Members of the House Intelligence Committee will press FBI Director James Comey to provide details of any investigation his agents are conducting over contacts between President Donald Trump’s associates and Russia, during or after the presidential campaign. Comey on Monday will testify publicly for the first time since Trump’s inauguration about Russia’s meddling in the U.S. presidential election and the web of conspiracies — or conspiracy theories — entangling Trump and those close to him. While the FBI and other intelligence agencies have already found that Russia hacked into Democratic emails and leaked them in an attempt to help Trump, members of intelligence panel want more information from Comey.
“We need to know whether the circumstantial evidence of collusion and direct evidence of deception is indicative of more,” Representative Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “Were there U.S. persons who were helping the Russians in any way?” Schiff said. “Was there any form of collusion? And what can we do to protect not only ourselves in the future and our allies who are facing the same Russian onslaught right now?”
Comey may need to be most limited in his comments on collusion because of the nature of ongoing investigations, Schiff said. “But there’s a lot he can tell us about the Russian motivations for their intervention in our election, how the Russians operate in Europe, what techniques they use, what we should be on the lookout for in our investigation,” he said.
Lawmakers will also press Comey about Trump’s unsupported claim in Twitter postings this month that former President Barack Obama had Trump Tower in New York “wiretapped” before the November election.
Full Article: Russia Election Meddling Gets Airing on the Hill With Comey – Bloomberg.