I'm just trying to picture the correspondence here, and I'm hearing that there might be an opportunity to get a little more detail on that later. I'm just trying to picture how this went down, for lack of a better expression.
Mr. Fergus is contacted by your wife, who is clearly not going through the channels of the official correspondence with the Speaker's office. Mr. Fergus receives the request of somebody he knows very well—he's babysat her children and she has allowed her children to be babysat by him—and he replies, “Yes, of course I'll do that. This is my friend.” Is that a fair assessment of how it probably went down?
There are people around this table who are trying to paint this as though official correspondence comes to the Speaker's office. The Speaker's office weighs the pros and cons. The Speaker's office decides that yes, he should make this video. The Speaker's office coordinates setting up this video.
I think that, based on what Mr. Fergus has said and based on your testimony today, it's much more plausible that your wife, who is a lifelong friend of Mr. Fergus, reached out and said, “Hey, we're doing this event for John.” It's going to be private or the information was delivered in such a manner as to suggest that and then she says, “Will you make this video?” or “Will you record something?”
Is that a fair assessment?