UPDATE: Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) is disagreeing with Chairman Burr's assessment regarding evidence of collusion between the president's campaign and Russia.
CNN:
"Respectfully, I disagree," Warner said Tuesday. "I'm not going to get into any conclusions I've reached because my basis of this has been that I'm not going to reach any conclusion until we finish the investigation. And we still have a number of the key witnesses to come back."
Warner's comments represented a rare public split for the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been the only congressional panel that has kept its investigation into Russia's 2016 election meddling on a bipartisan track.
Burr and Warner have managed to conduct a bipartisan investigation for more than two years, as their staffs have quietly interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed more than 300,000 pages of documents as part of the probe. But they have put off making conclusions about the collusion question, and the split is a signal that they could struggle to stay on the same page as the committee attempts to write its report on 2016 election meddling.
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"The only thing I've addressed is whether we had facts that suggest there was (collusion). We don't have any," Burr told reporters on Tuesday. Asked whether the committee's investigation exonerated Trump, Burr said: "Just saying what factually we've found to date. We haven't finished our investigation."
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"What we do know, and it's part of the public record, there's never been a campaign in American history that during the campaign and its aftermath that the campaign folks affiliated with the campaign had as many ties with Russia as the Trump campaign did," Warner said. "You get far down a thread and then it is interesting there are a number of the same people that ends up at the end of those threads, and many of those are the people we need to have come back and talk to us."
[Michael] Cohen was one of a number of witnesses, including Michael Flynn, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates, that the committee wants to interview but has not yet since they were charged by the special counsel, the aide said, so the panel didn't interfere with Mueller's probe,
Warner told CNN last month the accidental disclosure from Manafort's court filing that he was accused of sharing polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik — whom the special counsel has accused of having ties to Russian intelligence — was the "closest we've seen" to collusion.
The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand also adds more context to the original NBC News report:
Warner splits with Burr on collusion question (CNN)
The Senate Intelligence Committee is getting close to wrapping up its investigation of Russian election interference and to what extent the Trump campaign may have collaborated with a foreign adversary.
Investigators say they have unearthed no evidence so far that shows a direct link between the campaign and Russia.
But investigators disagree along party lines when it comes to the implications of a pattern of contacts they have documented betweenTrump associates and Russians — contacts that occurred before, during and after Russian intelligence operatives were seeking to help Donald Trump by leaking hacked Democratic emails and attacking his opponent, Hillary Clinton, on social media.
"If we write a report based upon the facts that we have, then we don't have anything that would suggest there was collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia," said Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an interview with CBS News last week.
Burr was careful to note that more facts may yet be uncovered, but he also made clear that the investigation was nearing an end.
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"We were never going find a contract signed in blood saying, 'Hey Vlad, we're going to collude,'" one Democratic aide said.
The series of contacts between Trump's associates, his campaign officials, his children and various Russians suggest a campaign willing to accept help from a foreign adversary, the Democrats say.
By many counts, Trump and his associates had more than 100 contacts with Russians before the January 2017 presidential inauguration.
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Democrats and other Trump opponents have long believed that special counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators would unearth new and more explosive evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians. Mueller may yet do so, although Justice Department and Congressional sources say they believe that he, too, is close to wrapping up his investigation.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee has been conducting the sole bipartisan inquiry, led by Burr and ranking Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia. The committee has sifted through some 300,000 documents, investigators tell NBC News, including classified intelligence shedding light on how the Russians communicated about their covert operation to interfere in the 2016 election.
U.S. intelligence agencies assess that the operation began as an effort to sow chaos and morphed into a plan to help Trump win.
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Democratic Senate investigators say it may take them six or seven months to write their final report once they are done with witness interviews. They say they have uncovered facts yet to be made public, and that they hope to make Americans more fully aware of the extent to which the Russians manipulated the U.S. presidential election with the help of some Trump officials, witting or unwitting.
The report, Democrats say, will not be good for Trump.
But they also made clear they haven't found proof of their worst fear: That the president formed a corrupt pact with Russia to offer sanctions relief or other favorable treatment in return for Russian help in the election.
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"There's an awful lot of connections of all these people," [Burr] said. "They may not be connections that are tied to 2016 elections in the United States, but just the sheer fact that they have a relationship — it may be business. It may be Russian intelligence. It may be they're all on the payroll of Oleg Deripaska," he added, referring to a Russian oligarch tied to Putin who had business dealings with [Paul] Manafort.
The final Senate report may not reach a conclusion on whether the contacts added up to collusion or coordination with Russia, Burr said.
Democrats told NBC News that's a distinct possibility.
"What I'm telling you is that I'm going to present, as best we can, the facts to you and to the American people," Burr told CBS. "And you'll have to draw your own conclusion as to whether you think that, by whatever definition, that's collusion."
Senate has uncovered no direct evidence of conspiracy between Trump campaign and Russia (NBC News)