The following article by Nicholas Fandos was posted on the New York Times website March 22, 2018:
WASHINGTON — House Intelligence Committee Republicans said Thursday that opposition to Donald J. Trump by the party’s national security establishment had opened the door for two foreign policy advisers whose interactions with Russian intelligence prompted F.B.I. scrutiny.
The Republicans said they had found no evidence that either man, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, had colluded with the Russians, despite the F.B.I.’s interest in the men. Nor did campaign advisers and aides provide evidence that any member of the Trump campaign had colluded either, according to summaries of 44 findings and more than two dozen recommendations the committee voted to release Thursday.
“When asked directly, none of the interviewed witnesses provided evidence of collusion, coordination or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” one of the findings read.
First previewed last week, the findings are the culmination of a year-old investigation by the committee. Democrats say the Republicans hurried the investigation, ignored crucial evidence and failed to follow obvious leads in an effort to clear Mr. Trump.
Other findings were less controversial and reflected the consensus position of American intelligence agencies and both parties on Capitol Hill. Representative K. Michael Conaway, Republican of Texas, who led the inquiry, said that the committee had found “a pattern of Russian active measures in the United States, both through cyberattacks and their use of social media to sow discord.”
“This poses a serious threat to future U.S. elections, including the primary elections that are already underway,” he said in a statement. “It’s critical to release this information now to protect our country and our elections from foreign interference.”
In addition to releasing the summary findings, the committee voted to release a Republican-written 250-page report over the objections of the committee’s Democrats, who offered a series of unsuccessful last-ditch motions to subpoena witnesses and documents, as well as to urge the House to hold Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, in contempt.
“It was a fundamentally unserious effort,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the panel.
Democrats are drafting a dissenting report based on the committee’s work thus far and have pledged to push on with their investigation without Republican cooperation. They have secured the cooperation of at least one new witness, Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge Analyticaand develop the company’s voter-profiling technology.
The Republican report chronicles Russia’s increasingly brazen efforts in the run-up to the 2016 election to compromise the United States’ political institutions and fan existing divisions among voters. It concludes that the response by the Obama administration had been “insufficient” and said an October 2016 public statement calling out Russia proved “ineffective.”
The report takes issue with the “analytical tradecraft” used by intelligence agencies that concluded that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had wanted to harm the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and help Mr. Trump.
More divisive are the findings on collusion. That subject remains an area of inquiry by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who took over the F.B.I.’s investigation of the Trump campaign last year.
The House Republicans said that they had found repeated contacts between members of the Trump campaign team and Russians, but in each case, they concluded that there was no evidence of improper collaboration. Mr. Papadopoulos’s attempts to connect the Trump campaign with the Russians had been “unsuccessful.”
Contacts with WikiLeaks were “ill advised,” but did not show evidence that Trump associates were involved in the hacking or publication of Democratic emails, Republicans said. And though the Republicans said they were “concerned” about Mr. Page’s “seemingly incomplete accounts” of a summer 2016 trip to Moscow, they noted that he had not been traveling on behalf of the campaign.
“Possible Russian efforts to set up a ‘back channel’ with Trump associates after the election suggest the absence of collusion during the campaign, since the communication associated with collusion would have rendered such a ‘back channel’ unnecessary,” the Republicans wrote in another finding.
Many of the committee’s recommendations center on the securing of the United States’ voting systems and echo those presented by the Senate Intelligence Committee in recent days, including steps to improve communications of threats between states and the federal government and to ensure voting systems are not hacked.
Others could prove more controversial. For instance, the Republicans recommend that Congress consider repealing the Logan Act, a 1799 statute that bars private citizens from interfering with American diplomatic relations. The statute has never been successfully used in court but has been discussed in connection with contacts between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, and the Russian ambassador at the time during the presidential transition.
They also recommend that the executive branch consider mandatory polygraph tests for political appointees with top secret security clearances who are not confirmed by the Senate.
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