The first hearing by the House Oversight Committee investigating Russia’s interference with the 2016 elections lasted about six hours on Monday. After all that time talking, even Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., had to admit he hadn’t learned much by the conclusion.
For all the fanfare given to Comey’s appearance, at least one more public hearing is scheduled, and committee members have said more open hearings beyond that are possible as well. The ranking Democrat on the committee, Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is urging Nunes to compel testimony by subpoena, if necessary, further down the road.
Here’s where some major issues and questions stand at present.
1 – President Trump was almost certainly not “wiretapped,” as he claimed, but questions remain about whether he or aides might have been caught up in a broader surveillance operation.
As expected, Comey quickly knocked down the claim that Barack Obama’s administration ordered a wiretap, saying that the FBI hadn’t authorized or conducted such an activity.
But the White House says Trump meant “wiretapped” more broadly. It still may be possible that he or his associates were swept up in some type of surveillance that was targeting a foreign national they came in contact with. While ruling out wiretapping, Chairman Nunes acknowledged, “It’s still possible that other surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates.”
The darkest, and unproven, theory is that the government targeted a foreign national they knew would speak with Flynn or other Trump associates in order to be able to listen to the Americans.
2 – Did Britain spy on Trump? Not likely.
This claim originates from Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, who appears to be suspended or worse in the wake of his pronouncement that British spies may have done the bidding of Obama officials.
NSA Director Admiral Mike Rodgers fielded this question in Monday’s hearing from Schiff and said such an activity would be “expressly against the construct” of an international intelligence-sharing agreement.
Paul Rosensweig, a former deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and security consultant agrees. “We know that the British didn’t help. Unless it was completely illegal, off the books, and a ‘black bag’ job,” he said.
3 – What big pieces to the investigation are still game?
Democrats will likely be pushing to probe two members of the Trump team, Paul Manafort, the former campaign director, and Carter Page, who was named as a foreign policy advisor to Trump during the campaign.
Republicans, meanwhile, will keep pressuring the FBI and Department of Justice to find the leaker(s) of the “Flynn transcript,” which exposed communications between Michael Flynn and the Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Those revelations ultimately led Flynn to resign after he had taken the position of national security advisor in the Trump administration.
4 – Comey laid the groundwork for how difficult finding the Flynn leakers might be.
Late in the testimony, Comey was asked if some leaks which have appeared in news reports may have come from the Trump White House.
Comey answered it was possible, but then veered off to say:
“And it’s often one of the things that is challenging, as I said, about a leak investigation. You think it’s going to be a small circle, but it turns out a lot of people either knew about it or heard echoes of it and it’s stories to tell to journalists about it. So in my experience trying to figure these things out for decades, it’s often coming from places you didn’t anticipate.”
5 – Should Director Comey have alerted the Oversight Committee earlier about the investigation into potential cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia?
Under direct questioning from Representative Elise Stefanick, R-N.Y., Comey was quizzed about why he didn’t tell Congress about the investigation.
“If the open investigation began in July and the briefing of congressional leadership only occurred recently, why was there no notification prior to the recent — to the past month?” Stefanik asked.
“I think our decision was it was a matter of such sensitivity that we wouldn’t include it in the quarterly briefings,” Comey answered.
The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York has more on this issue.
6 – Who testifies on March 28?
Nunes and Schiff, D-Calif., have said they expect most of the persons invited to testify will do so voluntarily at the open hearing either on March 28 or at some other point in the future.
The only other persons identified as having been invited by the committee are John Brennan, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency; James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence; Sally Yates, former acting attorney general; Dmitri Alperovich, Co-Founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike; and Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike.
“This is the end of the beginning,” Rosensweig said. “This is not going to be done next week. Not the congressional investigation. Not the FBI investigation. Not the pressure on the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel. None of that’s going to be done next week.”
