he House Intelligence Committee on Thursday released thousands of pages of declassified interview transcripts from the Russia investigation that show that more than a year into the probe senior FBI and intelligence officials could offer no specific proof of collusion between Donald Trump's campaign and Moscow and instead offered rambling explanations of why the probe had persisted.

The testimony of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe typified the testimony that was given back in 2017 to the committee, then under the leadership of Rep. Devin Nunes.

McCabe admitted at one point that while the FBI opened up the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation based on a tip from Australia that George Papadopoulos may have been told Russia possessed emails of Hillary Clinton, the bureau suspected the former Trump campaign adviser had little or no contact with Moscow.

So agents pivoted instead to another adviser, Carter Page, who had been the focus of Christopher Steele's now-discredited dossier, he explained.

"Papadopoulos' comment didn't particularly indicate that he was the person that had had — that was interacting with the Russians," McCabe answered when asked by lawmakers why a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant request in October 2016 focused only on Page and not the man the FBI originally predicated the Trump investigation upon.

It was one of the few extraordinary admissions from McCabe: The FBI opened up an entire counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign on a figure agents did not believe was having contact with Moscow.