i want to tone things down a little bit here and first express my gratitude for the thousands of men and women who work every day on the front line with the fbi. i come from a background as a prosecutor and our local law enforcement work with the fbi every day in our local office in minnesota, and then in the senate, i ve had the privilege to work with many, many people in the fbi. and i think the inspector general he s job is incredibly important. he keeps everyone honest. but i do think this it is important for those t agents an those in law enforcement that are watching today that people understand there are people up here that understand that you are simply doing your jobs. which i think is basically some recommendations foric change wh the inspector general found in this report. so before iis start my question
i think that it is important to put this discussion in context in the 2016 election which is why we are here today. it is nowe undisputed by our intelligence agencies t
president zelensky decided that they were not going to issue thatt statement that rudy giuliani wanted to include burisma in the 2016 elections, there was no white house meeting. it soon became clear to them that the security assistance was also at risk. and that took on a renewed importance for them. well, following the 25th call, the t july 25th call, ambassador sondland and volker worked closely with mr. giuliani and the ukrainians to help draft a statement that the president could make, president zelensky. wasn t that right? yes. and the report said they worked closely and there were also phone calls with the white house around the same time that they werear working closely. do you know what that statement was supposed tou say according to mr. giuliani and the u.s. officials? well, the key difference is that it had to include that ukraine would do the investigations of burisma which equalled theic biden investigatn in the 2016 ukraine
interference. but was there concer
sm he20 didn t talk about 2020. would you agree president trump was acting wrongly and corruptly that he was askingee r the investigation explicitly to help his 2020 election prospects? yes, my experience as ten years as a prosecutor, you never have a defendant or someone who s engaging in misconduct who would ever explicitly say in this case, president zelensky, i am going to bribe you now or i am going to ask you for a bribe, i am going to extort you, that s not theto way these things work. mr. castor. you said about hunter biden going back to 2014 for burisma. yes. president trump supported ukraine with aid and otherwise, 2017 and 2018, correct? we are going to keep an eye on thatee testimony in today s impeachment before the house judiciary. we have some breaking news for you on that other story we have been monitoring. a long anticipated justice department inspector general report on the investigation into the origins of the russia probe, the conduct of a career l
seem to have everything that s been a response to everything that the democrats have done. they announced impeachment charges, michael horowitz report. bill barr is out there. articles are introduced. horowitz testifies today. on one hand they get exactly what they want. they create sort of confusion about mueller, the obsession to get trump. that story is out there. it seems as if this is part of a strategy the way the trump administration has used the government to respond to impeachment. last night in hershey, pennsylvania, i was there, covering president trump s rally. he talked about the ig report. he talked about the ongoing impeachment inquiry. he claimed that he was spied on. this is the counternarrative that has been building on the trump campaign, on the white house side, the republican party for a long time. when you read the ig s report there was not an intention, according to horowitz, to spy.
what was going on was counterintelligence investigation about possible russ
consensus reached after multiple days and meetings among officials. we reviewed department policies and concluded assistant director pre step s exercise of description in opening the investigation was in compliance with those policies. we also reviewed, as we detail in the report, the emails, text messages and other documents of those involved in that decision, particularly mr. pre steps. we didn t find documentary or testimonial evidence that indicated political bias or improper motivation influencing his decision to open the investigation. while the information in the fbi s possession at the time was limited, in light of the throw threshold established by department and fbi predication policy which, by the way, is not a legal requirement but a prudential one in the fbi and department policies, we found that crossfire hurricane was opened for an authorized
investigative purpose and with sufficient factual predication. this decision to open crossfire hurricane which involved the act