About the Senate Intel Committee investigation

Though [Republican Chairman Richard] Burr and Mark Warner, the committee’s Democratic vice-chairman, have largely agreed on the parameters of the investigation, they have recently begun to disagree more publicly on what the facts they’ve collected add up to: Conspiracy? A series of coincidences and bad decisions? Or something in between?

The new Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, does not believe those questions can be answered without a thorough examination of Trump’s financial history and his potential entanglements with Russian money launderers, especially given new revelations about Trump’s efforts to pursue a multimillion-dollar real-estate deal in Moscow in 2016. So he has revived the panel’s floundering Russia probe by hiring upwards of a dozen dedicated staffers with expertise in corruption or illicit finance, or prosecutorial experience. That brings the total number of investigators, which could increase, to 24 on the House panel alone. Many are bringing specific skills to the committee that the nine staffers working on the Senate’s Russia probe—despite their extensive intelligence-community experience—do not have.

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A particular emphasis will also be placed on Deutsche Bank—the Trump family’s bank of choice for decades, which was fined in 2017 over a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme involving its Moscow, New York, and London branches. “The concern about Deutsche Bank is that they have a history of laundering Russian money,” Schiff told NBC in December. [...] Deutsche Bank representatives said last month that the bank was working with the House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees to “determine the best and most appropriate way of assisting them in their official oversight functions.”

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It is undeniable that the Senate Intelligence Committee has traditionally been far more unified than its House counterpart, mostly by virtue of longer term limits and different rules.

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Nevertheless, the bipartisan ground on which the Senate purported to have built its inquiry may be cracking. On Tuesday, Warner said he disagreed with Burr’s claim that the probe had found no “direct evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

  The Atlantic

But what wasn't widely noted in reports of Burr's claim there's no direct evidence is this fact: legally, in a court of law, circumstantial evidence is given the same weight as direct evidence.

Some Democratic aides were also confused by Burr’s recent claim that a key witness in the probe, the former British spy Christopher Steele, had not responded to the committee’s attempts to engage with him. In fact, Steele submitted written answers to the panel last August, two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the investigation told me.

The Senate’s subpoena for his testimony was dropped shortly thereafter—indicating that the senators were satisfied enough with his responses that they weren’t planning to compel further testimony.

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Investigators who have traveled to London since then have not approached Steele for an interview, according to Steele’s lawyer, who declined to be identified due to sensitivities surrounding the probe. Burr suggested in an interview with CBS last week that Steele remained out of reach. “We’ve made multiple attempts,” to elicit a response, Burr said.

Steele’s lawyer said that was “flatly not true,” and that the committee had actually agreed in writing not to seek further information from Steele after he submitted his written testimony.

Richard Burr's word simply cannot be trusted.

Burr recently defended the decision not to hire outside investigators, telling CBS that they “would’ve never had access to some of the documents that we were able to access from the intelligence community.”

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Ryan Goodman, an expert in national-security law, told me he saw “red flags” in the way the investigation was being carried out, including the chairman’s “failure to hire outside staff with professional expertise and experience in complex investigations, and the failure to use the subpoena power to easily obtain financial records from entities like Deutsche Bank.”

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A spokesperson for Warner declined to comment on whether the senator agreed with that assessment.

We'll guess.