Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) on Monday night indicated that it was time for the House Intelligence Committee to conclude its Russia investigation because the panel has merely become a forum for partisan bickering.
“We’ve gone completely off the rails,” Rooney told CNN’s Erin Burnett when she asked why the committee had concluded its investigation.
“Now we’re just basically a political forum for people to leak information to drive the day’s news,” Rooney added. “We’ve lost all credibility, and we’re going to issue probably two different reports, unfortunately.”
The committee, which has been roiled by partisan rhetoric, announced Monday evening that it had concluded its Russia investigation. In a one page summary of its findings, the committee said that it found no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia and that the committee disagrees with the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia favored President Donald Trump.
On the issue of preference for Trump, Rooney took a slightly more nuanced view. He told CNN that there’s evidence that Russian hackers favored Trump in some way but that he had doubts that Putin was working to elect Trump.
“I don’t know that necessarily there was a full-fledged campaign to do everything that they could to help elect Donald Trump. I think that their goal was chaos,” he said.
Watch a clip from the interview via CNN:
“We’ve gone completely off the rails, and now we’re just basically a political forum for people to leak information to drive the day’s news…we’ve lost all credibility” – Rep. Tom Rooney on the Republican decision to end the House Russia investigation https://t.co/smu8O6gYSJ pic.twitter.com/wzgCf2oiKZ
— OutFrontCNN (@OutFrontCNN) March 12, 2018
