Russia inquiries cost millions — exactly how much untold
Investigations run up vague but hefty taxpayer tab
Congress spends millions of dollars on investigations of Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election, but it’s impossible to tell from public reports exactly how much the inquiries cost taxpayers — and the committees running the investigations refuse to talk about it.
The Senate intelligence committee received an extra $1.2 million this year for its investigation and added two employees to help its staff with the Russia case, according to a congressional aide who was not authorized to speak about the subject publicly. The House Intelligence Committee added two lawyers with a combined annual salary of $290,000, expense reports show.
The congressional investigations are only a portion of the cost to taxpayers of the Russia saga. Special counsel Robert Mueller runs a criminal investigation out of the Justice Department for which there is little public accounting of the costs, and there is no telling how much the White House legal office spends to respond to the investigations.
Congress did not create a special committee for the Russia investigation like it did for the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which spent — and disclosed in routine accounting reports — nearly $7 million from 2014 to 2016 investigating the
killing of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans at a U.S. compound in 2012 in Libya.
Spending by special committees is much easier to track because their entire budget supports a single investigation. In contrast, the congressional committees conducting Russia inquiries have sweeping responsibilities and expenses unrelated to Russia.
Monthly expense reports filed by the House intelligence committee show it has spent more than $3.1 million through August on salaries, travel, equipment and other expenses. That is up nearly $600,000 from the same period a year ago and up more than $800,000 over the same period in 2015. The committee would not provide an estimate of how much of that budget is being consumed by the Russia investigation.
“I would say that up to 20% of (the committees’) time is spent on the Russia investigation,” said Charles Tiefer, who served as general counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1984 to 1995 and was special deputy chief counsel for the House Iran-Contra Committee’s investigation of the Reagan administration. “When you work with the staff of the House Intelligence Committee, you’re struck by the vast scale of their responsibility.”
The House and Senate intelligence committees oversee 17 military and civilian intelligence agencies with a total budget of about $75 billion. One of their biggest jobs is to approve an annual bill that authorizes funding for the agencies, a process that Tiefer said involves hours of closed-door, classified briefings from top intelligence officials.
“They’re overseeing CIA activities in Iraq and Syria, to give you an example,” said Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law.
Andrew Wright, former staff director of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said a major investigation typically required more than 50% of his staff’s time. He said it’s impossible to say how much time the two intelligence committees spend on the Russia case since every committee chairman runs his or her panel differently.
“For an investigation like this, it’s got to be massive,” said Wright, an associate professor at Savannah Law School in Georgia and former associate counsel to President Obama.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, unlike its House counterpart, is not required to file monthly public expense reports. In a resolution submitted to the Senate Rules and Administration Committee in February, Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, RN.C., estimated that the committee’s expenses would be as high as $3.2 million from March through September and as high as $5.5 million from October through September 2018 — the same as the year before — but that was before the committee got the extra $1.2 million for the Russia case.
The Senate committee refused to say how much of its total budget is spent on the Russia investigation.
By their leaders’ own descriptions, the intelligence committees have spent a great deal of time on their Russia inquiries.
At a news conference Oct. 4, Burr and Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said Senate investigators had interviewed more than 100 witnesses for a total of more than 250 hours and created more than 4,000 pages of transcripts. Staff members read more than 100,000 pages of documents, and the committee held 11 public hearings on Russia, the senators said. Burr said the committee planned to interview about 25 more witnesses this month.
The committees are being asked to do major investigations with too little staff, Tiefer said.