choose? is it a political document or legitimate intelligence? i d very much like to answer that question. i ve been directed by the fbi that i may not get into that based on operational equities. here s the issue that we have. we see the bias that you did. your explanations are not credible. we re trying to get to the genesis of why opening the investigation.i m with you focussing on russia. you try to rope in the other partier nominee and then we can t get to any answers of what the genesis of what this was. and let me finish. may 18, chairman gowdy said there s no big there there. so this had been going on at least ten months? i think it was going on before july 31. there you are mueller is appointed and you can t even identify any reason to suspect that there was collusion between trump s campaign and russia.
investigation. is that true, sir? yes. tell us why it s so important to prevent leaks from the fbi to journalists and others? leaks are terrible. they undercut things in a variety of ways. they can upend investigations and lead to incorrect assumptions and let witnesses though near being investigated. destruction of evidence, disclosure of classified anything. number of bad adverse things. got it. the doj ig s report has this to say about your involvement in the decision to involve congress about the wiener laptop strzok said to get a warrant for the laptop was known for many people beyond the mid year team and this raised a concern that this information could leak is. this statement from the i.g. s report true? yes. can you unpack that for us a
once we break those down, the amount of time it takes to fix is ten fold. i can not stress enough that i ask all of you to take deeply your responsibility to maintain our system of government thank you, mr. strzok. i need to say in closing, if anybody should be pissed at the fbi because you all helped this unfit man become president of the united states by not revealing to the people that he was under investigation in his campaign, it should be me. they should be applauding you, kissing you and giving you all awards because but for you, we would have had a legitimate president-elected. i yield back my time. gentleman from new york is yielded. witnesses can testify. as you know, during the course
is that correct? right. give me an example of a situation where bias would interfere with your professional judgment. difficult to answer a hypothetical. i m not going interview. i m going to destroy evidence. i m going to prevent somebody from taking an investigative step. has been a time when your professional actions or you believe that you had bias that you needed to move on from an investigation at any no. no. has there been a time in your career that you recused yourself from a professional action? no. okay. so you ll be surprised but i believe that the russians tried to destabilize our economy, our way of life, our government. i think they ve been doing it for a long time. i m curious if this is the first time that russia tried to interfere with an american
true? certainly with russians. i don t know how to characterize them. the fbi publicly disclosed information about the hillary clinton e-mail investigation 11 days prior to the election in 2016, true? yes. the fbi maintained con if i confidentiality at the trump campaign, correct? yes. if you wanted to stop donald trump from becoming president, you could have revealed the criminal investigation of the trump campaign prior to the election, true? yes, sir. mr. strzok, you are before this committee for one reason. to serve as a monumental distraction. there s a criminal investigation into the trump campaign and possible crimes related to the 2016 presidential election