Trump-Russia collusion? Still investigating, senators say

WASHINGTON — Leaders of the Senate intelligence committee said Wednesday 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 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-in-law Jared Kushner — and more than 100,000 pages of documents have been reviewed, Burr said.

But the committee has yet to interview many witnesses related to the Trump campaign and a June 2016 meeting that Kushner, Manafort and the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., held with Russians. The committee wants to interview Trump Jr. and everyone else involved with the meeting.

The lawmakers said 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.

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. Burr said the committee would ideally finish the investigation before congressional primaries begin next spring, but said he couldn’t put a firm deadline on the probe because they are always finding new lines of inquiry.

Warner later added 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 any voting tallies were altered.