The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday released thousands of pages of transcripts from more than 50 of its closed-door interviews from the panel’s two-year Russia investigation in 2017 and 2018.
The transcripts posted online Thursday, along with some of the committee’s correspondence, marked another endpoint to an investigation into Russian election interference that was marred by partisan infighting, setting the stage for an even bigger fight over the Ukraine impeachment inquiry, led by House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat.
The transcripts include interviews that the committee, then chaired by GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California, conducted with key members of the Trump team and President Donald Trump’s family, including Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Corey Lewandowski, Hope Hicks, Brad Parscale and Carter Page.
The interview of longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone later prompted his conviction on perjury charges for lying to the panel, and the President’s former lawyer Michael Cohen delivered a false statement to both the House and Senate Intelligence committees, which he later pleaded guilty to.
The panel also interviewed top officials from the Obama administration including James Clapper, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Andrew McCabe and Loretta Lynch.
The information that was discussed in the dozens of interviews is largely known: Both Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee issued reports on the House’s probe, and details were often leaked from the interviews soon after they occurred – sometimes even the same day. Later, then-special counsel Robert Mueller filled in many of the gaps when his redacted report was released in 2019.
The controversies the committee was investigating continue to be fought over – charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, a frequent subject of the House interviews, were dropped by the Justice Department on Thursday, undoing one of the key convictions secured by Mueller’s team.
Republicans on the panel concluded they had found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy between Trump’s team and Russia, and the Trump officials all testified they had seen no collusion on the campaign. But the interviews show Democrats clashing with Trump’s aides and confidants over questions they would not answer, which the Democrats say was the result of the committee failing to issue subpoenas to the officials.
The House’s Russia probe was one of three investigations – along with the Senate Intelligence probe and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Investigation – that prompted Trump’s frequent claims of a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” and the partisan warfare that followed over Russian election interference, the FBI and the Justice Department.
Transcripts illustrate what’s known about Russian interference
There are nuggets in the thousands of pages of interview transcripts providing new fodder for partisans on both sides and shedding additional light on the operations of the chaotic 2016 Trump campaign, explanations of controversial meetings during the campaign and transition, and acknowledgment from Obama administration officials there was no smoking gun showing a conspiracy between the Russians and Trump’s team.
Trump Jr., for instance, told the committee he had discussed with his father and attorneys his decision to release publicly the emails that involved setting up the meeting at Trump Tower in the summer of 2016 with the Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.
When asked about his infamous “If it’s what you say, I love it” email response to the purported dirt, Trump Jr. told lawmakers, “It’s a colloquial term of expression.”
“I would have been willing to listen and hear him out, and, you know, again, that’s about the extent of it. But at the time I wasn’t giving it too much credence, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it off till the end of summer,” he said, later comparing it to if a friend asked him to grab a beer after work.
Rhona Graff, Trump’s assistant at Trump Tower, told the committee she first learned of the email because Trump Jr. had posted it on social media and it included her name.
“I was driving with my family up to vacation. … I called my office, and they told me that my name was a p.s. or bottom of an email. I said, ‘Can you tell me what’s going on? I’m getting calls from the media.’ And they said, ‘Well, Don happened to post an email, and your name is mentioned at the bottom of it.’ “
Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, had a combative interview with the committee in 2018, with several expletives sprinkled throughout from both sides of the dais. In between several contentious exchanges, such as when he said he had visited the White House “more than 1, less than 100 times,” he acknowledged he had provided polling data to Trump about Flynn that “by and large, the Republican base was not in favor of a pardon for General Flynn.”
Hicks, who left her White House job the day after her House interview, told the committee that she and others in the campaign were concerned that then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was later convicted by Mueller’s team, might be stealing from it.
Hicks also explained, as CNN and others reported at the time, that while she hadn’t lied about matters related to the Russia investigation she did tell “white lies” for the President.
“I’ve never been asked to lie, like I said, about anything having to do with the scope of your investigation. But have I been asked to tell white lies, like tell somebody I’m not available because of X when, in fact, it was Y,” she said in 2018.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who in 2016 was a close adviser to the President, acknowledged in his 2017 testimony that people in Trump’s campaign, including himself, had used the WikiLeaks email hacks and leaks to “advance the interest of the campaign.”
In some cases, the interviews feel like relics from a different era. Cohen, for example, was interviewed in 2017, when he lied to the committee about the timeline of the proposed Trump Tower Moscow project. Cohen later pleaded guilty to charges brought by the special counsel, turned against Trump and testified before a Democratic-led House panel.
“I was asked to go to Russia on almost a dozen or half a dozen occasions,” Cohen said. “I was asked to bring Mr. Trump to Russia. I want to be very clear about this. I never went. I never agreed to go. I never filed for a visa. I never booked a plane ticket. I never booked a hotel. I never intended to go unless there was a deal that had been consummated.”
Questions about meetings during Trump transition
Meetings that the campaign had during the transition, such as Flynn’s call with then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak and Erik Prince’s meeting in the Seychelles, were a key topic in the interviews. The committee under Schiff referred Prince to the Justice Department in 2019, accusing him of lying about the Seychelles meeting when he testified before the panel.
Kushner’s interview raises questions about how forthright he was with the committee. He was the first major witness from Trump’s team to speak to the panel, in the aftermath of the disclosure of the Trump Tower meeting, in which, he said, he messaged his assistant to find an excuse for him to leave.
When asked about a meeting that he’d had during the transition with United Arab Emirates’ crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Kushner said one of the attendees was Rick Gerson, whom Kushner told the committee was a “friend” of Sheikh Mohammed. The Mueller report, however, said Gerson was a friend of Kushner’s, citing Gerson’s text messages, and he had arranged meetings with the crown prince as well as former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Many witnesses would not talk about events that occurred during the Trump administration. Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was an exception, explaining how Trump had asked him to publicly say there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
Coats said he had told Trump: “I don’t think it is appropriate for me to do that.”
Coats told lawmakers that Trump would often vent about the Russia investigation. At one particularly inopportune time during the NCAA college basketball tournament, Trump called Coats on a Saturday night. “I happen to know the exact date, because it was Saturday of the semifinals of the Final Four,” Coats said.
Keith Schiller, who was a bodyguard for Trump when he visited Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant, explained how he had been offered prostitutes for Trump in a “joking” manner, which CNN and others reported at the time of the interview. Schiller told the committee that as the Russia investigation unfolded, he made then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and then-White House counsel Don McGahn aware of the offer.
Some of the committee’s interviews have taken on new relevance in the years since. The panel spoke in 2017 to Michael Caputo, a campaign aide who was just recently named the spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department. “As I mentioned before, I had one discussion with Donald Trump about Russia. That was in 2013 over a dinner conversation, where he simply asked me what it was like to live there,” Caputo said in the interview. “I believe within 30 seconds our conversation switched to the thing that we both love the most, and that’s the Buffalo Bills.”
Obama officials also interviewed
The committee’s interviews are also now being viewed in light of a significant effort by the President and others to discredit the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation, as well as the FBI’s numerous missteps with the foreign surveillance warrant obtained on Page, who was interviewed by the panel.
Clapper, who was director of national intelligence in the Obama administration, told the committee in July 2017 that while there had been concerns about anecdotal evidence of meetings between Trump’s team and Russian officials, he had seen no direct evidence the Trump campaign was plotting with the Russian government.
“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,” Clapper said. “That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence. … But I do not recall any instance where I had direct evidence of the content of these meetings. It’s just the frequency and prevalence of them was of concern.”
Clapper explained he had a “visceral reaction” to the number of meetings that members of the Trump campaign were having with Russians, including Flynn’s contacts during the transition that prompted his initial guilty plea to the special counsel for lying to the FBI in 2017.
The committee voted almost two years ago, in September 2018, to release the interview transcripts that were made public Thursday. But the release was delayed after the transcripts were sent to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a declassification review, and ODNI told the committee it wanted to share some of the transcripts with the White House for review. The committee objected, and the transcripts remained in limbo until ODNI finished a review in recent days of the final transcripts, clearing the way for the release of the whole batch.
The House probe itself was not run by Nunes, who stepped aside from the investigation following a clandestine meeting at the White House, but by Rep. Michael Conaway, a Texas Republican. Conaway and Schiff, who was then the ranking Democrat, initially had an amicable relationship, but it devolved as the investigation wore on and Republicans wrapped up the probe in 2018.
This story has been updated with more details from the transcripts.
CNN’s Kara Scannell, Zachary Cohen, Alex Rogers, Clare Foran, Erica Orden, Priscilla Alvarez, Geneva Sands, Holmes Lybrand, Michael Conte, Katelyn Polantz, Sara Murray, Maegan Vazquez and Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.