Former House Intelligence Chair Rips Comey And Rogers After Hearings
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Pete Hoekstra, a former Congressman and Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, blasted both NSA Director Mike Rogers and FBI Director James Comey following yesterday's Congressional hearing on Russian interference into the presidential election claims that Barack Obama ordered electronic monitoring of Donald Trump and the leaking of classified information to the press.
Hoekstra says that the intelligence community, itself, needs to be more accountable for their actions and shortcomings.
"I was rather surprised that there was not more of a discussion of the total incompetence and the failure of the intelligence community and how someone like Mike Rogers can actually get up there and speak with any kind of credibility about what's going on in his organization. They gave him a free pass. This is the organization that set the cyber security, basically, for the whole intelligence community and they're viewed as the experts across the government."
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Hoeskstra said Comey's testimony was inconsistent and hypocritical in regards to what he chose to reveal and what he would not.
"I heard someone refer to it now as 'Comey Rules.' These are rules that he makes up that no one else knows what they are and he just springs them on you, saying that we're doing an investigation into, basically, the Trump campaign and Russian interference, but then not being able to say whether he was doing an investigation into the one crime that we know has been committed, which is the leaking of the transcripts and the information of a phone call by Michael Flynn. Let's see, we know there's a crime there but you can't admit that. Where we don't know there's a crime, you're free to talk about it. It's kind of amazing."