“You don’t have the kind of blow-ups [in the Senate] you had at the House,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO. | AP Photo House spat leaves Senate in driver’s seat on Russia probe Although House Democrats aren’t likely to walk away from the investigation, they concede their panel’s probe is now shrouded in a cloud of suspicion.

After a week of partisan rancor that threatened to bring down the House's probe into Russian interference during the 2016 election, the Senate is quickly realizing it may be the only chamber left that can produce findings free of the cloud of White House meddling.

“You don’t have the kind of blow-ups [in the Senate] you had at the House,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO.


The Senate Intelligence Committee has been able to avoid the partisan fissures that have weakened its House counterpart, and began conducting private interviews with intelligence officials last week. Sources say it also plans to interview Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and close adviser, who had met in December with the Russian ambassador.

“Trust me, I feel the — everybody on the committee feels — the responsibility to continue to try to do this right,” said the Senate committee’s top Democrat, Mark Warner of Virginia, who is leading the upper chamber’s Russia investigation alongside Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.).

That’s a far cry from the acrimony dividing the House Intelligence Committee, whose Democrats maintain that their panel's probe is shrouded in suspicion after Chairman Devin Nunes made explosive public comments last week about alleged incidental surveillance of Trump transition team members by the Obama administration. The House committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, later accused the White House of pressuring the committee to cancel an upcoming public hearing.

Such meddling, Schiff said, “threatens the integrity of the only investigation that’s been authorized in the House.”

The animosity carried over into the weekend, with Schiff questioning Nunes’ credibility to lead the investigation, and Republicans countering that Democrats have no evidence of actual collusion with the White House.

The series of spats on the House side has left the Senate panel feeling the pressure to deliver.

If it can’t, Congress’s Russia probes risk meeting the fate of the House’s investigation into the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, which ended with separate Republican and Democratic reports. Senate Intelligence Committee members want to avoid a similar fate, and believe they have a strategy to do so.

“I’m not concerned about their process,” Burr said of the House committee. “I’m concerned about mine.”

Burr said he and Warner had “constructed” the Senate’s plan “between the two of us, and there seems to be a great deal of trust in it.”

The upper chamber’s inquiry hasn’t been entirely without controversy: In January, Warner and all his Democratic colleagues nearly walked out of the investigation just as it was beginning. They were protesting Burr’s initial decision to not examine possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Burr himself has also come under intense criticism for his ties to the Trump administration. And Democratic committee members are still worried about the investigation’s pace.

But given the partisan warfare that has broken out among their House counterparts, Senate lawmakers believe they are running smoothly by comparison.

The House side reached new levels of bitterness last week, starting on Wednesday when Nunes held a solo news conference — without telling anyone else on his committee — to announce he knew of evidence indicating that U.S. intelligence agencies had incidentally monitored members of the Trump transition team. Nunes then marched to the White House to brief the president himself, but has not shared his alleged findings with the panel’s Democrats.

The next day, Nunes — a member of the Trump transition’s executive committee — apologized to his colleagues for keeping them in the dark. But he reopened the wounds Friday when he canceled an open hearing slated for Tuesday that had been set to feature former top Obama intelligence officials.

“I’m still, probably the most polite word I could use is baffled, by what Nunes did,” Warner said before Friday’s events.

The Virginia Democrat chalked up the Senate committee’s ability to move past those initial controversies to his “long-term relationship” with Burr.

Unlike the House Intelligence Committee’s hearing last March 20— which featured bombshell revelations from FBI Director James Comey — the Senate side’s upcoming hearing will feature only a top cybersecurity expert and former NSA head Keith Alexander, who left the agency in 2014. The Thursday gathering will be the panel's first hearing since it set the parameters of its investigation.

“What we want to do is we want to go through this in a much more methodical process,” Warner told reporters last week. “We’ll have an appropriate time to talk to the FBI director, but we want to have more information first.”

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Despite calls from House Democrats to take their chamber’s investigation away from Nunes, Senate Intelligence panel members declined to say whether they think the House can eventually churn out a credible set of conclusions.

“They’re certainly going to have some rehab work to do,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

Nunes’ actions have reinvigorated the push by some lawmakers to put a special prosecutor or independent commission in charge of the Russia probe. But even some Democrats say that’s not a panacea.

“In effect, they would have to start over,” Wyden cautioned. “People just say, ‘Well, let’s have a this, and let’s have a that.’ That work doesn’t automatically get transferred, you’ve got to go out and hire new people and the like.”

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), another Intelligence panel member, issued a similar warning.

“If you start a new process, it’s a year,” he said.

Austin Wright contributed to this report.