The top Republican on the House's Russia probe on Tuesday dismissed complaints from Democrats that he's rushing to complete the investigation without properly vetting witnesses.

"The investigation is not over. We’re moving forward aggressively," said Rep. Michael Conaway of Texas, a top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.


Conaway brushed off mounting Democratic complaints that Republicans have rushed the probe, called in witnesses without proper preparation or document requests and refused to compel witnesses to answer difficult questions.

"I’ve listened to their comments and listened to their questions," he said. "Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I disagree with them. We’re going to have those kind of natural disagreements among professionals."

Conaway added that he hasn't spoken yet with Sen. Richard Burr — the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — about opportunities to align the findings of their parallel Russia investigations.

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Democrats have turned up the volume on their criticism of the handling of the House Intelligence Committee's probe, which includes an examination into whether any associates of President Donald Trump aided a Russian scheme to influence the results of the 2016 presidential election.


"In the House Intelligence Committee, our investigation has made great progress," Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the panel, wrote in a Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. "But the Republican majority has repeatedly flouted investigative best practices — rushing in witnesses before we have documents, scheduling others out of state while we are in session and cannot attend, and refusing to bring in dozens of others, and with no witnesses scheduled after Dec. 31."

Schiff told reporters at the Capitol that he'll consider publishing the list of witnesses that Republicans haven't called if they close the investigation without hearing from them. He also dismissed criticism from other House intelligence committee members that Democrats have been dragging their heels to keep the probe alive.

One of those Republicans, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), said he expects that some witnesses he'd like to hear from won't be on the schedule until the New Year, which could keep the probe going into 2018. But he mocked Schiff's witness list as "pretty much every character in any Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy novel that you've ever read."

"I don’t think we should be putting artificial boundaries on any investigation," he said. "But that assumes people are interested in doing it with as much efficiency as we can do it."


Gowdy complained that Schiff prolonged the investigation's ramp-up earlier in the year, delaying the beginning of the probe.

Asked about Gowdy's criticism, Schiff said Democrats have regularly updated Conaway about their witness list, and some of the names that are being crammed onto the schedule have been on Democrats' lists for months.

"It certainly appears they got marching orders to bring this to an end," he said. "Otherwise it’s hard to explain why they have so deviated from investigative best practices."

