At a press briefing on Tuesday, Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, answered questions about a Congressional report on the FBI probe of the 2017 GOP Congressional Baseball Team shooting.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Chairman of the subcommittee, you all have been provided with this report.
00:04I want to clear something up.
00:06This is not an investigation.
00:08This is a report, an assessment, if you will, of the FBI's investigation of that incident.
00:15So it's just important to note.
00:17I know this can be a difficult topic for folks here, particularly on Capitol Hill,
00:21but we're glad you're here today, and our committee's objective of this report
00:24is to address the analytic integrity issues as we've laid out here before you today.
00:28So with that, we've got time for a question or two if anybody wants to ask one.
00:34Yes, sir.
00:36Would you look at other shootings as well, other mass shootings?
00:42Will you ask the FBI for their case file on those and also produce a report on other shootings?
00:50If it's indicated, certainly.
00:51I think what we've seen here by asking for this, this was eight years in the making,
00:56and obviously this was a very political in nature, as we've indicated here
01:03and as this report indicates as well, you know, this was not suicide by cop.
01:10There were some anomalies here that required that we be involved,
01:14and so we've got multiple courses of action we can pursue on any given number of topics,
01:21and, but this, we're here today to talk about this particular incident.
01:27Are there any conversations with Leader Scalise about your report and what's his reaction to this?
01:32Yeah, I'm not going to speak to Leader Scalise's personal response, but yes, we did.
01:38I spoke with him at length about this.
01:40He's very well aware, and as you can imagine, a very difficult topic for him to address,
01:45but I'll let him do that on his own terms, but he was advised of this well in advance.
01:53You touched on this at the top, but kind of go a little bit more into detail about how long you guys have been looking for answers,
01:59trying to get some assessment on what the FBI was looking at when it was doing its investigation.
02:03Eight years.
02:04We've been looking for eight years, and it wasn't until back in March when we had our global threats assessment
02:10that Director Patel decided that he would comply because, I mean, obviously he understood what it was we were asking for
02:18and how long we had waited.
02:21That wasn't the first time we had asked by any means.
02:24There were members that are no longer in Congress that were part of this committee.
02:28There were members that are no longer in Congress that were part of other committees
02:31that had been trying for literally years to get that report.
02:35And so this report that you have in your hands today is the culmination of eight years' worth of requests.
02:42And so hats off to Director Patel, but also to our staff here,
02:47who's done a fantastic job in a very short time to be able to illuminate what the problems were with that report,
02:53with that investigation.
02:55One more?
02:56Anybody?
02:57Nope?
02:59All right.
02:59Thank you all.
03:00We appreciate it.