rather than focus on urgent issues like family separation, aren t efforts to reduce gun violence in our communities, considering legislation to reform our broken immigration system, passing legislation to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, addressing the inability of americans who fall behind in their students loans to discharge that debt in bankruptcy or oversight of the many conflicts of interest and corruption in this administration, we re having another hearing on the hillary clinton e-mails. what you should understand, mr. strzok, is that the reason my republican colleagues will not let you answer a question is because they re not interested in your answers. in is about promoting a narrative. you re a prop. so they can promote a narrative in an ongoing effort to distract from the serious investigation of the special counsel that is closing in on the trump inner circle. this is a campaign to undermine that work and sadly, they ll do
you appear to so you re out of seat with an answer that was received from the department of justice. that is an interesting answer that you just gave that you may have been out of seat. now the question is policies procedures failed or not failed, this is a serious investigation that i take seriously. if you were read out, you should have been read out. that is my final statement. i yield back. the gentleman from rhode island is recognized. i look forward to a couple of extra minutes as each of my republican colleagues have had. serving on this committee and representing the state of rhode island is one of the greatest honors of my life. the conduct of this committee today has been tremendously sad and embarrassing and really dangerous to our democracy. i want to apologize to you for the way you ve been treated by this committee. for the american people watching, you ought not wonder why they have lost confidence in congress and are sick of the kind of circus that they sought i
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.
i.g. report, so there s going to be mr. chairman, the gentleman is out of time. may he answer the question? i didn t hear a question. i don t agree with it. he asked me whether or not i believed that the i.g. report indicated there was bias or not they re afraid to hear you answer. i d like the witness to answer the question. may i respond? sure. let s look at the facts of the laptop. the facts of the laptop are within hours of learning the laptop, i assigned agents to check in that wasn t if question. within a day they had done so the gentleman from idaho is yielded back. if you want to give a short response to a question that he does not believe he asked, you re welcome to do it. keep it short. speak clearly into the mic. absolutely. so sir i do take issue with the
opened a case into the allegations that the government of russia had made an off of assistance in the potential involvement of members of the trump campaign. i cannot envision a scenario that would not be a reasonable presented case to open an investigation. it s papadopoulos. that s not what they had. you didn t quite get there. i know comey may have said that but you didn t get there. papadopoulos, that s weak. the characterization was that it was a credible source of information, stands on its own. i don t think anybody in this committee would argue that. one, it wasn t appropriate to argument that and it wasn t we have questions about whether it was appropriate because we don t have the underlying information. we read in the new york times from leaks your time of the gentleman has expired. regular order. regular order. the chair recognizes the gentleman mr. chairman, there s a second element of the question