TO USE TRUMP’S AIDES’
than a month after the Republican took office.
Others discussed leveraging their ties to Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine living in exile in Russia, who at one time had worked closely with Manafort, who was dismissed from Trump’s campaign, the newspaper reported.
The intelligence was among the clues, including information about direct communications between Trump’s advisers and Russian officials, US officials received last year as they began looking into Russian attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of Trump’s associates were assisting Moscow, the newspaper said.
Separately, ABC News reported that Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign, would testify on June 6 before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.
ABC News said Page himself told it about the scheduled testimony.
A spokesman for the committee declined to confirm or deny whether Page would testify before the committee or, if he did so, whether he would appear in public.
On Wednesday, the top Democrat on the committee said it would subpoena Flynn in its probe into alleged Russian meddling in the presidential election after he declined to appear before the panel.
“We will be following up with subpoenas, and those subpoenas will be designed to maximise our chance of getting the information that we need,” Representative Adam Schiff said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
The leaders of the US Senate Intelligence Committee said on Tuesday they would subpoena two of Flynn’s businesses after he declined to hand over documents in its separate Russia probe.
Flynn, a retired general, is a key witness in the Russia investigations because of his ties to Moscow. He was fired from his position at the White House in February, after less than a month on the job, for failing to disclose the content of talks with Sergei Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the US, and misleading VicePresident Mike Pence about the conversations.
On Tuesday, Brennan, the former CIA director, testified to the House intelligence panel that he had noticed enough contact between Trump associates and Russia during last year’s campaign to justify an investigation.
Brennan’s confirmation of contacts between Russian officials and members of Trump’s team, increased the pressure on investigators to determine whether the Trump camp colluded with the Russians.
Schiff said the House panel had invited its first group of witnesses to testify, it is obtaining documents, and assessing who would cooperate voluntarily, and who would have to be subpoenaed.
He said the committee was trying to obtain an audio recording of any conversation between Trump and Comey, or Comey’s notes on his meeting with the Republican president in January.
Schiff declined to comment specifically on what financial information the committee was obtaining, but speaking in general terms, he noted that one tactic Russians used to influence foreign nationals was financial entanglement. Reuters