Thursday, during an appearance on FNC’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a member of the Homeland Security Committee, accused the FBI and Secret Service of impeding the congressional oversight investigation into an assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president.
Johnson said the agencies were “stonewalling” and warned that could generate suspicion and further conspiracy theories.
Transcript as follows:
WATTERS: Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has been investigating the shooting.
Senator, first of all, thank you for doing this investigation. No one else is, maybe a couple people in the Senate and the House, but what have you found that we need to hear?
JOHNSON: Well, Jesse, well, first of all, you laid out the obstruction. I’ve been doing oversight, investigating federal agencies for almost 10 years now. I know the tricks of the trade.
I know exactly how they stonewall you and how. Slow walk the investigation. So example, we’ve been requesting transcribed interviews. Now, we’ve done less than 12. The FBI has done over a thousand.
In that hearing about a month ago, I asked then FBI deputy director Paul Abbate, when can we see the transcriptions? The 302s from those interviews? He said, well, he will look into it and give them to us very soon. We haven’t got one of their 302s from them.
The people that we’ve asked to interview, again, we’ve done less than 12 interviews. They’re not the top requests. We have yet to talk to the sniper who actually took out Crooks. I think it’s incredibly important to talk to that individual and what we’ve been doing, and we released our updated timeline. That’s the way you do investigation.
You put things into a timeline, and ours now is down to seconds, and it really turns down to seconds right around the shooting time. And that is how you build the case. That’s how you find out exactly, is this person — is his memory foggy? Is he telling us the truth on these things? And so —
WATTERS: Senator, hold on. Let me just ask you because you just mentioned something pretty suspicious.
The Biden-Harris administration is preventing you guys from interviewing the sniper that took out Crooks?
JOHNSON: We haven’t talked to him yet. We’ve had less than 12 interviews. Now, these interviews take hours, okay.
So they are involved, but one thing you need is, you need documents before you do the interviews. They’ve been turning the documents over to us literally minutes before we conduct the interviews heavily redacted.
WATTERS: So they are trying to sabotage it.
JOHNSON: So what you need to do — you need documents like immediately, yes, and it would be — again it would be really nice to have the 302s from the FBI interviews. Why aren’t they turning those things over?
So literally, if you were designing an investigation to create suspicion and drive in conspiracy theories, this is exactly how you do it, the way the Secret Service and the FBI are conducting it.
WATTERS: What are they trying to hide? Because it’s worse when they don’t cooperate. That’s when we suspect something was wrong, and I know something was wrong. I know it was wrong, but now I think it’s really wrong, if you know what I mean.
Senator Ron Johnson, thank you so much. Please keep up the good work.
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