Senate panel: No sign of collusion
The Senate Intelligence Committee has not found “factual evidence” that the Trump campaign cooperated with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election, its chairman said Tuesday.
“We have no factual evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,” Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) said.
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, disagreed with that assessment but declined to offer his own view of where matters stand.
“I’m not going to get into any conclusions I’ve reached because my basis of this has been that I’m not going to reach any conclusion until we finish the investigation,” he said.
“And we still have a number of the key witnesses to come back.”
An aide to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), another committee member, told The Post he also took issue with Burr that “there has been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
NBC reported Tuesday that after two years and 200 interviews, the committee is nearing the end of its investigation into the 2016 election and has uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The network said that information came from both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.
But the committee is expected to question the Trump campaign’s judgment because associates and some Trump family members had contact with a number of Russians, NBC reported.
Burr first raised the possibility last week that the investigation would wind up with- out proof of collusion.
“If we write a report based upon the facts that we have, then we don’t have anything that would suggest there was collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia,” Burr told CBS.
The House Intelligence Committee, then under Republican control, said last year that it did not find evidence of collusion. But Democrats dismissed the findings as highly partisan.
Other investigations are ongoing, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, which has indicted or secured guilty pleas from former Trump campaign advisers and administration officials.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has been conducting the only bipartisan investigation in Congress.