I appreciate that, and I'm not trying to put you on the spot. I'm just asking for simple information.
I'm especially curious now, because what you're saying is different from what the chair said. What the chair shared with us is that he had, through the clerk, asked certain witnesses to be on standby. I don't know if he asked the witnesses from whom we didn't get to hear at the last meeting—because of the government filibuster—to be on standby. I don't know if he wants to weigh in on that, on whether there were others he had on standby related to other things the committee had been doing, especially since this is formally the continuation of a previous meeting. It's not a new meeting. It's a new day, but according to the rules, this is the same meeting that we started a week ago.
The explanation of the chair is that your presence here is the result of an invitation to be on standby. It sounds as though, through the chair, Ms. Boldt is saying that officials were following proceedings and making decisions on their own to be present based on guesses about how the committee might hypothetically unfold.
I wonder if you can clarify whether you were invited to be on standby, or whether you, in following these things, came to this conclusion on your own. I think the public will want to know this, because we're supposed to be accountable and transparent about the work we're doing, and there was no meeting notice about the fact that clause-by-clause was happening today. The government knew something. You guys maybe knew something, or maybe you were here based on a guess about a hypothetical. Through the chair, I wonder if Ms. Boldt could clarify that for us.