Sens. Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein sent a letter earlier this week to the Trump campaign’s attorney seeking emails from Rick Dearborn. | Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images Senators seek new Trump campaign emails in bipartisan Russia oversight

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s chairman and top Democrat on Thursday released a request for new emails from two senior campaign aides to President Donald Trump, taking a fresh bipartisan step in their investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the panel’s chairman, and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) sent a letter earlier this week to the Trump campaign’s attorney seeking emails from Rick Dearborn, who went on to play a prominent role in the presidential transition before reportedly leaving the White House earlier this year, and John Mashburn, who served as the campaign’s policy director and remains in the administration.


Grassley and Feinstein noted in their letter that their previous requests for 21 Trump campaign aides’ emails resulted in the receipt of more than 28,000 pages of documents, adding that “information obtained in a recent Committee interview warrants expanding those searches” to include Dearborn and Mashburn.

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Dearborn, a former top aide to Attorney General Jeff Sessions during Sessions’ Senate career, reportedly received an email in 2016 from an individual seeking to connect the Trump campaign with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Mashburn, like Dearborn, was among the officials notified of efforts to effect a Russia-friendly change to the 2016 GOP platform.

The letter from Grassley and Feinstein also asks the Trump campaign to search records for “possible misspellings” of the name of George Papadopoulos, the former aide who has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about communications with Russia. It’s a sign that the Judiciary Committee leaders’ bipartisan collaboration on Russia-related investigative matters is picking back up after a period of apparent fracture between the two parties, marked by laments from Democrats on the panel about the slow pace of oversight.

