potential investigation into obstruction of justice or what was your -- what was your thought process there? Because I know that you also said in the book that you didn't know who to go to, you couldn't go to Sessions and the Deputy Attorney General was -- I'll let you answer.
Mr. Comey. I met with the senior leadership team of the FBI, shared with them a memo that I created about the February 14th conversation, and we debated what to do. And because we didn't feel we could go to Attorney General Sessions because he was about to be recused, there was no Deputy Attorney General because Mr. Rosenstein had not been confirmed yet, and we didn't want to do anything that might chill the investigative team. We decided that we would simply hold on to it, keep the information close hold until the Department of Justice sorted out how they were going to supervise this and then we could bring them into it and figure out what should we do to investigate this. And so that's why I say, to my knowledge, no investigation was opened on the obstruction of justice at that point.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Okay.
Mr. Comey. We held it, and we actually never got to the chance -- the Department of Justice didn't get to the point of figuring out how they were going to supervise the investigation until after I was fired.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Why -- for a layperson who may not understand why you even thought about this amounting to potential
