House panel approves GOP report on Trump-Russia ties
WASHINGTON — The House intelligence committee voted Thursday to approve its final report into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, ending its inquiry and giving a final endorsement to the GOP conclusion there was no coordination between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.
The full Republicanwritten report will be released to the public after intelligence agencies conduct a classification review, which could take weeks.
The document is likely to please Trump but is fiercely opposed by committee Democrats, all of whom voted against approving it. The Democrats say the investigation was shut down too quickly and that the committee has not interviewed enough witnesses or gathered enough evidence to make such a definitive assessment.
After the vote, Republicans released a summary of 44 findings that say there were Russian cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions and that Russians leveraged social media in the U.S. to sow discord. The report echoes GOP criticism of the Justice Department and intelligence agencies.
On the subject of collusion, the report says that “when asked directly, none of the interviewed witnesses provided evidence of collusion, coordination or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”
The Republicans say they found no evidence that Trump’s “pre-campaign business dealings” formed any basis for collusion and appears to try and clear numerous Trump associates from wrongdoing.
The GOP document says there’s no evidence Trump associates had anything to do with hacked emails stolen from Democrats during the campaign, though it does mention “numerous ill-advised contacts with WikiLeaks.” Donald Trump Jr., messaged with WikiLeaks during the campaign.
An assessment released in January 2017 by U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russian military intelligence provided hacked information from the Democratic National Committee and Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has denied that Russia was the source of emails it released.
The report also concludes there’s no evidence Trump Jr. discussed the election with a Russian official he met at a National Rifle Association meeting in 2016, and says the younger Trump and other campaign officials did not receive any derogatory information about Democrat Hillary Clinton at a June 2016 meeting with Russians in Trump Tower. Emails showed that Trump Jr. and others attended that meeting with the expectation of receiving that information.
On Carter Page, a onetime Trump campaign official who was the subject of a disputed secret surveillance warrant, the committee concluded that a July 2016 trip to Moscow wasn’t on behalf of the Trump campaign. But the findings say the committee is “concerned about his seemingly incomplete accounts of his activity in Moscow.”
Texas Rep. Mike Conaway, the Republican leading the House investigation, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the committee wanted to get the report out as the 2018 campaign season begins.
On collusion and coordination, Conaway said, “We could not find a thread to follow that made sense.”
After the committee vote, the top Democrat, California Rep. Adam Schiff, said he had hoped Thursday’s closed-door meeting could have been public.
“It is a rather sad chapter in our committee’s long history with the ending of the majority’s participation in the investigation, that ending taking place in secret session for no reason at all except a desire to avoid public scrutiny of this decision, to curtail an investigation into one of the most serious intrusions into our democracy and our history,” Schiff said.
Democrats will have their own report and say they will continue to investigate the meddling.