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GOP senator calls for exhaustive investigation into Trump-Russia connections

By Rebecca Savransky - 02/14/17 11:22 AM EST

Sen. Roy BluntRoy Dean BluntGOP senator pushes back on Trump’s attacks on Maxine Waters’s intelligence Pair of DC fundraisers aims to boost McCaskill challenger Kansas City mayoral candidate: Trump is trying to define patriotism MORE (R-Mo.) on Tuesday said there should be an exhaustive investigation into the ties between Russia and the Trump administration.

"I think everybody needs that investigation to happen," Blunt told KTRS radio, CNN reported.

"And the Senate Intelligence Committee, again that I serve on, has been given the principal responsibility to look into this, and I think we should look into it exhaustively so that at the end of this process, nobody wonders whether there was a stone left unturned, and shouldn't reach conclusions before you have the information that you need to have to make those conclusions."
 
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Blunt said the Senate Intelligence Committee should also talk to the president's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, "very soon," adding that discussion should "answer a lot of questions."
 
"What did he know? What did he do? And is there any reason to believe that anybody else knew that and didn't take the kind of action they should have taken?" he said.
 
"For all of us, finding out if there's a problem or not and sooner rather than later is the right thing to do," he added.
 
He said he thinks the president has put together a strong national security team.
 
"And a lot of those people on that team have real concerns about Russia," Blunt said.
 
"And just because the president is trying to figure out how to talk to this dangerous power that's been an adversary of ours for a long time, certainly nothing wrong with that."
 
Blunt said every president has a chance to re-examine "how we deal with people that can do us either great harm or great good, depending on which relationship you're trying to build on."
 
Blunt also said during the interview that Flynn had served the country well in the past, but the senator emphasized the importance of being truthful.
 
"The national security adviser of all the people that work with and for the president has to be absolutely trustworthy and truthful and apparently he wasn't and he paid the price for that," Blunt said.
 
"In this case, absolute trustworthiness is the most important thing, even better than, even more important than knowledge, you've got to trust what the national security adviser says and apparently that wasn't gonna be the case here." 

Flynn resigned late Monday after reports he misled senior Trump White House officials about his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the U.S.

His future in the White House had come under speculation since reports surfaced last week that he talked about sanctions against Russia before Trump was sworn in.

Flynn blamed his resignation late Monday on the "fast pace of events" that led him to "inadvertently" give Vice President Mike Pence and others "incomplete information" about his phone conversations with the Russian ambassador.

Tags Mike Pence Roy Blunt