Senate panel finds Russia interfered in 2016

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday released its fifth and final report on Russia’s effort to influence the previous presidential election. The bipartisan investigation lasted three years. The update was part of a counterintelligence initiative to limit interference in future elections.

What did the committee say? The almost 1,000-page report describes Russia’s wide-ranging interference in the 2016 presidential election and notes that Trump campaign associates sometimes exploited the interference to the candidate’s benefit. The committee zeroed in on information sharing between campaign manager Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the report called a Russian intelligence officer. A group of Republican lawmakers, including Acting Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Marco Rubio of Florida, said the report should have made it more clear that “the Russian government inappropriately meddled in our 2016 general election in many ways but then-candidate [Donald] Trump was not complicit.”

Dig deeper: Read Harvest Prude’s report in The Stew about declassified documents showing the FBI doubted some of the intelligence that led to Robert Mueller’s investigation into the matter.