Senate

Rubio defends line of questioning during Comey hearing

by Rebecca Savransky - 06/12/17 8:56 AM ET

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is defending his line of questioning during former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony last week, saying he wanted to make sure the overall Russia probe was still a focus.

“It was really important for me to make clear that the president didn’t ask him to get rid of the Russia investigation,” Rubio told Politico in an interview published Monday.

“The best way to focus on what did happen is to identify what didn’t happen and then move on from it. And so, if there’s wrongdoing by anyone in regards to this, there’s now an independent counsel looking at these sorts of issues.”

Rubio said the focus of the Senate Intelligence Committee “needs to be about the broader Russia investigation.”

{mosads}“Did Russia interfere in our election? I think we know the answer to that,” he said. “But how they interfered — their methods, their tactics — is what the American people deserve to know. Because we are 16 to 18 months from another election. And they’re going to do it again.”

Rubio appeared to emerge as a defender of Trump during the hearing last week, pressing Comey on why it would be so bad for Trump to want to be exonerated publicly.

He also argued there was nothing nefarious about the president asking for loyalty and blasted the FBI for its leaks.

A Miami Herald columnist last week wrote: “Rubio seemed most interested in getting Comey to publicly admit that President Trump ‘was not personally under investigation’ than in obtaining any new evidence for the Senate investigation.”

Rubio, who ran against Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, has been working with Trump’s administration closely to rewrite the White House’s policy on Cuba. Trump has reportedly been mulling a rollback of the Obama administration’s Cuba policies, which led to a historic thaw in Cuba-U.S. relations.

Tags Marco Rubio