Senate's Russia reports to start publishing in July

Final versions of the Senate's five-part report on Russian interference in the 2016 election will be released in stages starting in July, the panel chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, told POLITICO on Thursday.

"It will start right after we come back from the Fourth," the North Carolina Republican said.

Burr and his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Mark Warner, have been at work for more than two years on a probe examining the Moscow-led interference campaign in the last presidential election. The committee has reviewed more than 300,000 pages of documents and conducted interviews with more than 200 witnesses, including a recent closed door sit-down with Donald Trump Jr.

"It's over," Burr said of the witness interviews, adding that the committee's work will come out in five installments.

The first report, Burr said, will cover election security. That will be followed by additional reports reviewing the Obama administration's handling of the Russian interference effort; social media's role in the disruption campaign; the Senate panel's assessment of the Obama-era intelligence committee's conclusions about Russian interference; and a final assessment of the main questions surrounding the Trump campaign and whether it was engaged in a conspiracy with Russia.

"I'm guessing right now that it will be mid- to end of September," Burr said of the fifth installment's timing for public release. "I just don't know how long it will take to declassify."

All of the panel's final conclusions remain under wraps, though it did release preliminary summaries of its work in 2018 on election security and the intelligence community assessment. Burr earlier this year also told CBS that the committee had not yet found any conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia — a statement that Warner disputed. Burr has also said the committee's work would go beyond the contours of now-former special counsel Robert Mueller's probe. Mueller concluded his probe in April after 22 months, announcing that he had not established a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia but declined to make a determination on whether the president had obstructed justice.

While Mueller is headed to testify July 17 before two House committees, Burr said he had no plans to bring the former FBI director in for public or private testimony.

"I actually took him at his word that he put everything in the report that was relevant," Burr said.