Arent Gettingis News Today

Should be a complete preservation of evidence. >> do you have any reason to believe theyve destroyed evidence in the meantime? >> i dont want to get into any of the facts of our investigation. but the request to preserve documents is made prophylactically at the very beginning of an investigation so that we dont have any issue like that come up in the future. >> are you aware of any information, about contact between russian officials, people tied to the kremlin in any way and the trump campaign...

Something the president said shouldnt happen, people using sources, but so it goes, this is just another partisan attack by democrats. i want to push back on that. its a familiar response from any white house when questioned like this. but did the democrats make jeff sessions say no when he was asked at his committee hearing if he had any contact with the russians? >> as mel brooks would say thats authentic frontier gibberish. they didnt put a name on it so i can attack the unnamed person. the b...

Fbi director or any other intelligence director to withhold information when talking with the intelligence committee or is that normal for them? is he just following routine procedure here? >> you know, i would say that certainly there is a cultural, as well as a policy framework for when individual members of congress approach the department and when committees do. what the department has to look at is, is this within the scope of the committees responsibilities and clearly it is. is this in th...

Surrogates and the russians? is your committee still equipped to handle this? >> this is the appropriate place for this to be done. we have the legislative branch has the house intelligence committee that has very broad jurisdiction over the intelligence agencies. its bipartisan. we have a bipartisan agreement. and this was a long, ongoing investigation and concern that weve had into russia, russia activity, not only in the cyber realm but involving elections and other elections across the globe...

Anyone connected to any part of the russian government about the 2016 election either before or after election day. one word answer, no. if you accept senator sessions at his word, the conversation was about senate business. that is a factual answer. but is it the right answer? is it -- is the answer a good lawyer gives when they know this -- theres a hunt under way. you say, no, but -- >> and the remarkable thing is there are many people in donald trumps cabinet who dont have experience with th...

That information? >> yeah, i dont have anything that would lead me to believe that thats the case. >> and do you have any concerns about the other piece of that reporting which was that the obama administration was concerned that this intelligence might be destroyed or ignored? >> it seems pretty far fetched. i dont even know -- i think those were unnamed obama officials. if those obama officials -- former obama officials have those concerns, it would be easy to stand up in front of a press conf...

But in fact, that they share with us the length and breath of what they may be doing. >> what was the rationale that director comey gave for not giving that information today? >> i dont want to go into specifics but there were certain questions that we were asking that he would answer and others he would not. and when members asked questions, he referred to us earlier a decision to decline to answer the question. again, i hope that when we next meet with the director, well have a different point...

Any information is going to ultimately be withheld from us. i will say theres a lot more information that the fbi and the intelligence agencies need to provide to our committee so that we can thoroughly go through all the information and process it and do an investigation. >> without get -- >> -- said the other day he wasnt really convinced. he hadnt gotten the assurances from the fbi that they would be cooperative. did you get that -- >> the director was very up front with us. i think we were v...