Sen. Mark Warner: More Serious Trump/Russia Questions; Nunes Memo a Fabrication

As Congressional Republicans (especially Rep. Devin Nunes who one would think was taking orders directly from Vladimir Putin) and Der Trumpenführer continue to wage war on the FBI and Justice Department officials - all aimed at killing the Russiagate investigation and protecting parties potential guilty of treason - Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) has announced that new documents provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee have opened entirely new lines of questions concerning Trump/Russia collusion.  Indeed, Warner excoriates Nunes who he describes as pushing a fabricated Star Chamber like effort. And that doesn't even get into the issue of obstruction of justice issues.  The take away is that notwithstanding GOP efforts to end the Russiagate as soon as possible, barring a right wing coup against  Constitutional government, not only is the Russiagate investigation not going away, but questions associated with it are multiplying and suggests many, many more months of hearings and possible indictments lie ahead.  Expect the Trump/GOP desperation to increase.  Here are excerpts from a piece in Politico on Warner's comments: 

Congress late last year received “extraordinarily important new documents” in its investigation of President Donald Trump and his campaign’s possible collusion with the 2016 Russian election hacking, opening up significant new lines of inquiry in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the president, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) says in an exclusive new interview.

Warner, the intel committee’s top Democrat, says “end-of-the-year document dumps” produced “very significant” revelations that “opened a lot of new questions” that Senate investigators are now looking into, meaning the inquiry into Trump and the Russia hacking—already nearly a year old—will not be finished for months longer. “We’ve had new information that raises more questions,” . . .

Warner also warns about a “coordinated” attack by the president and “Trump zealots” in the House of Representatives to undermine the legitimacy of the investigations against him, an effort Warner says includes the president’s threats to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and other officials as well as a secret Republican memo alleging “shocking” FBI surveillance abuse against Trump that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is now threatening to release. Warner calls out Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in arguably more explicit terms than any Democrat has yet, saying he has read the underlying classified material used in the memo and that Nunes misrepresented it as part of a McCarthyite “secret Star Chamber” effort to discredit the FBI probe of the president.

“We’re seeing this coordinated effort to try to impede the investigation,” Warner says. The Nunes memo . . . . is based on “fabrications” and “connecting dots that don’t connect,” Warner asserts.

Warner and other Democrats, joined by a few Republicans, have been urging such a step [to bar Trump from firing Mueller] for months. Although GOP congressional leaders are unlikely to permit a vote, many senators in both parties have signaled to Trump in recent days that a move against Mueller would amount to an explosive escalation. Firing Mueller “would be the end of his presidency,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has been an on-again, off-again ally of Trump’s, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Not only is the Russia investigation not going away, but questions associated with it are multiplying, whether it’s the new evidence Warner says his committee must now investigate or the revelation that the special counsel himself is on the long list of those, like fired FBI Director James Comey and the current deputy FBI director and deputy attorney general, that Trump has made very clear he wants out.

We may not have the public evidence yet to definitely resolve those questions, but Warner offers a provocative rationale for why it is we are now seeing such a stepped-up campaign by Trump and his defenders against those who seek to provide us the answers.

“Mueller is getting closer and closer to the truth,” Warner tells me, and “closer and closer to the truth is getting closer and closer to the president.”

Warner says he and the Senate panel remain focused almost exclusively on the initial questions surrounding the Russian election intervention and alleged collusion; the senators have decided that questions surrounding possible Trump obstruction of justice, “because it falls into criminality,” should remain largely in the “purview” of Mueller.

Virtually every member of our committee, Democrat or Republican, would agree,” he says, that Russia sought to intervene in 2016 on Trump’s behalf with “traditional spycraft” of stealing information and then releasing it, along with not-so-traditional methods of using social media platforms, compromising state voting systems and offering “dirt” on Trump’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton. . . . a noteworthy conclusion given that Trump himself has continued to cast doubt on the intelligence community’s conclusion that the Russians did in fact seek to influence the presidential race to Trump’s benefit.