Marco Rubio zeroes in on Russia — not Obama

The new Senate Intelligence Committee chairman has no interest in fighting Trump's election-year battles.

Donald Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill are pushing aggressive new investigations targeting the president’s political opponents. Marco Rubio isn’t joining the fray.

As Rubio assumes the acting chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Florida Republican is distancing himself from a GOP-led probe targeting Hunter Biden. He has declined to embrace Trump’s “Obamagate” claims. And he is warning the Republicans spearheading the Biden investigation not to promote Russian disinformation in the process.

“I’m not going to accuse any member who believes that they are exercising oversight to be colluding with a foreign power,” Rubio said in an interview last week. “I will say to you that I think it’s pretty clear that the Russians are constantly pursuing narratives that they believe will drive conflict in our politics and divide us against each other.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee has historically been a bipartisan one, but Rubio is taking over at a time when partisan tensions in the Senate are perhaps higher than they have ever been, which may bring drawbacks to the influential perch.

Trump is actively encouraging Republicans to join his election-year revenge play against those who led investigations that ensnared him, his associates and his presidential campaign. Rubio, on the other hand, appears more concerned about Russian interference in the next presidential election — a sensitive subject for Trump, who bristles at any mention of Moscow swaying American elections.

It’s an approach that provides continuity with his predecessor Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) but ultimately puts him on a collision course with Trump and his conservative allies, who are pushing for a forceful campaign against former senior Obama administration officials, including Joe Biden.

And unlike Burr, who plans to retire in 2022, Rubio still has political ambitions. He has expressed openness to another presidential run, and in the meantime is seeking to establish a legacy on foreign-policy and national-security issues. Running afoul of Trump or his base could undermine all that.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appointed Rubio as acting chairman of the Intelligence Committee after Burr temporarily relinquished the post amid an intensifying federal investigation into his stock transactions. McConnell said Rubio was the “natural choice,” a nod to his decade serving on the panel.

Rubio’s concerns about Russian disinformation echo those of Burr, who last year privately told GOP Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa that their corruption probe into Hunter Biden — the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s son — could aid the Kremlin’s efforts to sow chaos and distrust in the U.S. political system. POLITICO first reported Burr’s private warning.

“On that front, it’s important to remind everyone that [Vladimir] Putin is not a Republican or a Democrat,” Rubio said. “What he seeks more than anything else is to put us at each other’s throat. And nowadays that’s not a very hard thing to do.”

Rubio’s Republican counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), has been hinting at “criminal referrals” for members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. Rubio is steering clear of those and other efforts that Democrats — and privately, some Republicans — say could aid Russian intelligence.

When asked about such GOP initiatives, Rubio emphasized that his panel has jurisdiction over the activities of the intelligence community rather than the FBI or Justice Department. And he urged senators to be “wise” about the “ongoing threat” of election interference from Russia and other countries.

“If we hear or see something, I’ll encourage them to go read up on the intelligence they have access to,” Rubio said, adding, “Ultimately we can’t control what people decide to believe or say.”

Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has been conducting an investigation into Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, and is exploring claims that a Democratic-aligned public-relations firm sought to leverage Hunter Biden’s role on the board in order to influence State Department policies under the Obama administration.

Democrats have said the investigation itself is a misuse of the Senate’s resources and simply designed to boost the president’s reelection prospects, pointing to Trump’s efforts to prop up the same allegations against Hunter Biden. Critics of the probe have also said it undermines U.S. national security by giving a boost to Russian intelligence and the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign to suggest that it was Ukraine, not Russia, intervening in U.S. affairs.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, commended Rubio for his skeptical posture toward those probes. Rubio and Warner have a close working relationship and have teamed up to tackle Russia’s influence in Europe, among other initiatives.

“It’s only May, and attempts by foreigners, whether Russians or someone else, to interfere in our elections is only going to get worse,” Warner said in an interview Tuesday. “I’m glad Chairman Rubio recognizes that and so far wants to keep our committee from being used in those schemes.”

Johnson was forced to scrap a committee vote in March to authorize a subpoena for Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who made unsubstantiated claims about Ukrainian collusion with the Democratic National Committee in 2016, amid concerns about his credibility.

Johnson’s decision came after the FBI’s foreign influence task force briefed committee aides on Telizhenko, and after an all-senators classified briefing erupted into a combative war of words among senators who raised concerns about the Senate’s pursuit of the Biden allegations. Senators’ questions, directed toward top U.S. intelligence officials, focused on whether Telizhenko was taking part in a Russian disinformation campaign, POLITICO previously reported.

Last week, Johnson’s committee voted on party lines to authorize the first subpoena as part of the investigation. Johnson has sought to quell concerns about the information making its way to the committee, maintaining that he and his aides are carefully vetting both the documents and the sources.

Most of the Senate Republican Conference appears to support Johnson’s efforts, and the Wisconsin Republican has said he plans to release an interim report on the probe over the summer. In recent days, Trump’s allies in the Senate — including McConnell — have more fully embraced many of the theories driving Trump’s desire for revenge against his political foes, most notably the Obama administration over its handling of the initial Russia investigation.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced last week that his panel will conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the origins of the Russia probe — one that is expected to ensnare several high-ranking Obama administration officials, and is likely to lead to several subpoenas. Trump and his allies have been calling for such actions, arguing that Obama officials illegally targeted the Trump campaign and the president’s associates.

Rubio has called that probe a “valid area of inquiry” given the documented abuses of the surveillance courts. But he has declined to endorse Trump’s “Obamagate” claims, which include the allegation that the former president himself was involved in an illegal effort to undermine the incoming Trump administration, of which there is no evidence. And in 2017, Rubio pushed back against Trump’s unsupported claim that Obama had Trump Tower “wiretapped” during the 2016 campaign. Earlier, he criticized Trump for using hacked materials from WikiLeaks and encouraging the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Throughout Trump’s presidency, Rubio — who was memorably defeated by Trump in 2016 — has been careful to not directly criticize him, even as he has chosen not to cozy up to him.

But his posture could soon make him a target of Trump or his allies. Like Burr, Rubio is viewed by Democrats and Republicans alike as a fair actor on intelligence issues. And it was often that persona that got Burr in trouble with Trumpworld — most notably, his decision to issue a subpoena to the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.

The committee is also expected to soon release the fifth and final installment of its yearslong review of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. That report will focus on the counterintelligence nature of the initial federal investigation, including allegations of coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Rubio’s warnings about election interference come as some suspect that it is happening in real time. Russia reportedly tried to hack Burisma, an indication that it was looking for derogatory information about the Bidens. Warner has said Johnson should be careful of “potentially viewing manipulated Ukrainian information.”

In addition, just last week, Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian parliamentarian who has met with Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, released recordings of Biden’s phone calls with Ukraine’s former president, Petro Poroshenko. Derkach has long had ties to Russia and, like Telizhenko, has pushed unsupported claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Trump Jr. amplified the recordings on social media.

Both Rubio and Warner pointed to that release as further evidence that Moscow again is seeking to interfere in American elections. Warner said it showed that “there’s absolutely good reason to be concerned,” while Rubio warned that it could be the first of many efforts in a long, grueling presidential campaign.

“I think as a society we should anticipate that that’s the new normal for the time to come,” Rubio said. “And we should view everything with massive grains of salt about the sourcing.”