2016 ELECTION/GOP/RUSSIA/SENATE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The Republican at the helm of the Senate’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election backed on Wednesday the assessment by American intelligence agencies that Moscow favored Donald J. Trump in the race, contradicting both the president and fellow Republicans in the House. Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he saw ‘no reason to dispute’ the intelligence assessment, which was delivered in the final weeks of the Obama administration. Mr. Burr’s statement, while indirect, offered a clear rebuke to Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters in the Republican Party and in the right-wing news media, who have sought to cast the assessment as the shoddy work of Obama loyalists bitter over Mr. Trump’s election victory. Russia’s only goal, those supporters have insisted, was to sow chaos, and thus it could not have colluded with a campaign it cared little about. The only logical conclusion, they contend, is the one that Mr. Trump has already reached: The investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, is a ‘witch hunt’ cooked up by Democrats desperate to undermine a president they detest.”
-Matthew Rosenberg, “Top Republican Senator Says ‘No Reason to Dispute’ That Russia Favored Trump,” The New York Times online, May 16, 2018