Congress raises questions Mueller left unanswered about Trump, Russia – NBC News

WASHINGTON — Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report failed to address crucial questions about President Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia that the FBI may still be investigating, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday as he kicked off a hearing designed to spotlight those issues.

“Of all the questions that Mueller helped resolve, he left many critical questions unanswered — what happened to the counterintelligence investigation?,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said as he opened a hearing on counterintelligence issues. “Were there other forms of compromise, like money laundering, left out, uninvestigated or referred to other offices? Were individuals granted security clearances that shouldn’t have them? And are there individuals still operating in the administration that leave America vulnerable?”

Schiff said he is determined to get to the bottom of those questions, but he wasn’t likely to do so at Wednesday’s hearing, which featured testimony from two former FBI counterintelligence officials and a conservative commentator.

The former FBI officials, Stephanie Douglas and Robert Anderson, each ran the FBI’s National Security Division, a job that entails hunting for Russian spies in the United States. Neither of them is in a position to know what the FBI is doing now, but they sought to interpret the spare language of Volume One of special counsel Mueller’s report, the section that details more than 100 contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians.

Douglas, for example, said that when then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort handed polling data to a person the FBI said was linked to Russian intelligence, that amounted to the Russians “tasking” Manafort, a term spy hunters use to describe the actions of people under the influence of a spy service.

Manafort was charged with acting as an unregistered agent for Russian-backed Ukrainian politicians, but Mueller made no allegation against him or any other American of acting on Russia’s behalf in Russia’s operation to interfere in the 2016 election. To the contrary, Mueller did not find enough evidence to file criminal charges in any of the contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians.

But Mueller’s report was a prosecutor’s brief, written under strict Justice Department regulations. It did not render a judgment on the propriety of a major political campaign flirting with a foreign adversary that was offering assistance. Nor did it assess whether U.S. national security was harmed, or whether Trump or anyone else was compromised by his dealings with Russia, including his effort to build a hotel tower in Moscow that would have required the approval of President Vladimir Putin.

“It may not be a crime to build a Trump Tower in Moscow,” Schiff said. “Or for [former Trump attorney] Michael Cohen to seek the Kremlin’s help to do so. It may not be a crime to try to enrich yourself with a foreign business deal even while running for president, or to lie about it to the American people. But it is deeply compromising.”

Schiff and the former FBI officials noted that the Mueller report says FBI agents who worked alongside the Mueller team sent counterintelligence reports back to headquarters, the contents of which are not included in the Mueller report.