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“Is that accurate?” Himes asked Comey, after reading the tweet out loud.

“Well, it's hard for me to react to them,” Comey said. “We’ve offered no opinion, have no view, have no information on potential impact because it's never something we looked at.”

Himes followed up again, “It's not too far of a logical leap to conclude the assertion you have told Congress that there was no influence on the electoral process is not quite right?”

“Right,” Comey said. “It certainly wasn't our intention to say that today because we don't have any information on that subject. That's not something that was looked at.”

Comey media reports containing classified information

During the hearing, Republican committee members’ questions focused largely on leaks of classified information to the media -- a point that has also been pushed by Trump.

In his opening remarks, Comey said that leaks of classified information are “serious, serious federal crimes for a reason.”

“They should be investigated and where possible, prosecuted, in a way that reflects that seriousness so that people understand it simply cannot be tolerated,” Comey said.

He said even if news reports pertaining to classified information are false, he cannot dispute them publicly.

“We just can't do that because we'll give information to our adversaries that way, and it's very, very frustrating, but we can't start down that road,” Comey said.

“We cannot do that with classified information. It's very, very frustrating because I’ve read a whole lot of stuff, especially in the last two months, that's just wrong, but I can't say which is wrong, and I can't say it to those reporters.”

Comey admits he should have warned DNC on hacking

Comey acknowledged that in retrospect, the FBI should have “sent up a much larger flare” and “kept banging and banging on the door” when the Democratic National Committee was hacked in the 2016 campaign.

What’s more, Comey offered a description of just how big the Russian effort was -– he said that in this particular case, the U.S. government had to notify more than 1,000 entities that the Russians were hitting at the same time.

“Knowing what I know now, we would have made extensive efforts to notify ... I would have walked over there myself knowing what we know now. But I think the efforts we made, that our agents made, were reasonable at the time,” he said.

Comey said that the FBI first notified DNC of hack in August 2015. Comey said the FBI “never got direct access to the [DNC] machines themselves. The DNC in spring of 2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system.”

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