Dismiss Mueller's intelligence findings....

Intel Republicans dismiss Mueller's intelligence findings before seeing them

By KYLE CHENEY and ANDREW DESIDERIO

House Intelligence Committee Republicans concluded a year ago that the Trump campaign exercised “poor judgment,” “took ill-considered actions” and at times acted “inconsistent with U.S. national security interests.”

But on Thursday they said they don’t need to see special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to know that no one in President Donald Trump’s orbit was compromised by Russia — even unwittingly.

In interviews with POLITICO, committee Republicans acknowledged they had no insight into the substance of Mueller’s report beyond Attorney General William Barr’s sparse four-page summary, in which he wrote that Mueller was unable to establish that the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” in 2016.

“We’ve seen the four-page synopsis. Do you think there would be issues of counterintelligence that would not be highlighted?” said Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah.) “He would not have been so definitive … if there had been any ambiguity.”

Mueller’s investigation was spawned as the continuation of a counterintelligence inquiry that was first revealed to the public by then-FBI Director James Comey in March 2017. However, it remains unclear whether Mueller’s report — which is more than 300 pages in length, according to a Justice Department official — even includes so-called “counterintelligence” findings.

But the same GOP lawmakers who criticized the Trump campaign a year earlier signed a letter Thursday calling the suggestion that any Trump associates were compromised “demonstrably false.”

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who served on the intelligence committee during its GOP-led Russia investigation, said Barr’s summary effectively ruled out any counterintelligence concerns.

“If there had been collusion at the counterintelligence level, then certainly he couldn’t have said there was no collusion,” he said. Notably, Barr's summary doesn't mention “collusion” — which is not a legal term — but indicates that Mueller did not find evidence to “establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

A year earlier, the Republican report on the Intelligence Committee's 2017 investigation recommended that the intelligence community “should immediately inform U.S. presidential candidates when it discovers a legitimate counterintelligence threat to the campaign, and promptly notify Congress.”

If Mueller’s report includes a section on counterintelligence, the House and Senate intelligence panels would almost certainly be briefed on its findings, lawmakers said. Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has vowed for months to look into whether Mueller’s report would show that Russia had leverage over Trump or his associates during the campaign and Trump’s presidency, and he told POLITICO this week that he hoped for — but had not yet been promised — a briefing from the intelligence community.

Barr's four-page letter is silent on any counterintelligence findings or any characterization of the evidence Mueller gathered, but Schiff said the Justice Department has a “statutory obligation” to brief the committee on such findings.

Mueller's findings on the subject could reveal whether any Americans, wittingly or unwittingly, aided Russian efforts to interfere in the election, even if their actions never rose to a criminal level. And it's an area Congress — particularly the House Intelligence Committee — must continue to pursue, Democratic lawmakers and aides insisted Thursday.

“We have a president who has yet to release his tax returns. We have a president who did not fully divest from his own business interests. We have a president who insisted on meeting alone with Vladimir Putin without any representatives from the US government there,” said a House Democratic staffer during a briefing for reporters on Capitol Hill Thursday. “When you take that together, it raises a lot of questions about what is motivating this president’s foreign policy. As we continue down the road and providing oversight over the executive branch, those are potential counterintelligence indicators of real risk that our foreign policy is not designed to be in our national interest but to be in the president’s personal interest.”

It’s also unclear whether Mueller examined the issues surrounding Trump Tower Moscow, an attempted real estate deal in the Russian capital that has become a focus of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation. Trump publicly denied conducting any business in Russia during the campaign — and his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen initially told Congress that Trump ceased his effort to build Trump Tower Moscow in January 2016. Cohen later pleaded guilty to lying about that exchange. Rather, Cohen said, he helped lead Trump Tower Moscow efforts as late as June 2016.

“Moscow Trump Tower is more of an issue of compromise than it was of conspiracy, and so I would expect that would be a part of the counterintelligence findings,” Schiff said in a recent interview. “But they might not even be in the report at all.”

Nevertheless, all nine committee Republicans said Thursday that they didn’t need to wait for such a briefing to conclude that Schiff’s assertions were “demonstrably false.” In a letter, the GOP lawmakers called for Schiff to resign as chairman over his rhetoric.

“The findings of the special counsel conclusively refute your past and present assertions,” they wrote.

Republicans, in their own report cataloging Trump campaign contacts with Russians during the 2016 election, highlighted what they said amounted to “poor judgment and ill-considered actions” by both Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns.

“For example, the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between members of the Trump campaign and a Russian lawyer … demonstrated poor judgment,” the Republicans wrote last year when they closed their investigation.

“The committee also found that the Trump campaign’s periodic praise for and communications with Wikileaks — a hostile foreign organization — to be highly objectionable and inconsistent with U.S. national security interests.”

Asked about their certainty about the contents of Mueller’s report, Stewart pointed to the GOP’s report a year earlier and suggested they would have discovered anything questionable.

“I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that Mr. Mueller’s going to find something that we saw not a whiff of,” he said.

Reminded that Mueller discovered evidence that Trump sought to build a Trump Tower Moscow up until June 2016 — information that was not unearthed by the committee — Stewart said it was irrelevant. “It has nothing to do with collusion and conspiracy,” he said.

Democrats on the intelligence committee said Republicans are simply parroting Trump, who has declared Barr’s four-page summary a “total exoneration.”

“I think it’s anything but,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.). Himes said Mueller’s findings may not have amounted to a crime but his counterintelligence findings “could be of very real interest to the committee.”

House Democratic staff who briefed reporters Thursday noted that Trump and his associates would be innocent of a crime if they didn’t assist the Russian conspiracy — but that’s not where the analysis ends.

“If they knew about it, they are subject to compromise by the Russians who know that they know about it,” a House Democratic source said.