Jesus.The Senate Intelligence Committee report states that then-campaign chair Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that purported Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.
It found that a Russian attorney who met with Manafort, along with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016, had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government,” the report stated.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee’s three-and-a-half year investigation stands as Congress’s only bipartisan examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election. [...] But its leaders were noticeably divided along party lines in how they interpreted the report’s significance, and several committee members — including its acting chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — endorsed dissenting conclusions about Trump’s own culpability.
WaPo
Tell me who "all Americans" are voting for, and I'll tell you what their "independent conclusions" are.“After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion,” a group of six panel Republicans, including Rubio, wrote in a statement instead accusing the Democratic Party of coordinating with foreign actors to produce Steele’s dossier.
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Five Democrat senators — including Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the party’s 2020 vice-presidential nominee — asserted the report “unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.” Referring specifically to their findings on Manafort, the Democrats wrote, “This is what collusion looks like.”
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The committee’s past chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who oversaw the bulk of the investigation and also steered clear of the GOP’s dissent, struck a position in the middle.
“One of the Committee’s most important — and overlooked — findings is that much of Russia’s activities weren’t related to producing a specific electoral outcome, but attempted to undermine our faith in the democratic process itself,” he said in a statement.
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The intelligence committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who did not sign onto the Democrats’ dissenting views, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”
Adam Schiff's statement:The Senate panel’s probe, which was mostly driven by the committee’s bipartisan staff, included more than 200 witnesses and considered evidence relating to Russian disinformation, Trump’s personal, business and campaign contacts with Russians, and the transition period following the 2016 election.
At one point, the document all but concludes that Trump aides were duped and manipulated by Russian interests they were too callow to understand.
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The report also presents a damning portrait of the Trump campaign’s hasty move in March 2016 to assemble a foreign policy team, asserting that it had recruited inexperienced people without thoroughly vetting them.
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“Ultimately,” the committee wrote, “the foreign policy team exposed the Trump Campaign to significant counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
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The panel noted that its investigation was hampered by several witnesses’ refusing interviews and to produce documents, citing Fifth Amendment rights that protect against self incrimination. These included Stone, Manafort and Rick Gates, the campaign’s deputy chair at that time.
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The committee also outright accused Blackwater founder and Trump supporter Erik Prince of stonewalling its investigation, saying that it was “hampered by a lack of cooperation” and that his account of a controversial 2017 meeting in the Seychelles alongside a Russian official was “brief and deceptive.”
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Earlier this year, Burr stepped aside as panel chairman after coming under scrutiny over stocks he sold in industries hit badly by the coronavirus pandemic. Rubio has been serving as acting chairman in his place.
The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report affirms what we have all known for years: the Trump campaign had a breathtaking number of contacts with Russians tied to the Kremlin – at the same time that the Russian government, at the direction of Vladimir Putin, was running an influence operation in the 2016 U.S. election designed to help Trump’s campaign.
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[T]he Trump campaign invited illicit Russian help, made full use of that help while Russia’s covert campaign was underway, and then lied and obstructed the investigations in order to cover up this misconduct. As several Senators noted in a separate conclusion: ‘This is what collusion looks like.’
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The Trump campaign’s cooperation with the Russian effort to interfere in our election may not have been sufficient to warrant criminal charges, but it was dishonest, unethical and wrong. And the President’s continued efforts to invite, even coerce, foreign help in his campaign only underscore the danger he poses to our democracy.
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Indeed, some of the most serious bipartisan findings of the SSCI concern the efforts of Russian intelligence and Trump campaign actors to push the Russian false narrative that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election. It was precisely this false narrative that the President sought to coerce Ukraine to promote, in actions for which he was later impeached. Those disinformation efforts continue, aided by the President’s defenders.
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