The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is joining the Armed Services Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence in its determination to review Russia's hacking of the 2016 presidential election — although their probe will have limitations.
Sen. Bob Corker, who serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN on Tuesday that they will hold both open hearings and classified ones to determine what happened.
"We are going to systematically walk through the entire Russia issue and fully understand what has transpired," Corker said Tuesday.
That said, there will be limits to the extent of Corker's probe, at least based on his unwillingness to acknowledge the likelihood that Russian interference was motivated by a desire to swing the election to Donald Trump.
"Any time we have a country that is trying to discredit our democracy, it's an important issue for us to pursue," Corker told CNN later on Tuesday. "How deep it goes and whether they actually tried to tip it toward a candidate or not it's hard for me to discern at present."
Corker also conceded that, when it came to Trump's secretary of state nomination ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, "I have no idea what his feelings are on Russia."
Corker was willing to take well-deserved pot shots at the Russian dictator, however.
"Putin remarkably and disappointingly has ended up being front and center on the world stage," Corker said. "It's hard to believe for a country that has so little going for it."
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