Senator: Transcripts of Trump Jr. interviews on Russia meeting raise more questions

For Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the release of 1,800 pages of interviews with Donald Trump Jr. and others who attended an epic 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians is more about questions unanswered than those answered.

“The number of ‘I don’t knows’ and ‘I don’t recalls’ is striking,” said Blumenthal, a former Connecticut attorney general who sat in on the interview with Donald Jr. as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Clearly, he was on a mission to duck as many questions as possible — and he did.”

But overall, he said, the transcripts raise “deeply troubling questions about Russian interference in our elections and Trump campaign complicity.”

With Republicans in control of the committee, some Democrats said they were concerned that its chairman, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, was releasing the transcripts as a prelude to shutting down the committee’s investigation of possible campaign collusion with Russians in order to help now-President Donald Trump win the 2016 election — a charge the president has denied.

“Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans are rushing to declare their investigation complete when they have barely scratched the surface,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday.

Blumenthal said he was hopeful the Republicans would continue the investigation to completion.

Rep. Devin Nunes, RCalif., chairman of the House intelligence committee, shut down its comparable investigation with a finding consistent with President Trump’s declaration that no collusion had taken place.

Bipartisan leaders of the Senate intelligence committee said Wednesday they agreed with the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that the Russian effort was aimed at undercutting Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton and thereby aiding Trump.