Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., said Wednesday he will not seek out notes written by an American interpreter at a meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“If I were the president, I would try to claim executive privilege in anything that had to do with him,” Burr was quoted as saying by CNN.
He was then asked if he would try to get the notes from the 2017 meeting in Hamburg, which then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also attended. “No,” was Burr’s reply.
The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the president took steps to try to protect his conversations with Putin, including taking his interpreter’s notes from the Hamburg meeting and pressuring the interpreter to withhold information from administration officials. That followed a New York Times report that said the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Trump the day after he fired FBI Director James Comey in the spring of 2017.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders has called the Times report “absurd,” and when he was asked about whether he has ever worked for the Russians during an interview with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro late Saturday, Trump said it was “the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked.”
The counterintelligence inquiry reported by the Times was later wrapped into special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Burr and ranking members Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., is still conducting its own Russian interference inquiry.
