begin quote from:
House Russia probe on a collision course
Trump is fighting his Justice Department again\
House Russia probe poised to break down along partisan lines
Story highlights
- Republicans on the House panel are eager to wrap up the investigation soon
- They're accusing Democrats on the committee of wanting a probe without end
(CNN)Democrats
and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are on a collision
course, as the two sides appear increasingly likely to issue competing
reports coming to starkly different conclusions about the panel's Russia
investigation.
GOP
leaders on the House panel are eager to wrap up the investigation soon,
with influential Republicans saying the exhaustive review has dug
through thousands of documents and interviewed virtually every major
witness and has found scant evidence of collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russian operatives to meddle in the 2016 elections.
But
Democrats on the committee say there have been several areas that have
not been fully investigated, including financial records from the Trump
Organization and key officials in President Donald Trump's orbit, and
that they are seriously weighing issuing their own report detailing what
they view as the unexplored parts of the inquiry.
Rep.
Jim Himes of Connecticut, a senior Democrat on the panel, said Tuesday
that the committee does not yet fully understand the full extent of the
efforts to give Russian dirt to the President's eldest son, Donald Trump
Jr., and George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign foreign policy
adviser.
"I think a lot of work
remains to be done on who exactly knew what about Don Jr.'s efforts to
get dirt and George Papadopoulos' effort to get dirt on the Clinton
campaign," Himes told CNN. "Did those efforts stop with those
individuals or was it part of the larger effort within the campaign? I
don't think we know the answer to that yet."
Trump
Jr., who testified before the House panel in December as well as two
Senate committees, has said that he was not given dirt on Hillary
Clinton during a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, as
the meeting was focused on US sanctions on Russia.
Rep.
Adam Schiff of California and other Democrats have accused House
Republicans of trying to swiftly end the House Intelligence Committee
investigation as a precursor to ending special counsel Robert Mueller's
investigation, which is also looking at ties between Russian officials
and Trump's team. But Republicans have rejected that attack, saying
Democrats appear intent on pursuing an investigation without end.
"This
idea this could go on into perpetuity is just nonsense," Rep. Tom
Rooney of Florida, a senior Republican on the panel, told CNN last
month. "You can interview anybody that's ever met a Russian in the
government, and it's not going to help you get any closer to what the
four parameters were, what our job is, what the report is supposed to
look like, and to put it out there for the American people to consume."
The
growing partisan gap over the House investigation makes it increasingly
likely that after investigators spent much of 2017 examining
connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, the public may lack a
definitive assessment about what occurred in 2016.
And
increasingly, Democrats are calling on House Speaker Paul Ryan to
intervene, arguing he needs to help an investigation that they say is
being undercut by the panel's chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes of California.
"Who
can do the most to make sure that this investigation moves forward
appropriately? It's the speaker of the House," Rep. Mike Quigley of
Illinois, a member of the House panel, told CNN on Tuesday. "He is
facilitating the chairman of the Intelligence Committee's desire to take
this investigation to a different place and to hinder the Russia
investigation."
Ryan spokeswoman
AshLee Strong said in a statement: "The investigation will conclude when
the committee has reached a conclusion. It's clear by the endless
political posturing by some House Democrats that they would like to see
this investigation go on forever. Whether it concludes next month, next
year, or in three years, they'll say it's too soon."
There
are still two other Russia investigations occurring in the Senate, and
those appear likely to last longer than the House inquiry, though
several Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee say the
investigation could be reaching its final stages after more than 100
interviews.
Leaders of the House
panel still hold out hope that they can release one bipartisan report on
the committee's months-long investigation into Russian meddling.
"Hopefully
we're working on the same set of facts," said Rep. Mike Conaway, the
Texas Republican who is running the probe, adding that the panel was
starting to draft its report. "But everybody gets to look at the glass
and decide if it's half empty or half full."
But
members on both sides of the committee are preparing for the reality
that their conclusions about the probe will be simply too far apart for a
single report.
Conaway said he
wants to make as much of the committee's transcripts public as possible
so that the people can draw their own conclusions. He argued that the
collusion "narrative" seemed to disappear once the public got a
definitive sense of what the committee was discussing behind closed
doors, pointing to the panel's release of a transcript of a hearing with
Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser.
"We'll
put our conclusions in there, but as you saw with Carter Page, there
was a narrative that started that disappeared altogether once the public
saw what he really said at the interview," Conaway said.
In his House interview,
Page said members of the Trump campaign were aware of his July 2016
trip to Russia, and he disclosed interactions with more Russian
government officials beyond what had previously been publicly known.
Schiff,
the top Democrat on the panel, has increasingly accused the GOP of
seeking to shut down the inquiry by cutting off areas to investigate.
Schiff has accused the GOP of blocking subpoenas, including to Deutsche
Bank, to look into any business ties between the Trump Organization and
Russia. And he has said that a number of witnesses have been rushed
through the panel before members were ready to query them, calling for
major figures close to Trump to return for another round of questioning.
"It's
no way of conducting an investigation, not if you're serious about
getting the truth," Schiff said late last month. "It's a way to conduct
an investigation if you want to give the appearance of legitimacy or you
want to bring things to an end. But it's not designed to get at the
truth."
Looming over the
investigation is House Intelligence Chairman Nunes, who stepped aside
from the Russia investigation last spring amid a House Ethics Committee
investigation into his handling of classified information. He was
cleared by the panel in December.
Even
while he stepped aside publicly, Nunes was involved with the Russia
probe from the sidelines throughout the year. He retained subpoena power
as the chairman and was able to sign off on or block the committee's
subpoena and interview requests.
Nunes,
who was on Trump's transition team, has insisted that he never stepped
aside from the Russia investigation and was always in control, although
Conaway said last month that his role leading the probe did not change
after Nunes was cleared by the ethics panel.
And
while Conaway has said that Nunes issued every request he asked for,
the California Republican's presence has rankled Democrats, who have
accused Nunes of trying to undermine the committee's probe.
Nunes'
fight with the FBI and Justice Department over documents and interviews
connected with the opposition research dossier on Trump and Russia --
he's threatened to hold top officials in contempt of Congress -- have
only amplified those tensions in recent weeks, particularly as
Republicans and the President have ramped up their attacks on the
Justice Department and Mueller.
"It's not a secret that we have an investigation into DOJ," Nunes told CNN last month.
But Democrats accuse Nunes of trying to undercut the probe, and they believe that Ryan is helping him do so.
"The
responsibility to conduct a thorough investigation, or to prevent one,
ultimately falls on @SpeakerRyan," Schiff tweeted last month. "I'm
concerned he's heeding the calls of Bannon and @POTUS to 'DO SOMETHING'
by closing down the Russia investigation & opening up another
investigation of Hilary Clinton."
No comments:
Post a Comment