Former Trump campaign chairman Stephen K. Bannon has caught the attention of Senate Intelligence Committee investigators, according to a report in Reuters.
Reuters reported that the committee is probing Bannon’s contacts with two notable Trump campaign associates and Moscow: foreign policy advisor-cum-coffee boy George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, another self-described foreign policy guru who has drawn attention for his Kremlin sympathies.
The report also states that investigators will look at Bannon’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica. That firm, located in the UK and partly funded by Republican backer Robert Mercer, has attracted controversy for using data mined from social media to individually target potentially sympathetic voters in political campaigns. Bannon held the position of vice president at Cambridge Analytica from 2014 to 2016, before joining the Trump campaign.
Bannon attorney Bill Burck denied that Bannon himself was under investigation in a strongly worded statement to TPM.
“The Senate Intelligence Committee has expressed an interest in interviewing Mr. Bannon as a witness, just as they have many other people involved in the Trump Campaign. He is cooperating voluntarily and has not been subpoenaed,” Burck wrote in the statement. “The Committee has never suggested that he’s under investigation himself and to claim otherwise as the Reuters article does is recklessly false.”
Reuters cited an anonymous source as saying that Bannon was not a focus of the Mueller investigation.
The report follows one day after a Washington Post story saying that Bannon had testified for a second time in the Mueller inquiry, this time about potential coordination between Republican operative Roger Stone, Wikileaks, and Russia.
Papadopoulos did not reply to a request for comment.
