President Trump on Friday said he was “honored” to see the contents of a House Intelligence Committee report on its year-long investigation into Russian election meddling, claiming the heavily redacted document proved there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Moscow.
[READ: The House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation report]
“I was very honored by the report. It was totally conclusive — strong, powerful,” the president during a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The committee released the report earlier Friday morning following a review by intelligence officials to ensure no classified information was made public. Members of the House panel wrapped their investigation in early March, after finding “no evidence of collusion,” according to Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, who led the investigation.
“We found perhaps some bad judgment, inappropriate meetings,” Conway said earlier this month upon submitting the report for declassification.
Democrats on the committee have contested that conclusion and cast doubt on the report’s findings. They claim their Republican colleagues declined to interview key witnesses and were uninterested in pursuing a broad investigation of possible collusion between Trump associates and the Kremlin.
Meanwhile, Trump said the report proved what he “knew anyway.”
“It was a great report. No collusion … no coordination. No nothing,” he said, describing the committee’s findings as “very powerful [and] very strong.”
[Related: Former CIA Director John Brennan: Trump should ‘stay tuned’ on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation]
“They were very forceful in saying that the Clinton campaign actually did contribute to Russia, so maybe somebody ought to look at that,” he suggested.
Despite the absence of evidence to support collusion charges, the report does criticize the Trump and Clinton campaign’s lapse of judgment in certain moments during the 2016 election. It also found the Trump campaign’s “periodic praise” of the international hacking group WikiLeaks to be “highly objectionable and inconsistent with U.S. national security interests.”
