Washington: In a secured room in the basement of the Capitol in July, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, fielded question after question from members of the House Intelligence Committee. Although the allotted time for the grilling had expired, he offered to stick around as long as they wanted.
But Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican-South Carolina, who spent nearly three years investigating Hillary Clinton’s culpability in the deadly 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was growing frustrated after two hours. You are in an unwinnable situation, Gowdy counselled Kushner. If you leave now, Democrats will say you did not answer all the questions. If you stay, they will keep you here all week.
The exchange, described by three people with knowledge of it, typified the political morass that is crippling the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election — and whether the Trump campaign colluded in any way.
But the problems extend beyond that panel. All three committees looking into Russian interference — one in the House, two in the Senate — have run into problems, from insufficient staffing to fights over when the committees should wrap up their investigations. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s inquiry has barely started, delayed in part by negotiations over the scope of the investigation. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, while maintaining bipartisan comity, have sought to tamp down expectations about what they might find.
Nine months into the Trump administration, any notion that Capitol Hill would provide a comprehensive, authoritative and bipartisan accounting of the extraordinary efforts of a hostile power to disrupt American democracy appears to be dwindling.
“Congressional investigations unfortunately are usually overtly political investigations, where it is to one side’s advantage to drag things out,” said Gowdy, who made his name in Congress as a fearsome investigator of Democrats. He added, “The notion that one side is playing the part of defence attorney and that the other side is just these white hat defenders of the truth is laughable.”
Instead, he said, he is looking to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, to conduct an apolitical investigation.
None of the challenges have thus far stopped the committees. And given the closed-door nature of their work, prominent new avenues of inquiry could always emerge such as Russia’s use of social media to sow chaos and discord, capable of influencing the public discourse.
But all three are up against a ticking clock, with Republicans in both chambers eager to wrap up the investigations before too long.
Particularly in the House, partisan fighting is likely to undermine whatever conclusions the committee reaches. One lawmaker said the committee would probably produce two reports. The first, written by Republicans, is expected to forcefully say there is no proof that anyone around Trump worked with Russia to tip the election. A Democratic report will probably raise unanswered questions and say that the committee was never fully committed to answering them.
The panel has been on rocky ground for months, with much of the controversy surrounding the committee’s chairman, Representative Devin Nunes, Republican California, was forced to step aside from leading the investigation in April after it was disclosed that he had received classified information from the White House that showed that Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.
Nunes handed control to three of the committee’s Republicans, Representatives K. Michael Conaway of Texas, Tom Rooney of Florida and Gowdy. Conaway, a well-liked accountant, helped put the investigation back on track and has maintained a productive relationship with Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the panel’s top Democrat.
But Democrats say Nunes, whose signature is required to issue subpoenas, has continued to meddle around the edges of the investigation, driving Republican inquiries into who financed a dossier of unsubstantiated information on purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Nunes, they say, is also participating in an investigation into the revealing of Trump associates caught up in American surveillance by Obama administration officials.
“Frankly, I have been doing everything I can to try to get us to do a credible investigation and to reach a common conclusion,” Schiff said. “I view these things as obstacles that are in the way to overcome, and I am doing my best to overcome them almost daily.”
A spokesman for Nunes did not reply to a request for comment.
Across Capitol Hill, the tone has been different. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard M. Burr, Republican-North Carolina, and its top Democrat, Mark Warner of Virginia, have worked to project a collaborative rapport that committee members insist is real.
At a rare news conference this month, the two senators said they had already expended significant resources verifying the conclusions of America’s spy agencies about Russia’s efforts to meddle in the election and were now taking steps to better understand its use of social media campaigns and to investigate the collusion question.
“At the end of the day, what we owe the American people is the truth,” Warner said in an interview on Thursday. “And if there’s something there, then they should know that. And if there’s not something there, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that.”
But other committee members have sought to contain expectations. At the news conference, Burr said investigators had “hit a wall” in their work on the dossier, which holds some of the most salacious allegations of collusion, because its author, Christopher Steele, would not meet with the committee. Burr also said he did not have a mandate to look for criminal activity.
The Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, has struggled to get a fledgling investigation off the ground. Feinstein, the committee’s top Democrat, and its chairman, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Republican-Iowa, agreed this summer to begin investigating a cluster of topics related to the firing of James B. Comey as Federal Bureau of Investigation director, including Comey’s handling of the Clinton email case and the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia.
Given its jurisdiction over the Justice Department, the panel is the best positioned on Capitol Hill to unravel the Comey saga, including possible obstruction of justice. But after a brief flurry of activity earlier this autumn — including a closed-door interview with the President’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. — investigators reached an impasse in recent weeks, as Democrats and Republicans haggle over the next witnesses to call and documents to request.
