“We’ll back a truck up and get it on in here,” Mr. Pompeo said with a glare.

Just before the hearing began, the White House announced it was delaying an invitation to Mr. Putin to meet with Mr. Trump this fall in Washington. A statement by John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, said the follow-up meeting between the two presidents should take place at the conclusion of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference — “after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year.”

Russian officials had not yet committed to the invitation.

In his testimony, Mr. Pompeo sought but fell short of assuring senators that the United States would never acknowledge Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He did not directly answer whether sanctions to punish Russia for seizing the Ukrainian peninsula would remain in place in perpetuity.

Instead, Mr. Pompeo repeatedly restated United States policy, saying that after the Helsinki summit meeting, the stance on sanctions “remains completely unchanged,” and that “no commitment has been made to change those policies.” But he did not speak to whether Mr. Trump had signaled any willingness to reconsider or modify them.



Mr. Menendez told Mr. Pompeo that American citizens and their elected officials have heard more about what happened in the closed-door Helsinki meeting from Moscow than from their own president.



“We don’t know what the truth is because nobody else was in the room where it happened,” Mr. Menendez said.

On the election interference in particular, Mr. Pompeo told the committee that the president accepts the findings that the Russian cyberattacks took place and that he “has a complete and proper understanding of what happened.”