House committee Republicans declare no evidence of collusion

Investigation comes to a close almost year after it began.

WASHINGTON — Even as the special counsel expands his inquiry and pursues criminal charges against at least four Trump associates, House Intelligence Committee Republicans said Monday they have found no evidence of collusion between Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia to sway the 2016 election.

Rep. K. Michael Conaway of Texas, who is leading the investigation, said committee Republicans agreed with the conclusions of American intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered with the election, but they broke with the agencies on one crucial point: that the Russians had favored Trump’s candidacy.

“The bottom line: The Russians did commit active measures against our election in ’16, and we think they will do that in the future,” Conaway said. But, he added, “We disagree with the narrative that they were trying to help Trump.”

The announcement brought to an abrupt end to one of two remaining bipartisan investigations into the topic on Capitol Hill and is sure to provoke sharp objections from committee Democrats, who have been warning Republicans not to close the matter. Republicans have decided to end the inquiry even as new evidence has emerged that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is pursuing new lines of inquiry related to the case that have been left largely unexplored by the committee.

The decision to end the investigation with a conclusion of no collusion hands Trump a convenient talking point even before Mueller interviews the president and possibly other key witnesses.

“We found no evidence of collusion. We found perhaps some bad judgment, inappropriate meetings,” Conaway said during a briefing with reporters on Monday afternoon. “But only Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn or someone else like that could take these series of inadvertent contacts with each other, meetings, whatever, and weave that into some sort of a fiction and turn it into a page-turner, spy thriller.”

Conaway said the committee would turn over a 150page draft report to Democrats today for review and comment. The document includes more than 25 recommendations related to election and cyber security, counterintelligence practices and campaign finance rules. He said the committee was preparing a separate, in-depth analysis of the intelligence community’s assessment.

The decision leaves just a single committee on Capitol Hill that is investigating the attack on American democracy full time, in addition to the special counsel.

Conaway said the panel interviewed more than 70 witnesses and reviewed more than 300,000 pages of documents. Democrats say that effort has fallen well short of gathering all the evidence. Important witnesses have not been interviewed, and records have not been subpoenaed, including bank documents and certain communications that Democrats say are paramount to understanding the case.

The committee’s final interview took place on Thursday with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s onetime campaign manager.

Several witnesses thought to be central to the investigation never came before the panel, including Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his deputy, Rick Gates, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, and his campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, all of whom are under indictment by the special counsel.

Others, including George Nader, an adviser to the United Arab Emirates with ties to current and former Trump aides, only recently came to the committee’s attention.

Conaway said he hoped to work expeditiously with American intelligence agencies to declassify the report and make it public. He also said the committee would consider any significant new evidence that may emerge in the case in the future.

The investigation comes to a close almost exactly year after it began. Then, Democrats and Republicans on the panel agreed on a four-part framework for the investigation and pledged to work “on a bipartisan basis” to “fully investigate all the evidence we collect and follow that evidence wherever it leads.”

But the day-to-day reality of running a closely watched investigation potentially implicating a sitting president left the committee badly frayed. Democrats have accused Republicans of essentially blocking their path to the truth to protect Trump. Republicans have countered that Democrats on the panel have turned private proceedings into a television spectacle to earn political points.

The investigation had made little forward progress since December, committee members said. Only three witnesses have been brought in for questioning this year — a dramatic reduction in pace compared to earlier months.

Instead, Republicans and Democrats on the committee spent a month locked in an extraordinary dispute over a secret Republican memorandum that accused top F.B.I. and Justice Department officials of abusing their powers to spy on one of Trump’s former campaign advisers.

Republicans released the document over the objections of the Justice Department and the F.B.I., which warned in a rare public statement that it was dangerously misleading, and many used the document to argue that the entire Russia inquiry had been tainted by anti-Trump bias from the start.