sen intel committee for russia investigation--no staff, no witnesses, no experience. SHEEESH
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
M.I.A.
Senate Trump-Russia Probe Has No Full-Time Staff, No Key Witnesses
There are just seven part-time staffers working on the Senate inquiry. Not one of them is a trained investigator. And they haven’t interviewed a single player in Trump’s orbit.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russia’s election interference is supposedly the best hope for getting the public credible answers about whether there was any coordination between the Kremlin and Trump Tower. But there are serious reasons to doubt that it can accomplish this task, as currently configured.
More than three months after the committee announced that it had agreed on the scope of the investigation, the panel has not begun substantially investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, three individuals with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast.
The investigation does not have a single staffer dedicated to it full-time, and those staff members working on it part-time do not have significant investigative experience. The probe currently appears to be moving at a pace slower than prior Senate Intelligence Committee investigations, such as the CIA torture inquiry, which took years to accomplish. No interviews have been conducted with key individuals suspected of being in the Trump-Russia orbit: not Michael Flynn, not Roger Stone, not Carter Page, not Paul Manafort, and not Jared Kushner, according to two sources familiar with the committee’s procedures.
“It’s either a real investigation or not,” said one individual with knowledge of the committee’s activities. “You have to have an approved investigative guide. You have to make it formal. Can you have a credible investigation with only seven part-time staffers, doing everything in secret?” This is despite the committee’s leadership giving off a bipartisan, cooperative impression to the public.
Thus far the Senate Intelligence Committee has been focused only on reviewing the Intelligence Community Assessment, “Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” a declassified version of which was publicly released in January. The public assessment concluded that Russia had actively sought to interfere in the presidential race, and had a preference for Donald Trump, and does not draw conclusions about any possible Russia ties to Team Trump.Committee Chairman Sen. Richard Burr told the public in an update of the committee’s work on March 29 that this topic was a core mission of the investigation: “to look at any campaign contacts from either [campaign] with the Russian government or Russian government officials that might have influenced, in any way, shape, or form, the election process,” he said.
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