The Senate Judiciary Committee is expanding its Russia probe to two new Trump campaign aides.
In a letter sent Tuesday and made public Thursday, Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked the lawyer for President Trump’s re-election campaign committee to turn over communications to John Masburn and Rick Dearborn.
Mashburn is the deputy White House Cabinet secretary and served as a policy director for the Trump campaign. Dearborn recently left the White House after serving as deputy chief of staff for legislative, intergovernmental affairs and implementation. Before that, he worked as the executive director of Trump’s transition team.
The lawmakers say the request comes following “a recent committee interview.”
The request is for “responsive emails, or at least ensuring that adequate searches have been conducted that would cover these communications, is necessary for its investigative work.”
Search terms used for other document requests should be applied to Mashburn and Dearborn, Grassley and Feinstein wrote.
According to the two senators, the Trump campaign has provided more than 28,000 pages of documents, as well as letters detailing 21 campaign staffers whose emails were searched with more than 300 search terms.
Documents are due by April 12.
The panel has been investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election for nearly a year. The letter from Grassley and Feinstein shows a glimmer of bipartisanship on the committee, a few months after both said they were going their own way in the Russia probe.
Both, while speaking from the Senate floor in October, said they would continue the broad Russia probe, but would have specific issues they wanted to look into. For Grassley, that’s Hillary Clinton and the 2010 Uranium One deal, and for Feinstein, that’s the firing of former FBI Director James Comey and Russian meddling.
