Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA
The Senate Intelligence Committee is, for the time being, just about the last redoubt of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. For the most part, they take national security seriously and work across party lines to assess threats. Today they stated the obvious:
The Senate Intelligence Committee has determined that the U.S. intelligence community was correct in assessing that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the aim of helping then-candidate Donald Trump, contradicting findings House Republicans reached last month.
“We see no reason to dispute the [intelligence community’s] conclusions,” the committee’s chairman, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), said Wednesday in a joint statement with its vice chair, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who added: “Our staff concluded that the … conclusions were accurate and on point. The Russian effort was extensive, sophisticated, and ordered by President Putin himself for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.”
There’s really no reason to dispute this. After all, the fact that Putin interfered with the election doesn’t reflect in any way on the question of whether Trump colluded with Russia. Nevertheless—and despite the voluminous evidence implicating Russia—this simple statement was something that Devin Nunes couldn’t countenance over in the House Intelligence Committee. It’s just another sign of how ridiculous Nunes has become in his goal of becoming Trump’s most loyal lackey.
