CNN "CNN Newsroom" - TRANSCRIPT Massive Flight Disruptions Across U.S. After FAA Had System Outage; Santos On NY GOP Leaders' Call To Resign: "I Will Not"; Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) Discusses About Rep. George Santos' Assignments; More "Atmospheric River" Events Expected In CA In The Coming Days. Aired 3-3:30p ET

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CAMEROTA: With us now as Republican Congressman Kelly Armstrong, a member of the Steering Committee making these decisions about committee assignments. Congressman, thanks so much for being here. Should George Santos be on the Financial Services Committee? Will he be on that?

REP. KELLY ARMSTRONG (R-ND) He is not on the Financial Services Committee. But it's difficult for me, there's 222 members of the Republican majority, five of us serve on the Ethics Committee. I am one of those five and I know there's been an official complaint filed against him and I take that job very seriously. So I really can't comment more than that or on that.

CAMEROTA: Well, no, I understand, but I'm not asking you about the Ethics investigation into him, but because you're on the committee, the Steering Committee that assigns people to committee assignments, is George Santos assigned to any committee?

ARMSTRONG: No. He has no - we - he was not put on any committees today. We're coming back again next week.

CAMEROTA: As you know, there are local Republican leaders who are calling for him to resign over the slew of lies that he's said about his resume about his personal life, about his previous jobs. Do you agree that he should resign?

ARMSTRONG: It's - Again, I'm going to be very clear, he's had an Ethics Committee - or Ethics complaint officially filed against him. I am on the only true bipartisan committee in Congress. We take that job very seriously. We sit in judgment of our peers and it's just something I'm not willing to talk about.

CAMEROTA: Okay. How about Marjorie Taylor Greene? What committee is she going to be on?

ARMSTRONG: I don't know what committees she's going to be gone. I absolutely believe Marjorie Taylor Greene should be seated on committees and I believe that people - every one of us represents 750,000 people and we have - when they elect their member of Congress to come here, there seems to be a distinction in this town that we think we work for leadership, it doesn't matter if it's Democratic leadership or Republican leadership, we don't.

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We work for our constituents. I have the privilege of representing an entire state and those are the people I work for. I don't work for either Republican leadership or Democratic leadership. When we send somebody to Congress, they should get committee assignments.

CAMEROTA: I mean, except for - if it's, say, Eric Swalwell or Adam Schiff or Ilhan Omar.

ARMSTRONG: Well, as somebody who was defending our members, whether it was Jim Jordan, whether it was Marjorie Taylor Greene, whether it was Paul Gosar, whether it was Jim Banks' last Congress, I made this same argument, and I said, the problem is, is when you move the goalposts and the goalposts never go back. I begged the Democrats not to do this two years ago and we are seeing what's moving through with that.

CAMEROTA: Okay, let's talk about some of the top priorities for the new Republican-led House. I know that you, in particular, want Congress to investigate the FBI and the DOJ.

About the FBI, obviously, that's a vital crime fighting organization in our country. As you know, they just successfully surveilled the suspect in the Idaho - University of Idaho murders across the country and arrested him. They do things like that in much less high profile things every single day. Do you worry that by investigating the FBI, it will impact the morale of the agents and the work that they do?

ARMSTRONG: I worry that it's already happened. I work prior to ever being involved in government, I was a criminal defense attorney and a public defender in North Dakota. I worked with law enforcement agents from the FBI, DEA local and all the way across the board. But I also served on judiciary and oversight for my first two years in Congress.

I've read the two IG reports that have come out. I have seen what the - what we're doing dealing with it and one of my biggest frustrations is that the leadership of the FBI by politicizing and DOJ politicizing so many different things, that the rank and file members who are just trying to do the best work they can in places like North Dakota are losing steam through no fault of their own. We have to get into this.

I was actually one of the first people in judiciary on the Republican side to go after Director Wray in a hearing after President Trump appointed him. So I'm - these are really serious issues and we need to we need to investigate and deal with it. We've had - FBI whistleblower has already come forward and there's a real serious problem in leadership and just changing regulation isn't going to solve it.

CAMEROTA: Okay, so let's talk about the classified documents that we now know both President Trump and President Biden as Vice President appeared to mishandle. Do you see any difference in these cases?

ARMSTRONG: I haven't looked at it. I will tell you one big difference, it was discovered on both prior to the election, but only one was disclosed prior to the election. And this isn't the first time that has happened either, whether it's censoring the New York Post a hundred different people, we obviously know DOJ was coordinating heavily, big government was coordinating with big tech in order to suppress certain things in dealing with that. So my major concern right now is the difference in timing, but I'm

hopeful what we do as Republicans is something that I don't feel like Democrats did for my first two years. We're going to investigate the conduct and take it where it goes and we're going to do it a serious way and then prejudge any conclusions till we figure out what's going on.

CAMEROTA: Yes, but in terms of disclosure, just to be clear, it wasn't that President Trump came out and disclose it, it was at the National Archives, spent more than a year trying to get the documents back from Mar-A-Lago, that's why it was disclosed. They finally had to make a public statement, so I will say that they were disclosing.

ARMSTRONG: I understand that, but - no, and I understand that and I think there are probably differences in the cases. There's always similarities, there's always differences. But there seems to be a pattern of conduct as the closest - the closer we get to the election, the less stuff is disclosed on one side and nobody could argue that it happens on an even keel basis, because I've been here for four years, and that's just not the truth.

CAMEROTA: Okay. But once again, President Trump didn't disclose all the ones that he had either, so I can't - I don't think that in terms of non-disclosure around a midterm that that's a necessarily good analogy.

ARMSTRONG: No. But you have - suppressing the New York Post, this was obviously discovered within Vice President Biden a month before the election, all of those different things that continue to go on in suppression and suppression and the coordination between big tech and big government as we're leading up to elections is not something that I think is coincidental.

CAMEROTA: Okay. Congressman Kelly Armstrong, thank you very much for your time.

ARMSTRONG: Thanks.

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