The Republican head of the US House Intelligence Committee said Monday he had seen no evidence of contacts between President Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russian officials, as the White House sought to quell a media storm over the allegations.
The Trump administration is battling accusations, based on information allegedly leaked by intelligence sources to media, that onetime campaign chair Paul Manafort and others had communications with Russian intelligence before the election.
Those contacts came while Russia conducted what US intelligence says was an operation to interfere with the election to swing the vote in Trump’s favor, over his rival Hillary Clinton.
The FBI, CIA, and other agencies are investigating that interference, which US intelligence chiefs alleged in December were directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moscow has denied any interference.
“Here at the committee we still don’t have any evidence of them talking to Russians,” the Republican chair, Devin Nunes, told journalists.
“And what I’ve been told by many folks is that there is nothing there.”
Nunes would not say which US intelligence or security agencies has briefed his committee, which has an ongoing probe into Russian interference in US politics.
Nunes said that probe would continue, along with other investigations in the Senate Intelligence Committee and two other Senate committees.
“Just to be clear, we haven’t eliminated anything,” Nunes said.
“We do need to know if there are any Americans talking to the Russians.”
But he said that his committee will also investigate who in the government had leaked information on the Russia case to journalists.
Democrats worry that the Republicans want to stifle the Russia investigations to protect the month-old government of Trump, who during the campaign praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and promised a reset of strained relations between the two sides.
“We haven’t obtained any of the evidence yet. So it’s premature for us to be saying that we have reached any conclusion about the issue of collusion,” said Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on Nunes’s committee.
Some Democrats have called for a bipartisan committee or an independent prosecutor to be named to probe the Russia issue.
On Friday, Republican Congressman Darrell Issa became the first member of his party to endorse the idea of an independent prosecutor.
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