record and for your information that Representative Pete Aguilar, member of the select committee, has joined via Zoom here remotely.
The Witness. Congressman.
Mr. Coale. I have a question. Are there just two Republicans on the committee?
Mr.- The committee makeup, yes, there's Ms. Cheney, who's vice chair, as well as Mr. Kinzinger from Illinois.
Mr. Coale. Okay. Thank you.
BY MR.-:
Q All right. So you started advising.
Did you get close with the President during his campaign?
A Well, the answer is it's sort of a yes or no. Because the campaign was really focused early on about getting the requisite number of delegates to become, you know, the Presidential candidate.
So the focus of the campaign really wasn't on national security. Even though I was the national security guy, I wasn't involved with the domestic side of the house or gaining delegates to nominate him to be the Republican nomination to be President.
So it's a yes-or-no answer. The answer was, I probably spent more time talking to Corey Lewandowski as his campaign manager than I did with, at that time, the candidate, simply because it wasn't really their focus.
The only times we really got involved is we got involved in the debate preps, in the internal Republican debate preps, and making sure there was anything in the national security realm, if there was any questions that came up, I kind of give him a backstop. Because at the time, the only two national security guys he had working it were me and Mike Flynn.
