AUGUST 18, 2020
President Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia at the Group of 20 summit in Japan last year. – Erin Schaff/NY Times
A Republican-controlled Senate panel that has spent three years investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference and possible ties to the Trump campaign released its final, sprawling report on Tuesday, drawing to a close one of the highest-profile congressional inquiries in recent memory.
The Intelligence Committee’s nearly 1,000-page report was expected to substantially confirm the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, putting a bipartisan Senate imprimatur on a set of conclusions that President Trump and his allies — including some Republican senators and Attorney General William P. Barr — are trying to pick apart.
The committee did not preview its findings. Lawmakers and aides who wrote the report cautioned ahead of time that it would contain no meaningful new evidence of coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign but rather would add details to the already vivid web of contacts between the two worlds. Mr. Mueller found that Russia expected to gain from a Trump presidency and that the campaign expected to benefit from the Kremlin’s interference but did not establish an illegal conspiracy.
Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, lawmakers hope it will refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process that has continued unabated.
The report is the product of one of the few congressional investigations in recent memory that retained bipartisan support throughout. Lawmakers and committee aides interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents, including intelligence reports, internal F.B.I. notes and correspondence among members of the Trump campaign. The committee convened blockbuster hearings in 2017 and 2018, but much of its work took place in a secure office suite out of public view.
Portions of the report containing classified or other sensitive information were blacked out.
The Intelligence Committee released four previous volumes on its findings over the past year. The first focused on election security and Russia’s attempts to test American election infrastructure, and included policy recommendations to blunt future attacks. The second provided a detailed picture of Russia’s use of social media to sow political divisions in the United States.
Lawmakers then produced a study of the response by the Obama administration and Congress in the highly partisan run-up to the 2016 election. Most recently, they found that a 2017 intelligence community assessment, assigning blame to Russia and outlining its goals to undercut American democracy, had been untainted by politics and was fundamentally sound despite attacks on it by Mr. Trump’s allies.
The committee focused its work on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. It did not investigate attempts by Mr. Trump to hinder the work of federal investigators.
The report arrived in a fraught political moment, particularly for Republican senators on the panel who signed off on it and thus may find themselves at odds with Mr. Trump and other influential figures in their party. Since Mr. Mueller finished his work, Republicans close to Mr. Trump have sought to recast the president as the victim of politically motivated national security officials in the Obama administration.
The Justice Department’s independent inspector general has found that law enforcement officials had sufficient basis to open the Russia investigation and acted without political bias.
But two other Senate panels, the Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees, are conducting investigations premised on picking apart aspects of the special counsel’s inquiry. And though they have not disputed Russia’s interference, they have decidedly turned the party’s focus away from the actions of a hostile foreign power toward the workings of the investigation it spawned, arguing that Mr. Mueller should never have been appointed and that the F.B.I. should have dropped any inquiry involving the Trump campaign long before he was.
The Justice Department is undertaking a similar post-mortem. Mr. Barr told a congressional committee last month that he was determined “to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal.” He has appointed a criminal prosecutor, John H. Durham, to review the investigation and the actions of intelligence and law enforcement officials trying in 2016 to understand the Kremlin’s interference and possible links to Trump associates.
Much of the Intelligence Committee investigation was overseen by Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, but he temporarily stepped aside as the chairman of the panel in May because of a federal investigation into a rush of stock sales he made before the coronavirus pandemic began rattling the United States. As they watched a similar House investigation over Russian interference splinter under partisan bickering and Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Mueller, Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner worked steadily to ensure they could come to an authoritative bipartisan conclusion. Mr. Burr voted to endorse the final conclusions.
The findings are expected to broadly echo Mr. Mueller’s report on Russian election interference released publicly in April 2019.
That report documented attempts by Moscow to undermine confidence in the electoral process and sway the election toward Mr. Trump by hacking and dumping Democratic emails and engaging in sophisticated manipulation campaigns using social media.
After years of work, Mr. Mueller found dozens of contacts between Trump associates and Russian-connected actors, evidence that the Trump campaign welcomed the Kremlin’s attempts to sabotage the election and “expected it would benefit electorally” from the hacking and dumping of Democratic emails.
Courtesy/Source: NY Time
