Foreign Policy's Elias Groll interviewed House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) about what winning back the majority on Tuesday would mean for the committee's prematurely shuttered Russia investigation.
An excerpt:
Foreign Policy: If Democrats take over Congress and control of the House Intelligence Committee, what are your investigative priorities?
Eric Swalwell: The first would be to fill in the gaps that exist between what we wanted to pursue in the Russia investigation and what the Republicans allowed us to pursue, which was almost zero when it came to using subpoena power to get documents, bank records, cell-phone records, travel logs, etc. There are a lot of gaps to fill in there.
More broadly, we’ll be looking at what we can do to protect and secure the 2020 presidential election. That will be a major target, we expect, based on what the Russians did in 2016 and what they are doing now. We want to make sure that Americans have the awareness they need when they go to the polls in 2020.
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ES: There are a lot of unanswered questions around the Trump Tower meeting [with a Russian lawyer close to the Kremlin]. What happened with Don Jr. [Trump’s son, who attended the meeting] and his father when the offer was made a couple days before the meeting of compromising information on Hillary Clinton?
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Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen was in negotiations during the early part of the primary to put a Trump Tower in Moscow. And there are still questions about whether he went over during the campaign to Eastern Europe to meet with Russians, as the Steele dossier alleges. Getting those travel logs would be important.
Deutsche Bank has come up a number of times as a lender to the Trump Organization. They have a history of being fined for essentially laundering money for the Russians. At a time when Donald Trump was not receiving loans from any U.S.-based bank, he was getting help from Deutsche Bank.
We’d like to understand the true financial relationship there and whether any Russian money was involved.
Those are just a few, but they should have been pushed through in the last two years. Every request to do so was denied by Republicans on the committee.
Read more: How House Democrats Plan to Investigate Trump’s Russia Ties (Foreign Policy)