‘Obviously we have the deepest interests in the counterintelligence aspects of the investigation,’ the House Intelligence Committee chairman said.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal probe into potential conspiracy between Trumpworld and Russia is over. The head of the House intelligence committee wants to know if that means the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into the same question has also concluded.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that he’s begun negotiations with the intelligence agencies to get an answer to one of the many unknowns about the Mueller probe currently hidden behind the veil of Attorney General William Barr’s letter on Sunday purporting to summarize it.
“At this point, we don’t know whether any of the counterintelligence findings are part of the Mueller report,” Schiff said. “We have initiated discussions with the intelligence community to make sure that we obtain whatever is found in the counterintelligence investigation, or whether that [inquiry] is still ongoing.”
In January, The New York Times, citing in part the FBI’s former top lawyer, James Baker, reported that the bureau opened a counterintelligence inquiry into Trump’s ties to Russia in May 2017 after the president fired Director James Comey, who was then in charge of the overall Russia probe. Mueller, soon empaneled as special counsel, inherited that investigation.
Current and former FBI and Justice Department officials have characterized a counterintelligence probe into a sitting president—with its implication that the president, wittingly or not, posed a threat to national security—as unprecedented. For the same reason, the Times reported that the decision to open the probe was internally controversial.
The bureau’s counterintelligence investigations seek to understand the surreptitious activities of a foreign power and their possible connections to Americans. Since their objectives are not necessarily to bring charges, their standards of evidence are well below those of criminal inquiries. It is possible that Mueller closed the counterintelligence inquiry, and it is possible that Mueller passed it back to the FBI. Schiff wants to know either way.
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A counterespionage story in 3 acts…https://t.co/mLkcZF7wWN
— John Schindler (@20committee) March 30, 2019
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