saying in russian rumors or collusion rumors that would prompt this time of comment? what do you think? you re right. the question goes beyond just personal bias. the question is whether or not the bias of peter strzok mafested itself in the form of investigative decisions. he was the lead investigator for hillary clinton and then he was drafted on to the mueller probe. that is going 3 for 3. we ought to know whether or not there was bias in terms of the prioritization of the trump russia investigation over the hillary clinton e-mail investigation. you ll recall that the inspector general said that he was not sure, that it wasn t bias that resulted in a tamping down of the hillary clinton investigation and the acceleration of the trump investigation. only questioning will illuminate
normal processes, you would have had the front line prosecutors, investigators in the washington, d.c., field office and this is why so many retired fbi agents and current fbi agents were livid with james comey and were e-mailing him after his really bad announcement saying if they had done the very same things they would have been fired and possibly prosecuted for it and shows the double standard for it. if you don t think there s evidence of that, you need to reread chapter 12. it s pretty clear on the manifestation of that bias as it comes to opening up trump and russia. there s a separate i.g. investigation into that. well, it mentions russia too. it does come up, but it doesn t reach any conclusions about the russia investigation. it concludes that you can t exclude bias as a factor in prioritizing the russia investigation. that s one hell of a conclusion. [ overlapping speakers ] but at the same time it opens
no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias. those are the two different ways that bias is used as a word in this. i keep asking about the hillary clinton e-mail probe in this case because it does seem that you are open to the possibility that the net impact of all these decisions were made, it s possible, you re leaving open the possibility that it did have a negative impact on the clinton campaign. i just don t know. i just don t know. you re not ruling it out. yeah. it s a presidential election. we agree that you re not ruling it out. yet you were out here every day saying that the hillary clinton e-mail investigation and those involved in it were out to get then candidate trump. it just doesn t seem as if those two things could be happening at the same time. no. look, if you look at the text messages between the people who were the senior folks on the hillary clinton e-mail investigation, they re doing everything they can to pave a yellow b
up the possibility that that actually helped donald trump. again, all i m saying it helped donald trump to open up on russia and prioritize this. hang on, hang on, congressman. i let you make your case here. in this case where it talks about the fact it could not say with confidence that peter strzok did not act with bias when he delayed that aspect of the clinton investigation, it opens up the possibility that it helped candidate trump and not hillary clinton. all i m saying is if there was a conspiracy, which you have suggested, to help hillary clinton, there is no evidence here. no. just because the conspiracy didn t work doesn t mean it didn t exist. again, the conspiracy is ongoing. do you feel last question, last question. do you feel the same way about the trump tower meeting between donald trump jr. and russians promising dirt on hillary clinton? just because the conspiracy didn t work, it doesn t mean it didn t exist? no, that s different. does the same logic a
they said it wasn t political bias that led peter strzok but that threw off the entire timeline and began ann an illegitimate russia investigation. it was only six days before he was talking with his girlfriend about an insurance policy against the trump presidency. that was as good an evidence of bias that you could have in a case. to be completely fair, he said we did not have confidence that the decision to prioritize the russia investigation was free from bias. he doesn t say they found there was bias, he said we didn t have confidence that there was no bias. that s as bad as it gets in an i.g. report. i m just saying out there what was said. yeah, but they don t have confidence that there wasn t bias, that necessarily means that bias was present. i m just reading you the language the i.g. used so the american people can hear what it is and make that judgment for themselves. they also said, by the way, when it comes to the hillary clinton e-mail investigation, we found