr authorized the declassification of a specific footnote in inspector general's report on the crossfire hurricane investigation from late last year that's the the letter that was dated september 24th 2020. um the declassification of that footnote revealed something more disturbing about the steele dossier and that footnote revealed that the primary sub-source of the steele dossier was the subject of an fbi counter intelligence investigation between the years of 2009 and 2011 due to their apparent ties to russia the same document that alleged then-candidate trump was a russian spy was funded by political opponents and researched by a suspected russian operative and the fbi bought it hook line and sinker or at least they really wanted to and it gets worse from there though during the investigation into that sub source it was revealed that they had reached out to individuals about to join the obama administration and made them an offer made them an offer they could make a in quotes a quote little extra money end quote if they had access to classified information thankfully those people reported this encounter an associate of that sub source also stated that they persistently asked about their knowledge of a particular military vessel again that encounter thankfully was reported this sub source was in contact with a known russian intelligence officer and was invited to the russian embassy and the fbi knew all of this when they sought the first renewal of the carter page fisa application unlike those other people who reported their strange encounters with this sub source what exactly did the fbi do what did they do they never provided the information to the fisa court not one lick of it the fbi signed off on a violation of carter page's privacy using reports that would normally be used to create a 30-second political ad that were compiled by someone who is likely an actual russian spy and that's not even to speak of the noted inconsistencies that so many of my other colleagues have talked about between the reporting and the steele dossier and the information that the sub source provided to steal himself inconsistencies that the crossfire hurricane team continue to rely upon when seeking renewed fisa warrants on carter page director comey according to peter strzok you were briefed on steel's reporting and okayed the crossfire hurricane team's approach to use steel in the investigation do you recall being told about the counter intelligence investigation against this primary subsource do you believe that would that this information would have been relevant information for the director of the fbi to have received i don't know the answer to that maybe at some point it would definitely be important for the team to consider whether it made the sub source less credible or more credible i could see it cutting both ways well i think that's a pretty pertinent information when you're authorizing uh fisa warrants i would want to know what are the subsources motives you don't think that that's relevant information oh no i thought you were asking whether it was relevant for them to tell the director i'm not writing the fisa app the affidavit i'm not investigating the case it's important for the people running the case to think does the fact that a sub source has connections to russia make him more credible or less credible in reporting on russia they'd want to wrestle with that and decide what to do with it but as the director of the fbi you were signing off on a fisa warrant that application i do think it's information that should be provided to you as the director of the fbi do you believe that the department of justice and the fbi have a duty of candor to the foreign intelligence surveillance court yes very much do you believe they have a duty to present this type of exculpatory evidence to the court i think they have a duty consistent with that duty of candor to present a complete picture good and bad of all of their information so that if they have exculpatory information they ought to supply it yes they do and ladies and gentlemen if you're if you're watching this at home and i i do think that people are interested in this they want to know and believe in the fbi they want to know and believe in the doj so for those folks that are watching at home this isn't about political retribution or sour grapes this is about a coordinated effort by your government our government to influence politics using compromised foreign intelligence actors and i think this is a very very sad example of what could absolutely go wrong in our government thank you mr chair senator booker check one two ah got it thank you sir i think it would have been here long enough to get this to work um you know i still find myself concerned about the priorities of this committee given that elections have already begun and we have a real urgent ongoing crisis uh director comey this committee has already spent a lot of time investigating an investigation that's already been investigated and i'm pretty confident will continue to be investigated it's been cleared by the justice department's inspector general already and i understand and honor the interest to continue with the investigation of the investigation but i i just really think that given the existential threat to our current election processes the dangers of uh that we have the real substantive dangers of imminent uh violence uh the real substantive dangers of the undermining of an ongoing election that we should be focused on that and so i want to stretch gears and really focus in on what i think are alarming and disturbing comments made by president trump last night when he yet again refused to condemn white supremacists and calling on one group to quote stand back and stand by in august 2019 director comey you published an op-ed in the new york times about how president trump was deliberately fanning the flames of racism in america here's what you wrote and if i can quote it to you every american president knowing what lies deep within our country bears a unique responsibility say loudly and consistently that white supremacy is illegitimate that encouraging a politics of racial resentment can spawn violence and that violence aimed at people by virtue of their skin color is terrorism director comey what does it mean for the president united states to call on the proud boys which the southern poverty law center has designated as a hate group that regularly expresses white nationalist views to stand back and stand by it lifts the control rods in the basement of our amazing country has always been a small amount of radioactive stew and we've controlled that racist stew with law and with culture and when the president of the united states starts talking in that way about that kind of group he's pulling out of that radioactive stew the control rods that we've used for 50 years to suppress racist violence it is a deeply disturbing development and i hope no matter what your politics are you see it the same way and just to put a sharp edge on this sir since 9 11 is it true that the majority of our domestic terrorist actions killing american lives everywhere from a church in south carolina to a synagogue in pittsburgh the majority of our murders terroristic murders in this country have been done by right-wing organizations that's my understanding of the data domestic terrorism domestic right-wing organizations feeding hatred and bigotry and so how do these shameful comments of the present united states his outright refusal to condemn white supremacy dangerous white supremacy affect the psychology of groups like the proud boys and other violent extremists extremist groups like them other other white nationalist groups that we have seen conduct and carry out such violence how does it affect those the psychology of these groups it gives them license and it makes them cool in the eyes of the people who make up that radioactive stew and so it will attract more people to their warped view of the world and to their groups it is it is a free pass to people that nobody wants in their communities and i don't know whether today the president has tried to correct what he said but i would sure hope he would and director comey you're not alone you are not the first fbi director nor the last fbi director to state plainly the dangers of white supremacy of of this kind of violence uh your successor fbi director christopher wray recently testified that quote racially motivated violent extremism primarily carried out by white supremacists account for the majority of domestic terroristic threats this is a imminent threat as a president seems to be calling to such groups to stand by who a president who has explicitly said if he loses this election it will be an illegitimate election a president who has explicitly failed to commit himself to the peaceful transfer of power and so how do president trump's statements about these groups affect the fbi's ability to address this threat the fbi is fighting a fire of racist violence and with words like that president is using a fire hose to spray gasoline on that fire and as i maybe he misspoke maybe when he said stand down and stand by he meant something else i sure hope for the sake of our whole country he'll say that today what he really meant to condemn these groups but sir do you see the connection to the election that is ongoing right now and where we are less than 35 days away from that election do you do you have cause for not just concern but real alarm about these groups being incited and motivated by the words of the present united states towards violent actions yes that's why if i'm using my only metaphor of spraying gasoline with a fire hose it creates a dangerous blaze for all of us not just people of color but for every community in america that has these these thugs and criminals have a presence there ought to worry about this and the president of the united states should be charged with tamping it down not letting it free so here we are in the united states of america where the current fbi director where the past fbi director are both saying unequivocally that we are facing a threat of domestic terrorism and clearly saying that the words of the president of the united states is not calming is not unifying it's not bringing us together it's not condemning this is actually inciting it to use your words that is spraying gasoline on the fires of hatred going into an election where he is literally specifically talking to people and inviting them to potentially do things like show up at polling sites to take action to stand by i don't understand how we don't see this as what it is that we are on the verge of seeing a real threat to our fundamental democratic ideals and the smooth election processes to which have been frankly a hallmark of our country in our recent history this is a dangerous moment in time it is a frightening moment in time and we know from what happened in san antonio texas and a number of other occasions that people who are carrying out these actions are invoking the words of the president of the united states in their hateful violent actions this is a frightening time for america and for us not to be assembling the united bipartisan will of this judiciary committee or the bipartisan will of the united states senate to act against this when we have seen the agony of what happened in south carolina in an african-american church the agony of what happened in san antonio walmart the agony of what happened in the synagogue in pittsburgh and so many other occasions when hate crimes are on a rise i i it is shameful that we are doing nothing the only thing necessary for evil to be triumphant is for good people to do nothing your metaphor the president the united states last night sprayed gasoline on the fires of hate are in action right now on the eve of this contentious election means that we are standing by and letting this arsonist that is our president continue to menace the democracy we all cherish thank you mr chairman thank you uh the democracy we all cherish depends upon law and order it depends on truth-telling it depends upon the system being fair to those who are accused it depends upon courts being informed of exculpatory information that is what this hearing is about and we will continue with these type hearings to get to the bottom of how this got so off the rails so it never happens again senator kennedy thank you mr chairman mr comey have you ever heard the expression power doesn't change people it just unmasks them no i don't think so how's your book coming how many copies have you sold i don't know a lot i have a new one coming out in january about the justice department i hope that'll sell a lot too but i don't know i don't know the numbers you um you enjoy attention don't you mr comey i do not enjoy attention from my family i do not enjoy being recognized in public in my b-list celebrity fame which i hope will go away very soon well i'll give you this um you have been an equal opportunity egotist you have tried to screw both trump and uh you you and let's talk about clinton first when you were head of the fbi you investigated secretary clinton and her emails and her server did you not the fbi team did while i was director yes and you concluded that there was there were no criminal violations did you not there were no violations that a reasonable prosecutor would pursue but you didn't just issue a statement you called a press conference and you you you commented on her behavior you you said she was extremely care careless but in your opinion there was no criminal intent what were you thinking of i mean this is the this is the democratic nominee for president united states didn't you realize that could have an impact on the investigation the investigation was ending at that point when i issued the summary of what we had i'm sorry i misspoke didn't you realize that could have an impact on the election potentially sure and i was trying to offer i'm sorry go ahead i was trying to offer transparency about the justification for ending an investigation of intense interest to the american people in july it's july 5th of 2016. well you gave us a full dose of transparency 11 days before the election you sent a letter to congress sent up never mind what i said in my press conference my unprecedented press conference i'm going to reopen the investigation didn't you correct i i didn't say what you just said in the letter but i told the chairs of the committees we were reopening the investigation to examine some additional material and then a few days later right before the election you said never mind she didn't do anything no i said the examination was completed and it doesn't change our view and this is we're not talking about a parking ticket here we're talking about the democratic nominee for president of the united states the most powerful person in the free world and you didn't think that would have an impact on the election oh i knew it could potentially have an impact no matter what we did and you don't like attention yes both of those things are true at the same time sometimes you have to make hard decisions and you don't like attention uh let's talk about trump you didn't really care about uh dr page did you you wanted trump didn't you that is not accurate yeah um when when you uh when you uh went and got these warrants uh to investigate dr page um that that you don't remember much about what what did that allow you to do could you follow him around why didn't senator go get any warrants the investigative team and the lawyers from doj right could you follow him around with with with the authority from fisa no you didn't need authority from fisa to follow someone around this was about electronic surveillance okay you can wire tapping it allows you to collect electronic communications that he was engaged in you can wiretapping yeah that's the old-fashioned term but yes you gave you authority to collect electronic communications almost no one uses could you bug him i don't think there was authority in the fisa application for a remote listening device could you open his mail i don't think that was included either but you don't remem remember i don't it's easy to figure out but i don't sitting here i don't know okay that's fair um and and you're saying today that uh that that if you knew now what you didn't know then that you wouldn't assign the the uh the application i would not have signed the narrow certification the fbi director has to give but more importantly i'd want to know from the team how are you thinking about this why are these things not being included yeah i mean that's what i'm i mean you're you're a smart guy your honors graduate william mary chicago law school and uh you you don't like attention and i'm trying to understand that this you're investigating now you're investigating the republican nominee for president united states okay you've already finished with the democratic nominee yeah the republican nominee and you you you're you you you've got a faster warrant that was a lie and you say well it wasn't your head of their fbi didn't you check didn't you go hey guys this is the the this is a nominee for president united states let's sit down and talk about what's your evidence you never did that senator we were never investigating the candidate the republican candidate mr trump this is about a surveillance warrant on someone who was no longer associated with the campaign oh you just got his name out of the out of the white pages whose name and and then with with general flynn you you've wrapped up your investigation but you decided to take one more shot sally yates says you went rogue isn't that accurate it does not act well why would she say that she sure didn't compliment you i was sitting right here bigger than dallas listen to her she said you went rogue is she asking me what she meant by that yeah what do you think about that i think she was disappointed that i didn't coordinate the flynn interview with her in advance and i understood her concern about that i think she understood my explanation afterwards as to why i used my authority which i had to do it without coordinating but you don't like attention i stand by my earlier answer i love attention from my grandchildren and my children and my wife the rest of it i could let politicians have it can we agree that the fbi is the premier law enforcement agency in law of human history i think so at risk of offending dea i think so mr comey if you've chosen a different career say a driving instructor and you'd never pursue the career at the fbi don't you think the fbi would be better off i didn't pursue a career at the fbi i was very happily teaching at columbia when i was asked to become fbi director uh that's enough so uh we'll go to our next senator blackburn a minute are you aware that mr barnett who is the lead investigator of the flynn case recently said that he did not believe there was a crime involving general flynn i read his 302 and i think it does say that he thought that before january 5th or before flynn was interviewed so how normal is it for the lead investigator to believe that the person he's investigating didn't commit a crime and went so far as to say that he thought the whole team was out to get trump is that a normal thing in the fbi is that something the court should consider as to whether or not this is legitimate prosecution i think mr barnett was confusing the nature of the investigation which is a little bit concerning if he was working on it it was a counterintelligence investigation no so here's the point mr comey you said plan up to get prosecuted this was a counterintelligence investigation and there was no there there this man was the incoming national security adviser he had every reason in the world to be talking to the russians about changing policy but this whole rogue thing setting up an interview in the white house going around normal procedures bothered a lot of people are you aware that agents felt that the investigation was conducted so poorly that they had to buy liability insurance or thought about buying liability insurance i'm not although i thought all fbi agents i just want the public to know this was so bad by the people involved they felt like they needed to buy liability insurance that the man involved investigating general flynn didn't believe the man committed a crime and what they charged him with was giving false information about a contact with the russian ambassador when he was the national security adviser which was on tape and when mr barnett looked at the kislyak interaction he said i haven't changed my mind i think that's why the department of justice is so upset with the flynn prosecution senator blackburn thank you mr chairman and mr comey we thank you for coming uh we appreciate having your time uh you know this is our day three hearing we have talked with rod rosenstein we have also had the opportunity to talk with sally yates and yes in her testimony she did say that she thought you went rogue on this situation um and that is of concern for us one of the reasons we wanted to hear from you today and i will tell you this as i talk to tennesseans um one of the things that they're trying to figure out is quite simply this somebody cooked up this plot they came up with this and then somebody gave the order to carry this plot out and somebody did the dirty work but then when you talk to rosenstein and yates and now hearing from you basically what you say is you didn't know anything about any of this and you did not know any of this was going on so uh why don't you tell us who came up with this plot and then who gave the order to kill him what plot are you talking about senator spying on the president yeah there was no spying on the president you say there was no spying there was no problems with carter page getting that fisa warrant there was no problems with papadopoulos there was no uh problem with general flynn you're saying that you had just caused for every bit of that even though as the chairman just said and as senator kennedy said your goal was to get to the president right i'm going to understand what your question is well that is not surprising to me let me ask you this the books that you're writing would we find those as fiction or non-fiction non-fiction non-fiction okay uh i guess you've got plenty of facts in there that are footnoted and can back you up right sure and you can read the ig report and the mueller report and the senate intelligence now let's talk about that ig report as a matter of fact um i think it's interesting because when the ig report really contradicted uh your statements you claimed that the fbi did not spy on the trump campaign in 2017. and the ig report contradicted you on that is that a question yes sir what do you have to say about that i'm not aware that there's a contradiction on that point in the ig report okay you're not aware of that all right uh i assume that you're aware of the article that was posted to the washington post under your byline in may 28 2019 uh james comey no treason no coup just lies and dumb lies you recall that article yes senator i wrote that oh you did write that okay and do you still stand by that article because it alleges that joseph mifsud was a russian agent yeah that's right i think the intelligence committee found that he was representing russian interests in communicating with papadopoulos okay all right and uh so you're standing by that article i haven't read it since may of 2019 but i i think it was i got nothing i can think of now that i want to change and and okay and nothing has changed your opinions senator i don't know what the opinions are that you're asking me about but i don't know anything about something i wrote in may of 2019 that i would change and if somebody wants to know your opinions they can buy one of your books right or read the post or come to this hearing yep um i have to go back to this about who came up with this plot to carry all of this out we have seen all these emails the communications between strzok and page we have seen we've read the ig report we know there were things that seemed to be conveniently overlooked and it is astounding to me that as the head of the premier law enforcement agency you rosenstein and yates knew absolutely nothing but then you knew enough to go to the january 5th meeting in the oval office did you call that meeting or did either president obama or vice president biden call that meeting i don't know who called it i was asked to come to the white house for that meeting for the briefing on the 5th of january okay you were asked to come and who issued the invitation to you to attend that i don't know okay who mentioned the logan act and using that against general flynn nobody that i recall at the white house i remember discussing it at the fbi but not at the white house with the fbi okay and then um what were peter strzok's notes as later relayed to him by you what did president obama mean by instructing you to make sure that you had the right people on it i don't know what peter strzok's notes reflect i haven't talked to him about them and i don't remember using those hearing those words from president obama or using them with peter strzok i remember the president saying do this in the normal way was the way i understood him okay all right so still there is uh a veil of vagueness that is around your recollections and your memory when it comes to these incidences do you have any regrets my memory is pretty good i don't tend to remember exact words unless i write them down i remember the words of my marriage vows even though it was 1987 i don't remember specific words that were used during that january 5th meeting because they didn't write a memo about it afterwards you know mr comey i call that selective memory you choose to remember certain things and you choose to be vague about other things but one of the things that we do know is the the american people have been deeply troubled by the fact that the fbi could have conducted themselves in this way that the doj could have been involved in this they want to trust the institutions of their government they see someone in you who is very arrogant who is very dismissive and is very condescending to the concerns that they have about the structure of government in the american taxpayer they're paying the paycheck for every single person that is in that doj and that fbi and they expect their best efforts and according to mrs yates you did not give those best efforts you chose to go rogue i yell back thank you uh mr comey i really appreciate you coming uh today you didn't have to do this you chose to do it and i want to thank you mr comey are you still there yeah i'm still here okay yeah so i want to thank you for coming and we'll wrap this up um is it fair to say that knowing what we know now crossfire hurricane was not done by the book no that's fair to say okay that is fair to say it was not done by the book right no i'm disagreeing with you my answer you asked me i think in the main it was done well god help us all my friend if this is by the book god help the united states of america if this was done by the book because it was such an egregious violation of fairness altering exculpatory information failing to tell the court the unreliability of information before the court there was outcome determined at the beginning a warn against american citizen if this is by the book we need to rewrite the book and i promise you we will uh thank you very very much for coming and uh thank you uh now what will we be doing next this committee will be going down the ladder of who signed the warrant application to get a fisa warrant against carter page we've had rosenstein who is the acting attorney general sally yates who is the acting attorney general for this number two at doj when it was she was in charge both say i would not have signed the warrant application if i knew then what i know now regarding mr carter page now we have the fbi director who came into the the hearing today and said the three times he signed the application against carter page he would not have signed it knowing what he knows now knowing then what he knows now so where are we headed mccabe uh is next he was the number two at the fbi what am i worried about to the men to the public i'm worried that we're going to blame this on some low-level people somebody has got to be blamed for withholding exculpatory information from a court that would have saved an american citizen a lot of grief somebody's got to be blamed by using a document prepared by a foreign agent on the payroll of the democratic party who hired a russian agent to create a document called the dossier that was full of falsehoods that led to the obtaining of a warrant against a member of the opposition party's campaign team somebody has to pay that price because if they don't we will keep doing this again if it can happen to a republican it can happen to a democrat so what do i see here everybody at the top saying not me how is it possible that the director of the fbi and one of the most important cases in the history of the fbi was not made aware of the fact that the cia called the dossier the critical document to get a warrant against carter page internet rumor how's it possible that he did not know that the primary sub-source was a single individual suspected by the fbi of being a russian agent how is it possible he wasn't informed by people in the fbi after two interviews in january and march of the russian subsource the russian agent that the dossier was bar talk hearsay you need to take it with a grain of salt that none of that made it into the next warren application in april none of that made it to the top of the fbi how is it possible something this important to the country that it's not remotely possible to me that the case falls apart and nobody tells anybody at the top so to those who found this out that interviewed the sub source to those who were made aware that the uh subsource was a potential russian agent they want to hang you with this if you didn't tell the court then you're in trouble if you didn't inform your superiors you're in trouble because there's a duty to can of candor to the court so those of you who knew that the dossier wasn't reliable was internet rumor who had information that the sub source disavowed the reliability of the document and you didn't tell anybody about it you need to be fired or you're subject to going to jail if you did tell somebody then you've done your job but here's where we're headed apparently and one of the most corrupt investigations in modern history involving the nominee of the republican party where the fbi used a document prepared by a foreign agent christopher steele who hired a russian spy to create a document to get a warrant against american citizen about activities in russia that were russian disinformation at least in part that we end this whole drama was saying these things just happen nobody at the top really needs to be held accountable other than well yes my fault intellectually somebody needs to be fired or go to jail mr kleinsmith is pleading guilty to altering a document that it was exculpatory to mr page without the dossier there would be no ward against carter page because all the russian contacts could be explained if you understood mr page had been working with the cia something the fbi knew and failed to tell the court he went through hell because of the dossier not one person has been prosecuted for colluding with the russians in the trump world why does the radcliffe revelations matter the director of the fbi was informed by the intelligence community in september of 2016 that there was a plot being cooked up by the clinton campaign to accuse trump of being involved with the russians to distract from her email server problem and the fbi director doesn't remember that interaction here's the question do you think if this information involved trump they would have done something about it i've looked in the file i can't find any evidence they took it serious it doesn't matter if it's reliable or not the question is did the fbi pursue evidence against the clinton campaign well the same vigor they did the trump campaign can you imagine what the media would be saying today this revelation were about trump can you imagine how breathless it would be if the fbi just ignored it would can you imagine how this would be betraying on the newspapers and tv networks of this country if the republican party had hired christopher steele who hired a russian agent to investigate the clinton campaign to get a dossier on dossier on clinton accusing her of horrible things that were all russian disinformation hearsay innuendo to the american media you gave mueller a lot of coverage i supported the mueller investigation because i think it was important that we run these allegations down where there's accusations about the integrity of our elections about the role of russia we should all be concerned but now that we know now that we know that the carter page fiasco was an effort by a political party to create a document to get to be used against an american citizen weaponizing political research nobody seems to care my colleagues talked about everything but the issue before us i care i supported legislation protecting mueller for being fired why because i cared i agree with the following if the democrats were in charge we wouldn't be having this hearing the horowitz report 17 violations of protocol and policy regarding the carter page warrant application thank god for mr horowitz we have found more even more stunning violations the house judiciary committee has declared war on the trump administration every way you can including impeaching him but they have yet to hold a hearing with mr horowitz this committee has had hearings about russia involvement in our election about their methods and their means we call sally yates and clapper to tell us about their concerns about flynn at a time when people didn't know so i want to end with this about the flynn matter it is not normal ladies and gentlemen that the agent involved investigating a case mr barnett felt like that there was no crime and the man gets prosecuted anyway it's not normal for the agent in charge of investigating a case to believe that the organization was out to get a particular individual in the in this case trump this is not normal the flynn case is not normal the people in the field wanted to drop it they kept pushing it they manufactured a crime against general flynn he was not colluding with the russians he had every reason in the world to be talking to mr kislyak the ambassador to russia because he was going to be the incoming national security adviser it is not normal that the fbi takes a politically contrived document from a russian agent paid for by the democratic party and use it against an american citizen that is not normal somebody needs to be held accountable for this not only is it not normal it is incredibly dangerous so what will we do in this committee we will keep moving forward i'm going to call everybody who signed the warrant application and asked them if you knew then what you know now would you have signed the warrant application against carter page and oh by the way how is it possible that the people in charge seemed to know nothing about egregious abuses and one of the most important cases in the history of the fbi stay tuned you

Channel: Reuters

Views: 331,144

Keywords: us, russua, senate, James comey, fbi

Id: PZ3PRvwfsDw

Length: 239min 53sec (14393 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020