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97 said, "No, there's no there, there. Move on."

On October 27th, I learned that that was no longer true. And I had my team telling me, not only is it no longer true, but the result may change from our review of these hundreds of thousands of emails, and we can't finish it before the election.

And so what do I do? Do I stay silent and leave the Congress and the American people relying on something I now know is a lie or do I speak? And those are two really bad options. And my choice was to take the least bad. Tell Congress what I told you repeatedly is no longer true and try to make sure it's, "we don't know," "we're not sure," but to speak. Because to conceal would be to destroy the FBI and the Department of Justice.

Forget Hillary Clinton's Presidency, although that would be severely damaged if she became President on that basis. I made the judgement that the Department of Justice and the FBI will be ruined if I concealed a lie from this Congress. Reasonable people can disagree about that, but it illustrates that we treated the two consistently. And what trapped us in October was we had told everybody it was over in the summertime.

Mr. Thank you.

Ms. We're out of time.

We'll go off the record.