The report is yet another reminder of how the committee helped Democrats and other critics of President Donald Trump perpetuate the now-debunked theory that Trump was a secret Russian agent.
A year after Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded there was no evidence President Trump colluded with Russians to steal the 2016 election, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its fourth of five reports in a slow-moving and muted investigation into the same matter. While the committee asserted in July 2018 that it agreed with a disputed Obama-era finding on Russia’s motivation for interfering in the 2016 presidential election, its highly redacted report on the intelligence community’s January 2017 claim was finally released Tuesday morning.
The report is yet another reminder of how the committee helped Democrats and other critics of President Donald Trump perpetuate the now-debunked theory that Trump was a secret Russian agent. The Senate’s Intelligence Committee is ostensibly chaired by Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican who is currently avoiding questions about why he dumped stocks after receiving private briefings about coronavirus threats.
In practice, the committee has largely been run by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. The committee’s major and perhaps only contribution to the Russia collusion storyline was to employ a high-level staffer tasked with handling classified information who was convicted of lying to the FBI about leaks of classified information to reporters he was having affairs with. Both Burr and Warner begged a judge to be lenient with their former employee. The judge sentenced him to two months in prison.
Tuesday’s committee report is at odds with the findings of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (at least when it was under the leadership of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.), which revealed significant malfeasance in how the intelligence community conducted its Russia collusion investigation beginning in 2016.
A sprawling year-and-a-half investigation by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General corroborated all the major findings of the HPSCI report, including that intelligence community officials lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, fabricated and doctored evidence in support of applications to spy on American citizens who volunteered for the Trump campaign, and even colluded with agents of sanctioned Russian oligarchs in their attempt to take down Trump. Here are those HPSCI reports on Russian active measures and the DOJ’s abuse of the FISA process.
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