Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) tells The Hill he already has sent a good number of cases to Special Counsel Robert Mueller because lawmakers believe witnesses lied, and he likely will have more.
“We’ve made quite a few referrals,” Burr, who chairs the Senate panel, told The Hill on Thursday afternoon. “I won’t get into the numbers, but where we have found criminality, we have made those referrals and I’m sure that they’re not the last."
(...)
His latest comments come after President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty last month to lying to the House and Senate Intelligence committees about plans to build a Trump property in Moscow.
Cohen, who also agreed to cooperate in Mueller’s sprawling investigation, has admitted to lying to Congress in order to minimize Trump’s connection to the proposed project and to limit the ongoing Russia probes.
Cohen got two months' prison time for lying to Congress, but he will serve that concurrently with the three years he received for other admitted crimes.
A committee aide told The Hill that the panel did not refer Cohen’s case to Mueller. Instead, Mueller was able to review the transcript from Cohen’s interview with the committee in October 2017 after obtaining consent from Cohen’s attorney, the aide said.
(...)
The panel has requested to interview Cohen again, among others. Burr said Thursday he is “fairly confident” the probe will wrap up in spring of next year.
(...)
Since Cohen pleaded guilty, some attention has been paid to the transcript of September 2017 testimony from Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s eldest son, before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Trump Jr. told lawmakers then that the discussions about a possible Trump Tower Moscow within the Trump Organization “faded away I believed at the end of ’14” and “certainly” did not take place in 2016.
Those details conflict with Cohen’s account to Mueller. According to court filings in the case of Trump’s former lawyer, the discussions continued as late at June 2016, at which point Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Cohen also briefed Trump and members of his family about the project, prosecutors said.
Intel panel expects to refer more cases of suspected lying to Mueller (The Hill)