THANK GOD for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of investigators. We the people have no reason to doubt his investigations integrity no matter how nasty the partisan politics of the republicans on the House Intelligence Committee become. From the Washington Post and NPR.....
The Republican coverup for Trump just got much worse
House Republicans may have the power to prevent important facts about President Trump and Russia from coming to public light. But here’s what they don’t have the power to do: prevent important facts about their own conduct on Trump’s behalf from coming to public light.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have announced that they are shutting down their investigation into Russian efforts to sabotage our democracy and into Trump campaign collusion with those efforts. Shockingly, they have reached conclusions that are entirely vindicating for Trump: There was no “collusion,” and while Russia did try to interfere, it didn’t do so in order to help Trump.
In an interview with me this morning, Rep. Adam B. Schiff — the ranking Democrat on the Intel Committee — confirmed that Democrats will issue a minority report that will seek to rebut the GOP conclusions.
But here’s the real point to understand about this minority report: It will detail all the investigative avenues that House Republicans declined to take — the interviews that they didn’t conduct, and the leads that they didn’t try to chase down and verify. And Schiff confirmed that the report will include new facts — ones that have not been made public yet — that Republicans didn’t permit to influence their conclusions.
“There’s no way for them to reach the conclusions that they want to start with unless they ignore or mischaracterize what we’ve been able to learn,” Schiff said, adding that the minority report would also “set out the investigative steps that were never taken to answer further questions about the Russians and the Trump campaign’s conduct.”
Schiff had previously said the committee has discovered “ample evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Led by Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), however, committee Republicans will soon issue a report they claim will show there was no collusion and that Russia didn’t interfere to help Trump — putting House Republicans at odds with U.S. intelligence services and possibly with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who recently indicted 13 Russian nationals for an alleged plot to swing the election to Trump.
Schiff told me the minority report would set forth new facts not yet made public that will contradict the House GOP conclusions on both those fronts. He said he expected the GOP’s report to be “a far longer version of the Nunes memorandum that will omit key material facts and misrepresent others in order to tell the president’s political narrative.”
“We will be presenting evidence of collusion, some of which is in the public domain and apparent to everyone willing to see it, and other facts that have not yet come to public light,” Schiff told me. “I fully expect that the majority will omit many of these facts in its report and mischaracterize others.”
Schiff has said that committee Republicans have failed to sufficiently pressure key Trump associates — such as Donald Trump Jr., Hope Hicks, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Stephen K. Bannon — to answer questions raised by the committee’s investigation. Schiff added to me that the minority report would also detail what further investigative steps “need to be done” to discover the truth — steps that Republicans have declined to take.
The Nunes memo fiasco, redux?
Schiff also raised an interesting possibility: that the House Democrats’ minority report will actually be more in line with the bipartisan conclusions reached by the Senate Intelligence Committee (whose probe appears to be somewhat fairer) than the House GOP report will be.
“I suspect that we’ll be on a similar page to the analysis by the Senate,” Schiff told me. “House Republicans are likely to be out on a political lark.” If this comes to pass, then even some Republicans in the Senate will have reached conclusions that House Republicans declined to reach, though we don’t know yet what this might look like.
The House GOP decision to end the probe is being widely portrayed in the press (as always) as the result of partisan fighting. Some news accounts have repeated with a straight face the idea that House Republicans are ending the investigation out of frustration with Democratic efforts to use the probe for political purposes. But there is a known and verifiable fact set here about House GOP conduct that renders the reality inescapably clear: One party wants to get to the full truth, and the other simply does not.
The Nunes memo fiasco — in which Nunes’s bad-faith efforts to discredit legitimate inquiry into the Trump/Russia scandal crashed and burned — demonstrated for all to see the true nature of the Republican effort to weaponize and pervert the oversight process to protect the president. Hopefully the Democrats’ minority report will illustrate this even more comprehensively, with a level of clarity that will punch through the usual both-sides media coverage.
Republicans On House Intel Panel Conclude There Was No Collusion With Russia
Updated at 9:15 p.m. ET
House intelligence committee Republicans on Monday cleared President Trump's campaign of colluding with the Russians who attacked the 2016 U.S. election, concluding a probe that minority Democrats had long argued was focused on appeasing the White House.
The intelligence committee's findings do not end the Russia imbroglio — the Senate intelligence committee and Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller are continuing their work — but they provide a political shot in the arm for Trump. The president touted the findings on Twitter later Monday night.
Trump and his advisers have denied from the first they had any role in what intelligence officers call the "active measures" that Russia has been waging against the United States for years. The Republicans' initial report on Monday affirmed that those active measures have been taking place but said there was no evidence Trump played any role in them and, in a departure with the U.S. intelligence community, Republicans disputed that they were intended to help Trump win.
Republicans also highlighted what they call the real problems within the Russia matter, including what they say was the abuse of surveillance powers by national security officials and what they called "problematic contacts between senior intelligence community officials and the media."
House committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was set to send the majority's draft of the report to Democrats on Tuesday for their review. Democrats are expected to dispute its conclusions as premature or partisan and raise what they call the roadblocks to a true investigation that Republicans put in place. Ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., wanted to issue certain subpoenas or pursue other leads, for example, which he said the majority would not accommodate.
Ultimately, Monday's announcement by intelligence committee Republicans set the stage for the partisan outcome that has long appeared in store for the committee's Russia probe: a majority Republican report and a minority Democratic one that reach different conclusions.
Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, another top Republican on the intelligence committee, told reporters that meetings and other contacts between people on the Trump campaign and Russians might have been ill-advised at the time but did not add up to an international conspiracy to throw the election.
"We found perhaps some bad judgment, inappropriate meetings, inappropriate judgment in taking meetings," he told The Associated Press and other news organizations. "But only Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn or someone else like that could take this series of inadvertent contacts with each other, or meetings or whatever, and weave that into sort of a fiction page turner, spy thriller."
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