Senators: Trump-Russia collusion probe ongoing
Plan to meddle in U.S. politics clear
WASHINGTON — Leaders of the Senate intelligence committee said Wednesday that they have not determined roughly nine months into their investigation whether Russia coordinated with the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election.
“The issue of collusion is still open,” said the Republican committee chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, who, along with the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, provided an update on a congressional investigation that was launched the same month as President Donald Trump was inaugurated.
More than 100 witnesses have been interviewed — including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump son-inlaw Jared Kushner — and more than 100,000 pages of documents have been reviewed, Burr said.
The lawmakers said that though they have reached no conclusion about whether the campaign colluded with the Kremlin — the question also at the heart of a separate criminal investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller — their investigation has left no doubt about a multi-pronged Russian effort to meddle in American politics.
“The Russian intelligence service is determined, clever, and I recommend every campaign and every elected official take this seriously,” Burr said.
Warner later added that there was a “large consensus” that Russians had hacked into political files and strategically released them with the goal of influencing the election. He said Russian hackers had also tested the vulnerabilities of election systems in 21 states, though there’s no evidence that any voting tallies were altered.
The news conference Wednesday was an effort by the committee to lay out some of what’s been found so far as the 2018 midterm elections approach.
The Senate panel has also been focused on Russian efforts to push out social media messages on Twitter and Facebook, and is examining more than 3,000 Russia-linked ads that Facebook turned over to Congress this week.
Facebook has said the ads focused on divisive social and political messages, including LGBT issues, immigration and gun rights, and were seen by an estimated 10 million people before and after the 2016 election.