It all started out very nice and cozy as Sen. Burr and Sen. Warner held a bipartisan-like Senate Intel Committee press conference, full of hugs and emojis signaling their investigation into Russia's activities wouldn't resemble anything like the corrupt nature of Chairman Nunes' operation.
If you were hopeful these fine folks would take care of business in a professional and bipartisan way because when a foreign power tries to corrupt our election process, that's serious, serious business, but alas, you'd be wrong.
Yahoo's Micheal Isikoff is reporting that after three months of getting the investigation off the ground, partisan bickering has over taken the committee and that are now jeopardizing their entire investigation.
Isikoff writes, "The committee has yet to issue a single subpoena for documents or interview any key witnesses who are central to the probe, the sources said. It also hasn’t requested potentially crucial evidence — such as the emails, memos and phone records of the Trump campaign — in part because the panel’s chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., has so far failed to respond to requests from the panel’s Democrats to sign letters doing so, the sources said."
And there are rumblings within the Dem ranks that Warner has been appeasing Burr way to much.
It's unfortunate that the leader of the committee, Sen. Richard Burr was almost as tied to Trump as is Chairman Nunes.
On the campaign trail last fall, Republican Sen. Richard Burr told North Carolina voters there was no "separation” between himself and Donald Trump. The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman also bragged about his role in getting the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Now, the third-term senator is under fire for running interference for the White House last week on a news report asserting repeated contacts between Trump’s campaign and Moscow. And some Democrats are wondering whether Burr, who also served as a national security adviser to Trump’s campaign, is too close to Trump to lead an impartial investigation.
Rep. Nunes should have immediately recused himself from the House investigation of Russia, but didn't. Their investigation has been derailed since he was used as a political pawn of Trump, was finally forced him out and is now under review by the ethics people.
Senator Burr should also have recused himself from these Russian investigations, but instead gave us the stiff upper lip treatment and told America how professional he was going to be and so on.
Much of the investigating within these committees are done by staffers, but a very small amount have actually been cleared by Trump's new CIA director, which has slowed the whole operation down.
When you hear Sean Spicer or the boobs at Fox and Friends tell the world that they haven't found any ties between the Russian or the Trump administration and would have by now is a load of garbage because an investigation like this takes a long time to process.
So what has the committee been doing for three months? The five staffers assigned to the case have been methodically reviewing the classified raw intelligence documents that formed the basis for the Jan. 6 assessment — and that, in turn, has lead to the discovery of more documents that are potentially relevant, sources say. It also has compiled a lengthy witness list that staffers have begun to winnow down.
Read the entire article to know exactly where we are at this point.
So far we haven't seen Senator Burr summoned by the White House in the dead of night to leak bogus intelligence to the press, but can that be far behind?
