A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Sunday, May 14, 2017
President Trump shakes hands with
James B. Comey, the former FBI director, at the White House in January.
Trump fired Comey this week. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
President Trump’s decision to fire James B. Comey as FBI director added
new uncertainty to the Senate’s investigation into Russian meddling
during the election just as it was beginning to accelerate — but the
surprise ouster has also put new pressure on the panel not to slow down.
Comey’s firing “creates challenges” for the Senate Intelligence
Committee’s investigation, Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said this week
— particularly because senators want to avoid bumping heads with the
FBI over its parallel investigation as both move forward.
At the same time, the sense has grown among committee members that their
investigation may be the least compromised by politics and scandal and
has become a last line of defense against those forces. The House, which
is conducting a third inquiry, is still regrouping from a leadership
breakdown earlier this year.
“I think the burden’s always been on our committee because we own the
jurisdictional responsibility for the legislative branch to carry it
out. And I’ve intended from the beginning, regardless of the hurdles
that have been thrown, to finish this investigation,” Burr said the day
after Comey’s dismissal.
Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the committee, said
Thursday: “The amount of time that we’re both spending and staff’s
spending — it is a priority for this committee to get to the bottom of
this.”
Outside skepticism remains, however, particularly among Democrats
calling for an independent commission, about whether the probe will
answer the many questions that have arisen in recent months about
Trump’s ties to Russia.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe, which includes an examination
of whether Trump associates coordinated with the Russian government,
has shown fresh signs of progress in recent weeks. The panel has
received at least two caches of information containing raw reports from
the intelligence agencies in the last month and requested records from
the Treasury Department as well.
In the past few weeks the committee has also added staff to the probe
and demanded information from a number of Trump surrogates regarding
communications they had with Russians. On Wednesday, panel leaders
issued their first subpoena for records from former national security
adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired after revelations that he did not
disclose communications with Russian officials.
In the wake of Comey’s firing, however, senators anticipate having to
renegotiate arrangements with the acting FBI director and his eventual
successor, as well as with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
Rosenstein met Thursday with Burr and Warner, and has agreed to meet
with the full Senate next week.
The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation, in contrast, is still
regrouping following the decision of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a
Trump ally who had been heading the effort, to step down from that role.
Nunes drew widespread criticism for his attempts to focus the House
probe away from the possibility of coordination between the Trump
campaign and Russia and toward allegations that Trump associates may
have been swept up — and identified — in reports of government
surveillance of Russians.
Democrats, in particular, charged that he had coordinated his efforts
with the administration, creating a conflict of interest. After Nunes
recused himself, Rep. Michael K. Conaway (R-Tex.) took his place.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are operating with an
understanding that to preserve the integrity of their investigation,
they must avoid any whiff of partisanship.
“We’re going to do it right because that’s what’s expected of us,” Burr said Thursday.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the left-of-center Brookings
Institution, said that for lawmakers investigating Russian meddling,
Comey’s firing may trigger a sense of urgency that they are the final
backstop, given the uncertainty about the FBI’s future.
Even so, O’Hanlon said he was only about “90 percent confident in the integrity of each” of the three ongoing probes.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has so far mostly resisted pressure
coming from various corners of Capitol Hill to move faster, whether
coming from Democratic leaders such as Senate Minority Leader Charles E.
Schumer (D-N.Y.), or from parallel panels like the Senate Judiciary
Committee, which has interviewed many of the principal witnesses who
were on the Intelligence Committee’s shortlist as well, down the line.
“What I’m conscious of is how we do the best job in the way that’s the most timely possible,” Warner said last week.
The committee has also rejected calls from many Democrats for an
independent commission to take over the congressional probes of the
Trump administration. Warner has argued that starting from scratch could
undermine the good work the Senate panel has done, though he joined
Democrats in endorsing the idea of appointing a special counsel to
handle the FBI and Justice Department probes.
Republicans have sought to head off Democrats’ calls for a special prosecutor by arguing that it might impede their work.
“Let us finish our work. It’s moving forward. We’re finally making some
significant progress,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is on the
committee.
The pace of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation, however,
is not theirs alone to determine. How swiftly they are able to pore
through source documents from the intelligence agencies depends on how
readily and fully they are provided. Scheduling interviews also depends
in part on completing those document reviews — and on the cooperation of
intended witnesses.
Warner has often noted that the committee’s access to intelligence is
“unprecedented,” but he said Thursday that “there’s no playbook” for how
to share this much information with a congressional committee.
They are already hitting a few snags.
Comey was supposed to testify before the panel this week as part of an
annual briefing on worldwide threats, the timing of which would have
allowed committee members to press the director — in public and behind
closed doors — on the Russia investigation. Instead, senators grilled
his former deputy, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, about Comey’s
termination. Even the panel’s chairman, Burr, expressed frustrations
with how Comey had been treated.
Comey also will not attend a Tuesday closed-door session he had been
invited to, Warner told MSNBC on Friday. The former FBI director has not
offered senators an alternate date for such a meeting.
“It’s our hope in the not-too-distant future that we can find time for him to come in,” Warner said.
Senators also are facing a delay obtaining information from Flynn, as
made clear by the subpoena request Burr and Warner issued for documents
this week. Burr has long sought to avoid using subpoenas in this
investigation. He noted Thursday that he hopes the one issued for Flynn
will be the last, but he also warned that the committee would use all
available tools to move the investigation forward.
The committee must also grapple with a mandate that is constantly
shifting, as new revelations of the Trump team’s potential ties to
Kremlin officials surface in news reports and conflicting narratives
emerge from the White House.
Trump’s suggestion that there may be “tapes” of his conversations with
Comey posed the latest such potential twist; “if there are tapes,”
Warner said on MSNBC. Such tapes could shed new light on the role the
FBI’s Russia investigation played in Comey’s firing, but Warner said
that he was not convinced that it would be the intelligence panel’s
responsibility to investigate them. Instead, he suggested that the
Judiciary Committee “ought to get a look at them” as “there may be
criminal issues involved here.”
In a letter to White House Counsel Don McGahn, Judiciary Committee
ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wrote Friday that any such
recordings, if they exist, “must be preserved by the White House.”
Senior House Democrats also sent a letter Friday to McGahn, in which
they “request copies of all recordings in possession of the White House
regarding this matter.”