SEN. BEN SASSE:

So, I haven't yet called for either a special prosecutor or an independent counsel, but I want to distinguish those terms and talk about why not.

So, first of all, independent counsel, or a criminal or an investigative thing that's based on retrospective problems, that's one potential pathway. We also — we usually use the word independent commission or 9/11-style commission usually to look at not just what's happened retrospectively, but what do we need to do to be prepared for what Russia other and hostile foreign powers are going to do with cyber-attacks against us in 2018 and 2020?

I think, for the future-looking thing, we need to be doing lots more, because what comes next is far more compelling and dangerous attempts to interfere with America's trust and Americans' trust of each other. When the bot technology and the machine learning enables even more aggressive cyber-attacks in the future, it's not going to be against one party or against the other. It's going to be a war of all against all, where every American is supposed to doubt each other.

Putin is winning right now with these kinds of efforts. We have to be sure that we're doing the prospective looking at how we're going to be prepared for the cyber-attacks of the future. But I believe we also need to — and this is why I haven't yet called for a special commission or a special investigator, though I'm open to those deliberations — I haven't yet called for it because I want to see us restore trust in the institutions we currently have, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

We have to shore up these institutions. It's not the case that you can just punt because of the current mistrust and say, well, if we have a special prosecutor, that will be a panacea and everyone will trust it.

If the special prosecutor — we don't have a statute for it now, by the way. If we had to pass a new statute, usually, it would be some form of a three-judge panel. Well, if they appoint somebody, then two of them are going to have been Democratic nominees and one a Republican or two Republicans and a Democrat, and then people are going to dig into their history.

And we're going to have distrust all the way down. We only have feet of clay. And the American people, we need to come back together and restore trust in some of our extant institutions and plan for the future.