“The attorney general said he believed spying occurred in looking at the president’s then campaign. what you do think of that?” co-host John Dickerson asked.

“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Comey replied. “The FBI doesn’t spy, the FBI investigates. We investigated a very serious allegation that Americans might be hooked up with the Russian effort to attack our democracy.”

“Republicans need to breathe into a paper bag,” he continued. “If we had confronted the same facts with a different candidate, say a Democrat candidate, where one of their advisers was talking to a foreign adversary’s representative, about that adversary’s interference in our election, they would be screaming for the FBI to investigate and that’s all we did.”