Mr. Comey. Well, obviously I can't comment on the particulars of the Flynn case.
Mr. Cummings. Right.
Mr. Comey. But in general --
Mr. Cummings. Would that be -- no, you go ahead.
Mr. Comey. A normal response would be to suspend their clearance, but there may be operational reasons why you wouldn't do that. Say you have somebody inside the FBI you think might be a spy. You don't want to alert them to the fact that you're on to them. Suspending their clearance might alert them that you're on to them. So you might instead just try to put them in a bit of a box and restrict the information there without them knowing.
Mr. Cummings. Assuming -- so the question then becomes, in your opinion, why would a suspension of a clearance be significant there, assuming you don't have that history that you just stated?
Mr. Comey. Well, if we had someone in the FBI that we thought might be working for a foreign power, you want to stop the damage. And so that's why the normal practice, absent operational concerns, would be to stop the damage by cutting off their access to information that they might give to the adversary.
Mr. Cummings. Just a few more questions.
You have decades of dedicated service to our country and
