WASHINGTON (CN) — After much delay, 57 transcripts featuring testimony from key figures at the center of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference of the 2016 election were finally released late Thursday.
From former administration officials like Attorney General Jeff Sessions to some of President Donald Trump’s closest White House confidantes and campaign consiglieres like Steve Bannon, Hope Hicks, Brad Parscale and Carter Page to the recently convicted Roger Stone; the transcripts are a bookend that former impeachment manager and House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, described Thursday night as confirmation of what former special counsel Robert Mueller already revealed.
“[The] Trump campaign, and Donald Trump himself, invited illicit Russian help, made full use of that help and then lied and obstructed the investigations in order to cover up this misconduct,” Schiff said in a statement Thursday.
The trove of transcripts and other investigation materials were held in declassification limbo for over a year as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reviewed and redacted the records as it felt necessary.
First submitted for review in 2017, it was not until last March that the House Intelligence Committee was notified the White House wanted first looks and the right to redact anything that appeared to undermine the executive branch.
It was just this week that acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell notified the committee that final interagency review was completed for the remaining ten transcripts. Forty-three transcripts had already been reviewed and were effectively lying in wait since last June, Grenell said.
“While Special Counsel Mueller found insufficient evidence to prove the crime of criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt, he refused to draw any conclusion on the issue of collusion - contrary to false representations made by Attorney General Bill Barr and others,” Schiff said.
The “rich detail” of the transcripts, he added, established a long pattern of corrupt interactions seeming to spill over from year to year of Trump’s presidency.
Representative Al Green, a Texas Democrat, said in an interview Thursday he regretted the transcripts were not released some time ago, “so the whole story can be told.”
“I think transparency is important because the people have a right to know if there’s an intrusion into our elections,” Green said. “Free and fair elections are dependent upon no interference from foreign agents or foreign powers.”
Thursday night's doc dump included 2017 testimony delivered by the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., spanning more than 200 pages.
The transcript revealed a painstaking back and forth unfolding for roughly seven hours between the president’s son and lawmakers keen on gathering information about Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, then campaign manager-turned-convict Paul Manafort and senior adviser Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in New York.
Trump Jr. met with Veselnitskaya after learning she might have dirt on Hillary Clinton, Trump Sr.’s opponent in the 2016 election.
Veselnitskaya was later charged with obstruction of justice in an unrelated money laundering investigation last January by federal prosecutors. While there were no connections to her meeting with Trump related to that Justice Department investigation, it did confirm the depth and breadth of her connections to powerful Russian operatives.
Schiff, according to the transcript, pressed Trump Jr. about his correspondence ahead of the meeting and specifically, his now infamous remark that he would “love it” if the opposition research was damning and delivered in the summer before the election.
Was Trump Jr. willing to accept political help on his father’s behalf even if it came from the Kremlin, Schiff pressed.
“Well, I think what [sic] I say "I love it," especially if I'm putting it off by a few months, it's a colloquial term of expression, as I said in my statement a few months ago. 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,” Trump Jr. said.