FBI, NSA to testify on allegations of Russian hacking

WASHINGTON - Russia’s campaign to disrupt last year’s presidential election has spawned a tangle of inquiries with competing agendas and timetables, and with little agreement on the most important things that should be investigated.

Staff members for the Senate Intelligence Committee have spent weeks poring over raw intelligence that led the Obama administration to conclude that Russia meddled in the election, but they have yet to be given any access to far more politically charged information - evidence of contacts between Russians and associates of President Donald Trump.

The House Intelligence Committee is conducting its own investigation of issues surrounding Trump and Russia, but the committee’s Republican chairman has said a top priority is to unmask whoever is speaking to journalists about classified information. Democrats on the committee hope the investigation can force a disclosure of the president’s tax returns.

Monday will bring the first public intelligence committee hearing on Russia since November, when the FBI director, James B. Comey, and the director of the National Security Agency, Michael S. Rogers, will testify before the House panel.

The progress of these congressional inquiries depends at least in part on a third investigation by the FBI, in which counterintelligence agents have been scrutinizing past contacts between Russian officials and Trump’s aides. Officials say the FBI effort will probably take many months or even years, however eager Congress might be for quick answers.

And, while the FBI conducts its investigation in secrecy, the White House insists publicly that there is nothing to investigate.

“It puts us in a very difficult position,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a former FBI agent who served as the government’s senior counterintelligence official and retired last year. “We are pushed and pulled by Congress, and then having to address the concerns of the White House and Justice Department.”

The overlapping investigations have, in some cases, already been plagued by partisan sniping and misdirection by Trump, raising questions about whether there can ever be a full public accounting of the scope of Russia’s campaign to influence the election in November.