WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Leaders of the Senate intelligence committee said Wednesday that they have not determined roughly nine months into their investigation whether Russia coordinated with the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe issue of collusion is still open,\u201d said the Republican committee chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, who along with the panel\u2019s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, provided an update on a congressional investigation that was launched the same month as President Donald Trump was inaugurated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than 100 witnesses have been interviewed \u2014 including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner \u2014 and more than 100,000 pages of documents have been reviewed, Burr said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lawmakers said that though they have reached no conclusion about whether the campaign colluded with the Kremlin \u2014 the question also at the heart of a separate criminal investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller \u2014 their investigation has left no doubt about a multi-pronged Russian effort to meddle in American politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Russian intelligence service is determined, clever and I recommend every campaign and every elected official take this seriously,\u201d Burr said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Warner later added that there was a \u201clarge consensus\u201d that Russians had hacked into political files and strategically released them with the goal of influencing the election. He said Russian hackers had also tested the vulnerabilities of election systems in 21 states, though there\u2019s no evidence that any voting tallies were altered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The news conference Wednesday was an effort by the committee to lay out some of what\u2019s been found so far as the 2018 midterm elections approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Senate panel has also been focused on Russian efforts to push out social media messages on Twitter and Facebook, and is examining more than 3,000 Russia-linked ads that Facebook turned over to Congress this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Facebook has said the ads focused on divisive social and political messages, including LGBT issues, immigration and gun rights and were seen by an estimated 10 million people before and after the 2016 election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lawmakers said that though they have reached no conclusion about whether the campaign colluded with the Kremlin, their investigation has left no doubt about a multi-pronged Russian effort to meddle in American politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":67858,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":38,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[38,106,31,33,9],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1182,1217],"class_list":["post-22094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-congress","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-newsletters","category-federal-oversight"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"EQZDEZ3OIRDGROGTNL2PYNRJZU","arc_canonical_url":"\/federal-oversight\/congress\/2017\/10\/04\/senators-probe-into-possible-trump-russia-collusion-ongoing\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n