Republicans on Tuesday have been ecstatically pointing to an NBC News article that reports the Senate Intelligence Committee has “uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.”
Here’s the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, tweeting out NBC’s Ken Dilanian’s on-air reporting, stressing that “even Democrats are admitting what we already knew.”
Not true.
And even Dilanian makes clear his reporting doesn’t exonerate anyone.
NBC News does appear to have jumped the gun.
“Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, rejected Republican Chairman Richard Burr’s recent statements that the committee has not found evidence of collusion, saying the investigation is still ongoing and the committee still had to interview key witnesses,” CNN reports.
“Respectfully, I disagree,” Warner told CNN 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.”
Meanwhile, many are noting that there’s no reason Congress needs to use any legal standard of conspiracy to impeach the President. And Justice Dept. expert Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S Attorney and former DEA Administrator, says for prosecutors there is almost never “direct evidence” of conspiracy, yet those cases get prosecuted and the criminals get convicted.
“A judge will tell you, and tell jurors when they instruct them at the end of a trial, that circumstantial evidence and direct evidence are given equal weight,” Rosenberg said Tuesday afternoon on MSNBC. “In fact, in the dozens and dozens of cases I tried to a jury, only once ever did I have direct evidence of a conspiracy. You almost never see that. So to say that there’s no direct evidence of a conspiracy is really not all that damning on the facts of the case.”