Hillary Clinton was going to win the election and so there was no urgency to it. And there was an assumption on my part that nothing would be published about any of this any time likely before the election, and I wanted to tell them about it because that was when it was happening.
But I didn't, you know -- it was -- basically in a political campaign, you know, when you get past Labor Day people stop publishing stories that could be perceived as a late hit or an October surprise or some kind of a stunt.
And so, you know, in a presidential campaign you're sort of winding down at that point. You know, all of the information that you needed to gather for debates or political ads or anything like that, it's all been gathered.
And so -- anyway, so we wanted people to know. And we were also of the view by that point -- we'd been doing the research for two-plus months -- we were of the view that there was really something here, that this was really bad, and that there was some serious allegations that it wasn't just Russians. It was Russians working with Americans.
So that was round one. Then—and indeed, no one ran off and wrote a big story about how Russian -- how a British spy is -- thinks that, you know, the Russians are working with the Trump people.
There were, you know, a trickle of stories, you know, I guess more than a trickle, but there were some very limited stories about people associated with Trump having connections to the Russians. And I can remember specifically there being stories about Carter Page and his trip to Moscow and the fact that that was something that was of FBI interest, and that Carter Page stuff is something that we covered with the media.
But anyway, so none of that made a dent in the sort of general coverage,
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
