“…
“You can’t look at this issue without considering the timing and context in which she arrived in the Senate,” said Halie Soifer, who was Harris’ national security adviser during her early days in the Senate. “Her first month in Washington was also Donald Trump’s.”
Her time on the panel “solidified her worldview in terms of the importance of defending democracies and multilateral alliances,” Soifer said of the panel’s work on assessing Russia’s global campaign against the U.S. and its allies.
It was also Harris, a newcomer to the panel and to Washington writ large, who prodded her fellow committee members to conduct an aggressive investigation that would stand up to public scrutiny, according to two people who were in the room at the time and two other congressional staffers briefed later on closed-door deliberations of the panel.
“It’s a committee that we always prided ourselves with bipartisanship, particularly back when we were doing the Russia investigation,” Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the panel, told NOTUS. “She fit very much into that mold, or, you know, had the committee work together on items, but she also was not at all intimidated about asking hard and tough questions.”
Three people said it was Harris, drawing on her experience as a prosecutor, who laid out expectations for what senators and staff should be doing and how they should divvy up responsibilities. And one person said that when other senators hesitated at the possibility of authorizing certain investigative steps like interviewing Trump’s family, it was Harris who pushed them to follow every investigative thread to its conclusion. (And indeed, the GOP-led panel would end up subpoenaing Donald Trump Jr. and interviewing Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, twice.)
“They came out of there saying, ‘Wow, she fucking knows what she’s doing,’” recalled one former Democratic Senate aide whose boss was in the 2017 closed-door meeting. …”
