your question, yeah, the normal circumstances, the Attorney General would make that announcement with the FBI director --
Ms. Jackson Lee. Absolutely.
Mr. Comey. -- standing next to her. Absolutely. And so I had never even actually heard of a circumstance where the FBI made an announcement separate from the -- without coordinating it with the Attorney General. I thought we had to do that if the American people are going to have confidence that the result was apolitical.
Now, it would have been great if Loretta Lynch had recused herself and made Sally Yates the acting attorney general. I think what I would have done in that circumstance is hand it to Sally, who did not have the issues that Loretta had -- I like them both -- but didn't have the issues that Loretta had with potential appearance of bias, but Loretta announced that she would not recuse herself. She would just accept my recommendation and that of the career prosecutors.
And so I felt like I didn't have the option to hand it to Sally because Loretta had stayed in charge. That makes sense. And so I called each of them and said, I'm going to make an announcement this morning. I'm not going to coordinate it with you. I hope when you see it, you'll understand why.
And the goal was to make sure the American people knew, this wasn't the Obama administration. This wasn't some political fix. There was no case there because apolitical professionals
