"But only Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn or someone else like that could take this series of inadvertent contacts with each other, meetings, whatever and weave that into some sort of a fiction, page-turner spy thriller," Conaway said. "We're not dealing in fiction, we're dealing in facts and we found no evidence of any collusion." Donald Trump seized on the news, tweeting all in capital letters: "The House Intelligence Committee has, after a 14 month long in-depth investigation" found no evidence of collusion or coordination." He did not mention it was the Republicans on the commitee who came to the conclusion. The Republicans who control the committee are ending what was originally supposed to be a bipartisan investigation over the objections of Democrats and even though an inquiry by Special Counsel Robert Mueller remains underway and at least four people connected to the President's campaign are facing criminal charges. "After more than a year, the committee has finished its Russia investigation and will now work on completing our report," the chairman, Devin Nunes of California, said in a statement. "Once the committee's final report is issued, we hope our findings and recommendations will be useful for improving security and integrity for the 2018 midterm elections."

Representative Adam Schiff of California, the panel's top Democrat said Republicans on the committee have been under pressure to end the investigation and doing so now "represents yet another capitulation to the executive branch." "By ending its oversight role in the only authorised investigation in the House, the majority has placed the interests of protecting the President over protecting the country, and history will judge its actions harshly," Schiff added. The announcement is likely to further inflame the partisanship that has consumed the panel almost since the start of the inquiry on January 10, last year. The two parties haven't even been able to agree on the scope of their investigation into Russian meddling. The conclusion that there was no evidence of collusion echoes an argument the President's been making since the inquiries began. The draft report is set to be delivered to committee Democrats on Tuesday for review and comment. After the committee votes to adopt it - likely with Republicans having a majority on the panel - it will be submitted for a declassification review. A declassified version then will be made public. An early overview of the 150-page draft provided by Republicans on Monday said it will report there was evidence of Russian cyber attacks on American political institutions in 2015 and 2016, and Russians' use of social media to sow discord, and that the US government was slow to respond. It will conclude, however, that "we have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians."

The GOP's conclusion comes as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe is ramping up its investigation of the Trump team's alleged effort to coordinate activities with Russian officials, even gathering evidence that an early 2017 meeting in they Seychelles was an effort to establish a backchannel to the Kremlin. It also contradicts the preliminary findings of committee Democrats like ranking member Adam Schiff, who told reporters last month that based on what he had seen, there was "ample evidence" of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Donald Trump in Vietnam last year. Credit:AP Democrats and Republicans on the committee have interviewed the same 73 witnesses and viewed the same 300,000-plus documents, according to the tally Conaway gave reporters on Monday.

Conaway said he believed all the findings of the report could be substatiated. But Democrats say there are thousands more pages of documents the committee never procured, and dozens more witnesses they need to call in to interview. Committee Democrats have also clamoured for the panel to issue several subpoenas for witnesses who either have ignored the committee's requests to appear or given incomplete answers during their interviews with the panel. But Conaway dismissed the idea of keeping the investigation over any longer, telling reporters that if Democrats expected him to "sit around and wait with the expectation that something might happen," his answer was "no." He also argued against using subpoenas or stronger measures - such as contempt citations - to compel any more testimony from witnesses who have appeared before the panel but refused to answer questions related to their time in the administration, arguing that Trump might eventually want to invoke executive privilege.

"You use subpoenas when you think you can actually get something from them, and we're not particularly confident that the subpoena process will get us any more information that we had," Conaway said. "We've interviewed everyone we think we need to interview." Democrats were not part of the drafting of the GOP's report, and were not presented with a copy of the findings before Conaway addressed the press. Conaway told reporters that he would give committee Democrats the report on Tuesday for their comments, suggestions and proposed changes, which he would take under advisement before presenting it to the intelligence community for redactions. He said that the report would likely not be released to the public before April. Democrats on the committee are expected to write their own report Washington Post, Bloomberg