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164 Mr. Thank you, Mr. Comey. I appreciate it.

Ms. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone.

Mr. Comey, before we begin, I wanted to ask a question from the last round just as a point of clarification. In the discussion about why you put -- in late October made an announcement again about the Hillary Clinton email investigation, you said it was for consistency. What precluded or what made you believe or the FBI not believe that allowing the public to be aware of the investigation of Russia and possible interference or aiding and abetting by Trump aides in his campaign would justify that as well?

Mr. Why wouldn't we announce --

Ms. Why wouldn't you have announced that?

Mr. Well, for a number of reasons. It would -- there wouldn't be any policy exception that would permit it; that is, it would jeopardize the ongoing investigation and it would be brutally unfair because we didn't know whether we had anything. We literally just started. And as I said, by the time I was fired, we still hadn't come to a conclusion. And so we'd be revealing something that was inherently misleading and jeopardizing our ability to investigate by revealing it.

It's for that reason -- I actually don't remember any discussion about whether to reveal that we had these classified counterintelligence files. Instead, what we debated a lot was should we tell the American people that the Russians are messing