he adds it seems to be good for him politically. joining us pam bondi, special advisor to the president. key member of his impeachment defense team. during the break you said you wanted to respond to director comey. sure do. chris: go ahead. he is right. the men and women in the fbi deserve much better than what they had in james comey. that man was fired in disgrace. he must have read a different report than we all read. he presided over the fbi in times worse than when j. edgar hoover was at the fbi. that man led the fbi and it s unbelievable. that steele dossier was essential and central to this report. it was fake. we know it was fake. and he says that his people did nothing wrong? first of all, he was the leader. he was the one charged with briefing the president when in fact he was spying on the president. i, that guy needs a lawyer by the way. i can t believe this. he repeatedly misled the fisa
doesn t make it part of the broader mosaic, makes it the center peas of the whole fisa application. i don t understand it to be saying that. i could be wrong about that. chris: i got his quote here. he says, we concluded the steele reporting played a central and essential role in the decision to seek a fisa warrant, that it pushed the fisa proposal over the line in terms of the establishing probable cause. i mean he says what he says. words mean something. yeah. i agree with his characterization. i m just, i don t see the disconnect between the two of us, i m sorry i m missing it. chris: you don t see a difference it is part of a broader mosaic and played an essential role in establishing probable cause? it was one of a bunch of different facts that were assembled to apply to the court. it was the one that convinced lawyers they had enough now with that added to the pile to go forward. chris: i guess the question is, it seemed you were minimizing the role of the steele dossier
he is saying i told him one thing and he wrote something else. the fbi knew that. yeah, but that doesn t drive a conclusion that steele s reporting is bunk. there are number of tricky things. you re interviewing subsource after you will the report has become public. as counterintelligence investigator is he walking away from it because it is now public? that has to go to into your assessment of mr. steele. chris: if it had become public just barely. this is january 2017. this isn t two years later. when it blew up, published by whatever the outfit, bus feed was all over the news. it had become a big deal. chris: did you know all of this? all of what? chris: everything that we re talking about here? did you know that in fact the steele report was the key for probable cause? did you know that the fbi had talked to the russian contact and said what steel said, he had told them was not true? did you know this? you re the fbi director? first, again, the report will speak for itself.
apparently you did not know at the time steele s main russian sources told the fbi that he had misrepresented what that russian source said and fbi knew at the time that quarter page in fact was acting as a contact, unofficial source for the cia. given what you know now, we talked earlier to director comey. he basically said i was wrong in what i represented back in 2018. are you willing to admit you were wrong in your defense of the fbi s fisa process? i m certainly willing to admit that the inspector general found serious abuses of fisa that i was unaware of. had i known of them, chris, yes i would have called out the fbi at the same time but i think it is only fair to judge what we knew at the time, not what would be revealed two years later but yes there were very serious abuses of the fisa process. they need to be corrected. we need to make sure they never happen again. chris: chairman schiff. thank you for your time.
bunk, but the fbi goes back and renews its fisa application three more times and by this point the fbi knows that the steele reporting is not credible. yeah i think you re mischaracterizing both what the fbi knew and what mr. horowitz says in his report. they didn t conclude the reporting in steele was bunk. they said there were questions about subsource reporting that should have been included in renewals. when i brief the president, i said i didn t know whether it was true or not, i just needed him to know about it. chris: i think you re mischaracterizing. steele isn t, horowitz isn t saying that the subsource, the russian contact was unreliable or was inaccurate, the russian contact said to the fbi, steele is unreliable because he misrepresented. steele misstated or exaggerated the sources, statements and multiple sections of the report.