Two top Republican senators asked the Senate Intelligence Committee for access to records that the committee had obtained during its own lengthy inquiry into Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election.
Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent acting Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, and his Democratic vice chairman, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, a two-page letter on Thursday “to request access to certain transcripts of interviews conducted and records acquired by your committee that overlap with ongoing investigations” by their own committees.
“As part of our investigation into the presidential transition in 2016 and early 2017, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee authorized the issuance of subpoenas, if necessary, to several individuals regarding the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the ‘unmasking’ of U.S. persons or entities during the transition period. While seeking the voluntary cooperation of several prospective witnesses, several have requested — and provided permission for — us to review transcripts of their testimony before your committee because of the overlapping subject matter,” Johnson and Grassley wrote. “The review of these discrete number of transcripts would assist in our investigation by narrowing the areas to be addressed with each witness.”
Johnson has fended off criticism of his committee’s investigation by the Right and the Left and released an 11-page defense of the inquiry last week, saying that Democrats “have once again decided to weaponize a false ‘Russian disinformation’ narrative as a tool for attacking their political opponents” while arguing that “it is Democrats who have sought out and disseminated Russian disinformation” and “it was the Democratic National Committee, together with cutouts for the Clinton campaign, that paid for and helped peddle the Steele dossier.”
Grassley and Johnson told the Senate Intelligence Committee that they also wanted records related to the CIA’s contacts with Perkins Coie lawyers Michael Sussmann and Marc Elias. It was Elias who hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which turned around and hired British ex-spy Christopher Steele, and both Sussmann and Elias had contact with Steele during the 2016 election. The two senators also asked for records related to former CIA Director John Brennan meeting with former Democratic Sen. Harry Reid in 2016.
Johnson and Grassley said Thursday that they “respect the authority” of the Senate Intelligence Committee to protect its interests, adding that “ultimately, we have the right as United States Senators” to access the records. The senators made it clear that “we are not asking to take possession of the transcripts, but rather will be available to review them at an agreed upon time and place.” The senators asked that one Republican and one Democratic staff member from each committee be allowed to review the selected witness transcripts.
The Senate Intelligence Committee said that “the five volumes of the Committee’s Report capture the results of three years of investigative activity, hundreds of witness interviews and engagements, millions of pages of document review, and open and closed hearings.”
The committee’s fifth and final volume was released on Wednesday, detailing the “counterintelligence threat” posed by Russian election interference in the race between President Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, revealing new details about Russia’s efforts, describing shady connections between former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and a number of Russians, and highlighting significant flaws with the U.S. government’s response and its investigations, including criticizing the FBI’s reliance upon Steele’s discredited dossier.
The first volume, released in July 2019, concluded that “Russian government-affiliated cyber actors conducted an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016” and likely attempted intrusions in all 50 states. The committee found “no evidence” that vote tallies were altered or that voter registry files were deleted or modified.
The second volume, released last October, said Russian operatives working through the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency masqueraded as U.S. citizens online and used ads, fake articles, and false personas to push disinformation to tens of millions of social media users in the United States. It criticized the Obama administration’s failure to warn and work with Twitter and Facebook to battle Kremlin-backed trolls interfering in the 2016 election.
The third volume, released in February, criticized the Obama administration for being unprepared to combat Russia’s election interference effort in 2016 and for fumbling the response, finding that “the U.S. government was not well-postured to counter Russian election interference activity with a full range of readily-available policy options.”
The fourth volume, released in April, stated that the panel found no evidence of political pressure on the spy agencies to reach a specific conclusion on Russian interference and determined the assessment by the CIA, FBI, and NSA “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The committee defended the intelligence process behind the CIA’s assessment that “Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for” then-candidate Trump.
Those Senate Intelligence Committee findings clash with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, chaired at the time by California Republican Devin Nunes. That assessment concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but found the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.”
The intelligence assessment is being scrutinized by U.S. Attorney John Durham.
