Russia favored Trump, Senate committee says
WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee has determined that the U.S. intelligence community was correct in assessing that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the aim of helping then-candidate Donald Trump, contradicting findings House Republicans reached last month.
“We see no reason to dispute the [intelligence community’s] conclusions,” the committee’s chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said Wednesday in a joint statement with its vice chairman, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who added: “Our staff concluded that the … conclusions were accurate and on point. The Russian effort was extensive, sophisticated, and ordered by President Putin himself for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.”
This marks the second of four interim findings the intelligence committee has said it will publicize before tackling the more consequential question of whether Trump and his associates colluded with Russia to influence the election’s outcome, allegations the president has denied and sought to discredit. The committee is expected to publish a comprehensive final report this fall.
The Senate committee’s findings clash with the House GOP’s determination that the intelligence community did not follow its own best practices in concluding the Kremlin favored Trump in the election. The dispute could complicate the Republican Party’s messaging heading into the 2018 election season.
Trump has taken umbrage at the intelligence community’s determination that the Kremlin favored his candidacy over Clinton’s. The president cheered the House Intelligence Committee’s report, claiming on Twitter that it vindicated him by finding there was no evidence his campaign colluded with Russia.
Although the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to weigh in on the collusion allegations, Burr and Warner have hinted for days that their panel’s interim findings on the intelligence community would depart from those reached by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. “I’m not sure that the House was required to substantiate every conclusion with facts,” Burr told reporters last week, promising the Senate panel would “have the facts to show for” its conclusions.
House Democrats, who roundly disagreed with the House GOP’s findings, praised the Senate Intelligence Committee’s conclusions. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the House intelligence panel’s ranking member, said in a statement that he “fully concur[s] with the conclusion of the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee that the ICA’s determination that Russia sought to help the Trump campaign, hurt Hillary Clinton and sow[ed] discord in the United States is fully supported by the evidence.”