00:00You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.
00:05Please be seated.
00:07When I was appointed FBI director in 2013, I understood that I served at the pleasure of the president.
00:14And although the law required no reason at all to fire an FBI director,
00:18the administration then chose to defame me, and more importantly, the FBI,
00:24by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led,
00:29that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader.
00:34Those were lies, plain and simple.
00:37And I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them, and I'm so sorry that the American people were told them.
00:43I don't think it's for me to say whether the conversation I had with the president was an effort to obstruct.
00:48I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning, but that's a conclusion I'm sure the special counsel will work towards
00:54to try and understand what the intention was there and whether that's an offense.
00:58I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document.
01:03You've seen the picture of me walking across the blue room, and what the president whispered in my ear was,
01:09I really look forward to working with you.
01:11So after those encounters...
01:13And that was just a few days before you were fired?
01:15That was on the Sunday after the inauguration.
01:17The next Friday I have dinner, and the president begins by wanting to talk about my job.
01:23And so I'm sitting there thinking, wait a minute, three times you've already asked me to stay, or talked about me staying.
01:29And my common sense, again I could be wrong, but my common sense told me what's going on here is,
01:33he's looking to get something in exchange for granting my request to stay in the job.
01:39My impression was something big is about to happen.
01:41I need to remember every single word that is spoken.
01:44And again, I could be wrong, but I'm 56 years old, I've seen a few things.
01:49My sense was the attorney general knew he shouldn't be leaving, which is why he was lingering.
01:54And I don't know Mr. Kushner well, but I think he picked up on the same thing.
01:58And so I knew something was about to happen that I needed to pay very close attention to.
02:02I said, look, I've seen the tweet about tapes.
02:05Lordy, I hope there are tapes.
02:06The president tweeted on Friday, after I got fired, that I better hope there's not tapes.
02:11I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn't dawn on me originally,
02:15that there might be corroboration for our conversation, there might be a tape.
02:19And my judgment was I needed to get that out into the public square.
02:23And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter.
02:28Didn't do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
02:34And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it.
02:36And then you made a comment earlier about the Attorney General, previous Attorney General, asking you about the investigation on the Clinton emails,
02:46saying that you've been asked not to call it an investigation anymore, but to call it a matter.
02:50And you had said that confused you.
02:52Can you give us additional details on that?
02:54Well, it concerned me, because we were at the point where we had refused to confirm the existence, as we typically do, of an investigation for months.
03:05And it was getting to a place where that looked silly, because the campaigns were talking about interacting with the FBI in the course of our work.
03:13The Clinton campaign at the time was using all kinds of euphemisms, security review, matters, things like that, for what was going on.
03:21We were getting to a place where the Attorney General and I were both going to have to testify and talk publicly about it.
03:26And I want to know, was she going to authorize us to confirm we had an investigation?
03:30And she said, yes, but don't call it that. Call it a matter.
03:33And I said, why would I do that?
03:35And she said, just call it a matter.
03:38And so that concerned me, because that language tracked the way the campaign was talking about the FBI's work.
03:46And that's concerning. All I can do is hope. The President surely knows whether he taped me.
03:53And if he did, my feelings aren't hurt. Release all the tapes. I'm good with it.
03:58Got you.
03:59Got you.
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