Senate probe into Russia voting collusion ongoing
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 try to sway the 2016 presidential election.
“The issue of collusion is still open,” said the Republican committee chairman, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, who along with the panel’s top Democrat, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, provided the first major update on a congressional investigation that was launched the same month as President Trump was inaugurated.
“The committee continues to look at all evidence to see if there was any hint of collusion,” Burr said, adding that “I am not going to even discuss initial findings, because we haven’t any.”
Burr and Warner said that the committee has interviewed more than 100 witnesses, including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. More than 100,000 pages of documents have been reviewed.
But the committee has still yet to interview some 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 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 Russian effort to meddle in American politics.
“The Russian intelligence service is determined, clever and I recommend every campaign and every election official take this very 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 that 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 said there is 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 Senate panel has focused on Russian efforts to push out social media messages on Twitter and Facebook, and is examining more than 3,000 Russia-linked ads Facebook turned over to Congress this week. Burr said he does not intend to release those ads.