a thing, but c-span's big idea is more relevant today than ever. no government money supports c-span. its nonpartisan coverage of washington is supported as a public service by your cable or satellite provider. on television and online, c-span is your unfiltered view of government so you can make up your own mind. >> attorney general william barr says he will not testify before the house judiciary committee tomorrow. today he spent several hours answering senate judiciary committee questions about the mueller report on russian influence in the 2016 election. here's a portion of that hearing. >> the firsted or over business is to try to cool the room down, we'll see if we can do that. the attorney general will be testifying here in a bit about the mueller report. i want to thank him for coming to the committee and giving us an explanation as to the action

he is took and why he took them regarding the mueller report. here's the good news. mr. graham: here's the mueller report. you can read it for yourself, it's about 400 and something pages. can't say i've read it all but i've read most of it. there's an unredakotaed version over in the classified section of the senate. a room where you can go and look and e unredakotaed version i did that and i found it not to change anything in terms of an outcome. but a bit about the mueller report. who is mueller? for those who may not know, i don't know where you've been but you may not know, bob mueller has a reputation in this town and throughout the country as being an outstanding lawyer and a man of the law. he was f.b.i. director, he was

the deputy attorney general, he was in charge of the criminal division at the department of justice, he was a united states marine. and he has served his country in a variety of circumstances long nd well. for those who took time to read the report, i think it was well written, very for rogue and let me tell you -- very thorough and let me tell you what went into the report. 19 lawyers employed. approximately 40 f.b.i. agents. intel analysts -- intel analysts. forensic accountants and other staff. 2,800 subpoenas issued. 500 witnesses interviewed. warrants executed. more than 230 orders for communication records so records could be obtained. 13 requests to foreign

governments for evidence. over $25 million spent. over two years. we may not agree on much but i hope we can agree we had ample resources, took a lot of time, and talked to a lot of people. and you can read for yourself what he found. the attorney general will tell us a bit about what his opinion of the report is. in terms of interacting with the white house, the white house turned over to mr. mueller 1.4 millioning to be yumets and records. -- 1.4 million documents and records. never asserted executive privilege one time. over 20 white house staffers, including eight from the white house counsel's office, were interviewed voluntarily. don mcgann, chief counsel for

the white house, was interviewed for over 30 hours. everybody that they wanted to talk to from the trump campaign on the ground, they were able to talk to. the president submitted himself to written interrogatories. so to the american people, mr. mueller was the right guy to do this job. i always believed attorney general sessions was conflicted out because he was part of the campaign. he was the right guy with ample resources and the cooperation he needed to find out what happened was given, in my view. but there were two campaigns in 2016. and we'll talk about the second one in a minute. so what did we learn from this report? after all this time and all this money, mr. mueller and his team concluded there was no

collusion. i didn't know, like many of you here on the republican side, we all agreed that mr. mueller should be allowed to do his job without interference. i joined with some colleagues on the other side to swro deuce legislation to protect the special counsel, that he could only be removed for cause. he was never removed. he was allowed to do his job. so no collusion. no coordination. no conspiracy between the trump campaign and the russian government regarding the 2016 election. as to obstruction of justice, mr. mueller left it to mr. barr to decide after two years and all this time, he said mr. barr you decide, mr. barr did. there are a bunch of lawyers on this committee and i will tell you the following. you have to have specific intent

to obstruct justice. if there's no underlying crime, pretty hard to figure out what intent might be if there was never a crime to begin with. the president never did anything to stop mueller from doing his job. so i guess the theory now is he didn't collude with the russians, he didn't specifically do anything to stop mueller but attempted obstruction of justice of a crime never occurred. i guess is sort of the new standard around here. we'll see if that makes any sense. to me, it doesn't. there's another campaign. there was the clinton campaign. what did we learn from this report? the russians interfered in our election. so can some bipartisanship come out of this? i hope. so i intend to work my colleagues on the other side to introduce the deter act and to

introduce legislation to defend the integrity of the voting system. senator durbin and i have legislation that would deny anyone admitance into the united states a visa through the immigration system if they were involved in interfering in an american election, working with senator whitehouse and blumenthal to make sure if you hack into a state election system even though it's not tied to the internet that's a crime. i would like to do more to harden our infrastructure because the russians did it, some 400-pound guy sitting on a bed somewhere, they was russians. and they're still doing it. it could be the chinese. it could be somebody next, my takeaway from this report is that we've got a lot of work to do to defend democracy against the russians and other bad actors, and i promise the committee will get on with that work hopefully in a bipartisan fashion. the other campaign.

the other campaign was nvestigated not by mr. mueller but by people within the department of justice. the accusation against the clinton -- secretary clinton is she set a private server up somewhere in her house and classified information was on it. to avoid the disclosure requirements and the transparency requirements required of being secretary of state. so that was investigated. what do we know? we know that the person in charge of investigating hated trump's guts. i don't know how mr. mueller felt about trump but i don't think anybody on our side believes that he had a personal animosity toward the president when he couldn't do his job. this is what strzok said on

february 26, 2016. he's in charge of the clinton investigation. he's, trump's, abysmal. i keep hoping the charade will end and people will dump him. february 20, 16. paige is the department of justice lawyer assigned to this case. march 3 20, 16. trump is a loathsome human being. instruction, oh my god -- god, trump is an idiot. paige, he's also. strzok, god, hillary should win 100 million to nothing. compare those two people to mueller. march 16, 2016. god, trump is a i cannot believe trump is likely to be an actual serious candidate for president. july 21, 2016. trump is a disaster. i have no idea how destabilizing his presidency would be. august , 2016. three days before strzok was made deputy acting in charge of

the counterintelligence division of the f.b.i. he's never going to become president, right? paige to strzok, no, no he won't, we'll stop it. these are the people investigating the clinton email situation and strzok, the counterintelligence -- and start the counterintelligence investigation of the trump campaign. compare them to mueller. august 15, 2016. strzok, i want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in andy's office that there's no way he gets elected but i'm afraid we can't take that risk. it's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you tie before you're 40. august 26, 2016. just went to the southern virginia wal-mart. i could smell the trump supporters. october 19. 2016.

trump is a -- idiot. he's unable to provide a coherent answer. sorry to the kids out there. these are the people that made a decision that clinton didn't do anything wrong and that counterintelligence investigation of the trump campaign was warranted. we're going to in a bipartisan way, i hope, deal with russia. but when the mueller report is put to bed and it soon will be this committee is going to look long and hard at how this all started. we're going to look at the fisa warrant process. did russia provide christopher steele the information about trump that turned out tore garbage that was used to get a warrant on an american citizen, and if so, how did the system fail? was there a real effort between papadopoulos and anybody in

russia to use the clinton emails stole by the russians? sor that thought planted in his mind? i don't know but we're going to look. and i can tell you this. if you change the names y'all would want to look too. everything i just said just substitute clinton for trump. see what all these people with cameras would be saying out here about this. as to cooperation in the clinton investigation, i told you what the trump people did. tell you a little bit about what the clinton people did. there was a protective order for the server issued by the house and there was a request by the state department to preserve all the information on the server. paul cambetta, after having the

protective order used a software program called bleach bit to wipe the mail server clean. has anybody ever heard of paul cambetta? no. under protectived offer from the house to -- protective order from the house to preserve information, under request to preserve information on the server, he used a bleach bit program to wipe it clean. what happened to him? nothing. 18 devices possessed by secretary clinton she used to do business as secretary. how many of them were turned over to the f.b.i.? none. two of them couldn't be turned over because judith casper took a hammer and destroyed two of them. what happened to her? nothing.

bottom line is, we're about to hear from mr. barr the results of a two-year investigation into the trump campaign, all things russia, the actions the president took before and after , 40 ampaign, $25 million f.b.i. agents, i appreciate very much what mr. mueller did for the country. have read most of the report. or me, it is over. >> thank you, mr. chairman. welcome, attorney general. on march 24, you sent a letter to chairman graham and the ranking member of this committee providing your summary of the princico