House Committee Grills Comey on Clinton Emails, Former President Obama

House Republicans on Tuesday released transcripts from their Monday grilling of former FBI Director James Comey in a closed session. A good portion of the meeting included Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina trying to connect dots between former President Barack Obama's knowledge of any possible national security breach by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and whether or not the FBI kept the former president abreast of any investigations they had going at the time.

Gowdy began the executive session by asking Comey about a meeting at the White House that was supposedly a "private meeting," and if the director wrote a memo to his senior leadership team at the FBI about that meeting. Comey said his memo included Andy McCabe, Jim Baker and Jim Rybicki, and possibly the National Security Branch at the FBI and the head of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI.

Gowdy then asked Comey about an interview Obama gave 60 Minutes in 2015 in which Obama said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton merely "made a mistake" and didn't mean any harm in the leak of her emails.

"Did you address that with him personally?" Gowdy asked Comey.

Comey said he didn't, according to this transcript sent Tuesday.

Gowdy asked Comey if he sent "word through Attorney General Loretta Lynch that it is not appropriate for the head of the executive branch to comment on a pending investigation?"

Comey said, "I did not."

When Gowdy asked Comey how he communicated with the president during those times to let the commander-in-chief know that commenting on pending investigations was "not appropriate," the director said he didn't.

And to address a scenario when Obama said, "This is not a situation in which America's national security was endangered" about Clinton's emails despite no one from the FBI alerting him, Comey didn't have a response other than, "I can't answer that for him."

When Gowdy asked if all of Clinton's emails had been recovered, Comey asked for a clarification of "all of her emails."

Gowdy said any emails that would have been generated. Then the Representative asked if any emails had been destroyed.

"Yes, by her," Comey said, referring to Clinton.

Gowdy and other members of the Committee on the Judiciary in a joint oversight group drilled further into probes about Reince Priebus, Gen. David Petraeus, Michael Flynn and others in this 173-page report.

Monday's meeting also details several events involving U.S. officials with Russia and intricacies surrounding when and where those meetings happened.

"There was an issue with respect to that, and it was that if the bad guys—we didn't want to do anything to confirm to the bad guys that they might have Barack Obama's private cover email unclassified because let's imagine the Russians had captured that communication, they might not know what they had. And so, I remember some discussion about what we should say, if anything, in my public remarks about that."