The House committees are actually asking about things already known to the IC, that there is generally far too much communication between this WH and Russians beyond normal diplomacy. More specifically, the contacts are now far too blatant, as with Sergey Lavrov’s coincidental presence in Hanoi last week.
Intermediaries do much of this, as the Cohen testimony and the Stone prosecution have suggested, but official versus unofficial communication beyond the 100 known contacts raise some important issues if Putin claims that he and Individual-1 “speak regularly”.
On the Senate side, a member of the gang of eight knows a lot more about those contacts.
Appearing on “Meet the Press,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., disagreed with the assertion by his Republican counterpart on the committee that congressional investigators have found nothing “that would suggest there was collusion.”
But Warner made it clear that he’s seriously concerned about a possible link between the Russians and Trump’s allies and campaign apparatus.
"I'm going to reserve judgment until I’m finished, but there's no one who can factually say there isn't plenty of evidence of collaboration or communication between the Trump Organization and Russians,” Warner said.
“I have never in my lifetime seen a presidential campaign, from a person of either party, have this much outreach to a foreign country and a foreign country that the intelligence community [says], and our committee has validated, intervened massively in our election and intervened with an attempt to help one candidate, Donald Trump, and hurt another, Hillary Clinton.”
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