WASHINGTON -- FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday refused to say whether his bureau was investigating any possible ties between Russia and the Donald Trump's presidential campaign, citing policy not to comment on what the FBI might or might not be doing.
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Comey testified at the Senate's second hearing in a week addressing allegations of Russian election hacking. In late October he angered Democrats when he announced 11 days before the election that the FBI was looking at more emails as part of its investigation of Hillary Clinton.
"I would never comment on investigations -- whether we have one or not -- in an open forum like this, so I can't answer one way or another," Comey told the Senate's intelligence committee during his first public appearance before Congress since the disclosure about Clinton review.
"The irony of your making that statement, I cannot avoid," said Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent.
[INTERACTIVE: Read the intelligence report on Russian hacking in U.S. election]
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., insisted, "The American people have the right to know this."
It wasn't clear whether Wyden was alluding to an investigation that may be classified.
A U.S. official said Tuesday that top intelligence officials last week told Trump about an unsubstantiated report that Russia had compromising personal and financial information about him. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not allowed to publicly discuss the matter.
The briefing about the document was first reported by CNN. A summary of the allegations was separate from a classified assessment of Russia's attempts to meddle in the U.S. presidential election. Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the intelligence community's findings last week.
Shortly after news reports were published Tuesday about the briefing, Trump tweeted: "Fake news - a total political witch hunt!" Trump was expected to hold a previously scheduled news conference today to discuss his future plans regarding his role with the Trump Organization.
The unsubstantiated document on Trump was compiled by a former Western intelligence operative as part of an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client who opposed Trump, and later funded by Democrats, according to Mother Jones, which published an article about the report in October and said the operative had turned over the report to the FBI.
The New York Times reported that the operative had previously worked for British intelligence. The Associated Press has not been able to substantiate the information in the dossier, which misspelled the name of Russia's largest bank.
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said in an interview Tuesday on NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers that "nobody has sourced it. They're all unnamed, unspoken sources in the story." She said it may have originated with a Russian investigator or groups that wanted Clinton to win the White House.
It's unclear why the intelligence officials decided to brief the president and Trump on the uncorroborated information at this time, but lawmakers and others have repeatedly noted that Russia collects intelligence on Democrats and Republicans.
"The Russians also hacked systems associated with the Republicans. They just chose not to release that material yet," Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said Tuesday. "There's nothing that prevents them from doing so at a time of their choosing in the future."
Comey told lawmakers at the hearing that Russian hackers did penetrate the Republican National Committee's computer records, but he called it a "limited penetration of old RNC" computer systems that were "no longer in use."
While Comey did not go into detail, he appeared to be referring to a Russian-led attack on a contractor in Tennessee used by the Republican committee.
Federal investigators, speaking on background, have said that a single email server used by that contractor had been penetrated. But it was going out of service and contained outdated material that the Russians probably found of little value.
Comey and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, spoke to the committee about the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies' classified report presented last week to Obama, Trump and senior members of Congress. An unclassified version also was made public, outlining the agencies' claims of Russian actions designed to undermine the election and help Trump by casting Clinton in a bad light.
The FBI was among three U.S. intelligence agencies that collaborated on the report on Russia's election activity. It linked Russian President Vladimir Putin to the hacking of email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and individual Democrats like Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. It said there was no evidence that the Russians tampered with vote tallies; the agencies said they couldn't assess if Russia succeeded in influencing Americans to vote for Trump.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who opposed Trump in the GOP primary, said Russia's activity wasn't guided by its support for Trump, but rather "to influence and to potentially manipulate American public opinion for the purpose of discrediting individual political figures, sowing chaos and division in our politics, sowing doubts about the legitimacy of our elections."
Information for this article was contributed by Eileen Sullivan, Deb Riechmann and Kathleen Hennessey of The Associated Press and by David E. Sanger and Matt Flegenheimer of The New York Times.
A Section on 01/11/2017