it s understandable why the president might make such a statement. a former head of the fbi, robert mueller, is put in charge of an important investigation and who does he pick to be on his team? well you would want people who are experienced and smart and most importantly unbiased. because whatever you do, the result is going to be second guessed, one side or the other is going to be dissatisfied, critical, so above all things, they ve got to at least appear to be fair and unbiased. who does mueller pick? 16 attorneys, nine of the 16, more than half, have given money to the obama campaign or the clinton campaign or both. and nobodies has given a cent to donald trump. or his campaign. does that show a lack of booiiar fairness? i think the american people can decide that for themselves. perhaps more shocking we recently learned that one of those supposedly unbiased investigators with mueller is a
investigations in congress and so we ve seen quite a bit of evidence of, you know, a lot of partisanship and frankly dysfunction on the side, a lot of clashes between adam schiff and devon newness who is recused from the investigation and mike conway, seeing a little more cohesion and agreement side on the senate side committee investigation. i do think if we re going to be looking for who is going to be getting substantive answers in the face of some pushback from the executive branch it s far more likely to come in that investigation at this point. it goes further, mark, because to john s point, i mean on the oversight committee, elijah cummings bringing whistleblower allegations that mike flynn was texting a former business colleague we re going to drop the russia sanctions when president trump becomes president during the inauguration, whistleblower claims. trey gowdy who chairs the committee says we re not going to look into that. it s important that the
2016 at trump tower and also present at the meeting was jared kushner and paul manafort. it was during yesterday s meeting that don, jr., told investigators he had this talk, this chat with his father, and it came after a misleading statement was crafted aboard air force one as the president and his aides were coming back from an overseas trip and it was the new york times that first approached the white house about this story and it was during that approach and in the crafting of the statement aboard air force one was somewhat misleading. they offered a misleading statement which claimed that meeting was about adoption. don, jr., told the committee investigators he first spoke to hope hicks about a response to the story. now all of this, the crafting of this misleading statement, which involved the president and white house aides, is all part of the special counsel investigation.
special counsel was named. what happens is now we ve politicized potentially wrong doing, right, certainly when it comes to the integrity of our election system. when you hear people talk about special counsels and how they run amok, the bottom line is they re supposed to be immune to the politization of what the investigation is. we re also hearing concerns and frustration from the senate side from dianne feinstein who doesn t think that charles grassley, who is the chairman of the senate judiciary committee is really going at this hard enough. they ve backing off. while we saw a lot of functioning investigations happening on the senate side, we re now starting to see that deteriorate a little bit, specifically the judiciary committee. you re also seeing criticism in some of the investigators even within bob mueller s team are political. that is starting to come out. we will see that, by the way, when fbi director christopher wray testifies in a few minutes. that will be front and c
justice department official, and also a defense attorney, that that s not my experience as the normal practice. i am also however reluctant to answer questions with a hypothetical about whether i would ever do something because every investigation is subject to its own unique circumstances. i certainly understand. because that s what happened in the so-called investigation of hillary clinton and i yield back my time. the chair recognizes the gentle woman from california. thank you, mr. chairman, thank you mr. director for being here today. and thanks to you for your leadership of this agency and to the men and women who work so hard to protect our country and to serve the united states. we all appreciate it. even though we might have a few questions. my question, my firsts question, has to do with cyber security. you know, the there s a rapidly growing threat of cyber