WASHINGTON
— In a secured room in the basement of the Capitol in July, Jared
Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, fielded
question after question from members of the House Intelligence
Committee. Though the allotted time for the grilling had expired, he
offered to stick around as long as they wanted.
But Representative Trey Gowdy, who spent nearly three years investigating Hillary Clinton’s culpability
in the deadly 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was growing frustrated
after two hours. You are in an unwinnable situation, Mr. Gowdy, a South
Carolina Republican, counseled Mr. Kushner. If you leave now, Democrats
will say you did not answer all the questions. If you stay, they will
keep you here all week.
The
exchange, described by three people with knowledge of it, typified the
political morass that is crippling the House Intelligence Committee’s
investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election — and whether
the Trump campaign colluded in any way.
But
the problems extend beyond that panel. All three committees looking
into Russian interference — one in the House, two in the Senate — have
run into problems, from insufficient staffing to fights over when the
committees should wrap up their investigations. The Senate Judiciary
Committee’s inquiry has barely started, delayed in part by negotiations
over the scope of the investigation. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, while maintaining bipartisan comity, have sought to tamp down
expectations about what they might find.
“Congressional
investigations unfortunately are usually overtly political
investigations, where it is to one side’s advantage to drag things out,”
said Mr. Gowdy, who made his name in Congress as a fearsome
investigator of Democrats. He added, “The notion that one side is
playing the part of defense attorney and that the other side is just
these white hat defenders of the truth is laughable.”
Instead, he said, he is looking to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, to conduct an apolitical investigation.
None
of the challenges have thus far stopped the committees. And given the
closed-door nature of their work, prominent new avenues of inquiry could
always emerge, such as Russia’s use of social media to sow chaos and discord, capable of influencing the public discourse.
But
all three are up against a ticking clock, with Republicans in both
chambers eager to wrap up the investigations before too long.
Particularly
in the House, partisan fighting is likely to undermine whatever
conclusions the committee reaches. One lawmaker said the committee would
probably produce two reports. The first, written by Republicans, is
expected to forcefully say there is no proof that anyone around Mr.
Trump worked with Russia to tip the election. A Democratic report will
probably raise unanswered questions and say that the committee was never
fully committed to answering them.
The
panel has been on rocky ground for months, with much of the controversy
surrounding the committee’s chairman, Representative Devin Nunes of
California. Mr. Nunes was forced to step aside
from leading the investigation in April after it was disclosed that he
had received classified information from the White House that showed
that Mr. Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.
Mr.
Nunes handed control to three of the committee’s Republicans,
Representatives K. Michael Conaway of Texas, Tom Rooney of Florida and
Mr. Gowdy. Mr. Conaway, a well-liked accountant, helped put the
investigation back on track and has maintained a productive relationship
with Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the panel’s top
Democrat.
But
Democrats say Mr. Nunes, whose signature is required to issue
subpoenas, has continued to meddle around the edges of the
investigation, driving Republican inquiries into who financed a dossier of unsubstantiated information
on purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mr. Nunes,
they say, is also participating in an investigation into the revealing
of Trump associates caught up in American surveillance by Obama
administration officials.
“Frankly,
I have been doing everything I can to try to get us to do a credible
investigation and to reach a common conclusion,” Mr. Schiff said. “I
view these things as obstacles that are in the way to overcome, and I am
doing my best to overcome them almost daily.”
A spokesman for Mr. Nunes did not reply to a request for comment.
Democrats
were also incensed by Mr. Gowdy’s remarks to Mr. Kushner in July, which
they said were representative of efforts by some Republicans to cut the
investigation short. Shortly after the meeting, Mr. Schiff publicly
accused Mr. Gowdy of playing defense attorney for the administration.
Republicans
have returned the biting words, sharply criticizing Mr. Schiff, whose
frequent television appearances irk them. Mr. Rooney used a vulgarity
when he called Mr. Schiff’s comments about the Kushner interview
nonsense. And Mr. Gowdy said on Friday that he had been compelled to
weigh in by the Democrats’ repetitive and meandering questions — and
that a transcript would show his own questions to have been
appropriately aggressive.
The Republican said it had become clear where the committee was headed.
“Will
our private conclusions be the same? Yes,” Mr. Gowdy said. “Will our
public pronouncements be the same? No, of course not.”
“This is politics,” he added.
Across
Capitol Hill, the tone has been different. The chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina,
and its top Democrat, Mark Warner of Virginia, have worked to project a
collaborative rapport that committee members insist is real.
At a rare news conference this month,
the two senators said they had already expended significant resources
verifying the conclusions of America’s spy agencies about Russia’s
efforts to meddle in the election and were now taking steps to better
understand its use of social media campaigns and to investigate the
collusion question.
“At
the end of the day, what we owe the American people is the truth,” Mr.
Warner said in an interview on Thursday. “And if there’s something
there, then they should know that. And if there’s not something there,
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that.”
But
other committee members have sought to contain expectations. At the
news conference, Mr. Burr said investigators had “hit a wall” in their
work on the dossier, which holds some of the most salacious allegations
of collusion, because its author, Christopher Steele, would not meet with the committee. Mr. Burr also said he did not have a mandate to look for criminal activity.
“The
special counsel is focused on criminal acts; we’re not focused on
criminal acts,” he said. “If we find one, then they’re the first phone
call we make.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and a former chairwoman of the committee, told CBS’s “Face the Nation”
this month that Mr. Mueller stood a much better chance of reaching a
definitive conclusion about collusion than the committees did.
“There’s
no proof yet that it’s happened, and I think that proof will likely
come with Mr. Mueller’s investigation,” Ms. Feinstein said. “He’s got
the ability to use a grand jury. He’s got the ability to use the power
of subpoena without question. And he’s got the ability to do a criminal
investigation.”
Both
intelligence committees will also face questions about how much of what
they find can be declassified and shared with the public. Mr. Burr said
on Wednesday that his goal was to have the “meat of our business” done
by late spring, in time for state governments to make changes to their
voting systems before next year’s midterm elections. He said he would
push to declassify the findings as much as possible.
The
Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, has struggled to get a fledgling
investigation off the ground. Ms. Feinstein, the committee’s top
Democrat, and its chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley,
Republican of
Iowa, agreed this summer to begin investigating a cluster of topics
related to the firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, including Mr. Comey’s handling of the Clinton email case and the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia.
Given
its jurisdiction over the Justice Department, the panel is the best
positioned on Capitol Hill to unravel the Comey saga, including possible
obstruction of justice. But after a brief flurry of activity earlier
this fall — including a closed-door interview with the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
— investigators reached an impasse in recent weeks, as Democrats and
Republicans haggled over the next witnesses to call and documents to
request.
Mr.
Grassley has spent weeks negotiating with the Justice Department on the
committee’s behalf to try to gain access to two key F.B.I. officials
who worked closely with Mr. Comey, Carl Ghattas and James Rybicki. Hopes
of interviewing Paul J. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman,
collapsed over the summer after prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller
warned Mr. Manafort that they planned to seek criminal charges against
him.
On
Wednesday, Mr. Grassley unilaterally sent a flurry of letters
requesting interviews with and information from current and former
Justice Department officials, as well as Mr. Kushner and others involved
in a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump campaign officials
and a Russian lawyer said to be offering incriminating information about
Mrs. Clinton.
Senators
said they were still hopeful that the committee would break through the
logjam, but a deal had not been reached as of Friday.
“The
American people deserve a public investigation,” said Senator Richard
Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, noting that the Judiciary Committee
could work more publicly than the intelligence panels. “They deserve
witnesses who will give an accounting in public under oath.”
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