Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr and ranking Democratic member Mark Warner appeared on Wednesday to give an update on the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. While the committee was not ready to give definitive answers on any topic, they indicated that they were very close to closing out a few issues. An example: the original intelligence assessment indicating that Russia was behind actions to steal and distribute Democratic emails was accurate.
While most of the focus was on the extent of the investigation to this point—over 100 interviews, over 100,000 documents, thousands of hours of evaluation—there were several points on which Burr and Warner would not give a definitive statement. In particular, when it comes to the central issue of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials, Burr would only say that the issue of collusion was “still open.”
Burr had effusive praise both for the intelligence committee and their statements on Russian interference, and for members of the Obama administration who appeared before the committee to explain both their methods and motivations as they attempted to raise awareness of Russian actions.
A less favorable opinion was handed to Homeland Security, which only last week finally released all the states where they learned about Russian attempts to invade voter rolls or directly corrupt the voting process. While Burr made a definitive statement that nothing Russia did “affected vote tallies,” that’s not the same as saying that Russia did not interfere through altering voter registrations.
There were some topics on which the committee seemed to have reached either a dead end or a roadblock, such as the Steele Dossier, where Burr insisted they could not move forward without some cooperation from British security consultant Christopher Steele. The most interesting point of the conference was that not only were both senators insistent that collusion was still an open issue, but neither of them tried to amend that with any statement such as “we currently have no evidence but ...” Collusion is just … open.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2fR17Ef
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment