no evidence that quote political bias or improper motivation influenced it. so, based on your investigation, personal political views expressed in text messages did not motivate the opening of the investigation of ties between trump campaign advisers and russia. is that correct? that s correct. ultimate lip, we concluded that those text messages, which we found last year were entirely inappropriate didn t ultimately make, play this, play the role in mr. prestep s decision to open the investigation. thank you so your investigation also uncovered text messages between other fbi employees expressing support for candidate and president trump. correct? that s correct. so, fbi employees held personal political views that were both favorable and unfavorable toward the candidate
and he s marketing the dossier, which is a bunch of garbage to anybody and everybody. to me that s important. is that important to you? any evidence of bias is supposed to be disclosed to the court and to the department lawyers. okay. so, let s play this out. in january, 2017, when they figure out the primary subsource and they talk to the russian guy that provided steele all the information, what should the fbi have done at that moment? two things. reconsidered internally where things stood and most importantly told the lawyers at the justice department who they were asking to help them get a fisa. and there are five people in that interview, right? correct. okay. are you going to make sure those five people are known to the higher ups? they are all a part of the referral i mentioned earlier. okay. did they have a duty to report to their supervisors and eventually to the court
sources. i d like to ask you a few questions about it. your investigation found the use of confidential human sources was consistent with existing rules. correct? correct. the use of confidential human sources here was not solely to gather first amendment protected information? correct. and that is the standard currently in the rules. and you found no evidence that the decision to use confidential human sources was motivated by political bias. is that correct? correct. with regard to your policy recommendation, what, if anything, do you believe should be changed and why? so as i mention in my opening statement, i think we were surprised to learn and concerned to learn that in an investigation of any political national party political campaign, the confidential human source usage could be approved by only a first-level supervisor. in this insubstance as we note here, some of them were approved at the assistant director level.
take issue with that statement? certainly our findings were that there were significant problems. so when comey speaks about fisa, you shouldn t listen? you should listen to mr. horowitz. he s not indicated and to be concerned about the fisa warrant process is not nonsense. christopher steelee, is it fair to say that he had a political bias against donald trump? he, given who he was paid for, there was a bias that needed to be disclosed to the court. does it seem that he personally had advice, not because he was on the payroll of the democratic party? well, we found in the course of this and heard from mr. orr about his comment to him that he was desperate to prevent mr. trump s election. again, this is the guy that provides the dossier that gives the warrant over the top against carter page. he s paid for by the democratic party and he personally believes it s bad for donald trump to win
trump campaign did occur. end quote. and as you said, your investigation found no evidence that the fbi placed any confidential source within the trump campaign or tasked any confidential source to report on the trump campaign. that s correct, right? that s correct. further, no evidence of political bias or improper motivations influenced the decision to use confidential sources as part of the investigation? that s correct. did your office ask attorney general barr and u.s. attorney general u.s. attorney john durham to share whatever evidence they had that might be relevant to your investigation? we asked mr. durham to do that. and what about attorney general barr? and attorney general barr. thank you. so nothing they could provide altered your office s conclusion that the fbi did not place spies in the trump campaign?