The 15-member committee has been an atypical oasis of functionality in a Congress that routinely splinters along party lines when questions are raised about the political implications of Russia’s plot to influence the 2016 election and any role Trump’s associates may have had in those efforts.

The continued harmony is due, in part, to the commitment of Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the panel’s chairman and vice chairman, to keep the process collaborative — and their calculated decision early on to postpone directly assessing whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Moscow.

That work will not begin until after November’s high-stakes election, which could result in Democrats retaking majorities in Congress. Officials insist the timeline is not intended to let lawmakers avoid having to address a divisive issue before the midterms.

AD

AD

In a brief interview, Burr promised the committee would release additional findings at some point this month, as it has periodically upon reaching conclusions about election security and the quality of the intelligence community’s assessment about Russia’s activities in 2016. The committee’s next preliminary reports are expected to address the Obama administration’s response to the Russian threat and the role social media companies played in the dissemination of Moscow’s disinformation campaign.

“We hope in the next two weeks to give everybody a status update,” Burr told The Washington Post recently. “We’ll be very specific on where we are and where the path forward is.”

But leaders are no longer confident they can wrap up their interviews, much less their final report, by the year’s end.

AD

“We’ve been at it this long, we need to continue, finish in a thorough manner,” Warner told The Post. Asked whether tackling the collusion question would strain the panel’s cohesion, he added, “Time will tell.”

The Intelligence Committee is one of five congressional panels that have investigated the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russian President Vladi­mir Putin directed a sophisticated operation to exploit American societal divisions leading up to the 2016 election, with the goal of helping Trump attain the White House, and federal law enforcement agencies’ efforts to determine whether members of the Trump campaign were involved.

AD

The work of the other four — the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight committees — has been upended by partisan feuding and distrust, leaving the investigation led by Burr and Warner as the only one with a chance of being received as credible by members of both parties.

AD

Initially, the Senate Intelligence Committee was supposed to end its work by the end of 2017.

Burr then predicted it would happen around Valentine’s Day — and then August.

Recently, the committee’s leaders suggested they could finish by year’s end — but Warner now acknowledges they set that timeline “aspirationally.”

The committee has not finished its interviews, Burr said, noting that the roster has grown “significantly” since the probe began in January 2017. It is possible, too, aides to the committee said, that unforeseen developments, especially resulting from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s parallel investigation, could require additional interviews.

AD

AD

Several of the 100-plus witnesses already interviewed have been questioned about allegations Trump’s campaign coordinated with the Kremlin, but the committee has not yet set out to draw conclusions from their answers.

Publicly, Burr and Warner say they are committed to keeping the committee’s work bipartisan through the end — a stance that has set them apart from the House Intelligence Committee, where the investigation’s findings have resulted in separate reports, and the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, whose rancorous probe of the FBI and Justice Department also is unlikely to end with a consensus .

But privately, people involved in and close to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation worry about whether Democrats and Republicans will stick together when they issue their findings and it comes to stating whether they believe there is conclusive evidence of a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and the Russians. Sharp divisions on that point between otherwise conciliatory lawmakers already are on display.

AD

AD

“We have no hard evidence of collusion,” Burr said during a Fox News interview last month, though he was quick to add that the investigation is “not over” and the issue “has not been finalized at all.”

But Burr surmised the committee was unlikely to find anything indicating the president and the Kremlin had coordinated to affect the election’s outcome. “I can’t really tell you,” he said. “. . . Maybe we find something in the next several interviews that are evidence of collusion.”

“I don’t think so, with what we’ve seen,” he said.

Warner has taken the opposite tack, refusing to presuppose anything and taking every opportunity to say that the volume of and secrecy surrounding contacts between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin appear to be potentially incriminating.

AD

The longer the process goes on, there is a greater chance its conclusions will hew to those reached by Mueller’s team, many Democrats argue. Mueller’s probe is widely seen as the ultimate arbiter of whether the activities of Trump and his subordinates were incidental or nefarious.

AD

Panel Republicans are less eager to adhere to Mueller’s timeline — but also wary of prematurely shuttering the probe.

“I don’t know if the process particularly has to stay open. . . . You could issue a report and then if new information becomes available, focus on that,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a committee member, said in a brief interview when asked about the need to work around Mueller’s schedule.

AD

But he added that he “wouldn’t set a timeline” on the probe, “because it’s largely driven by information.”

“You don’t want to end it earlier than it needs to, because you may be walking away from the potential to acquire additional information and testimony that might be relevant to our findings,” Rubio said.