The intelligence community has completed a long-delayed review of transcripts connected to the House Republican-led investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, a development that could reignite the furor over the long-dormant probe.

Ric Grenell, President Donald Trump's acting director of national intelligence, informed lawmakers this week in newly disclosed correspondence that the White House has dropped its demand to review aspects of the testimony, which had led to a year-long standoff with Chairman Adam Schiff, who took control of the committee last year.

The move paves the way for as many as 53 transcripts from that investigation to be released publicly, more than two years after the probe concluded.

“After more than a year of unnecessary delay, the ODNI has finally concluded its protracted classification review of the Committee’s transcripts, and it also appears the White House has now abandoned its improper insistence on reviewing key transcripts, which the Committee appropriately rejected," a House Intelligence Committee spokesman said in a statement.

The spokesman indicated that the panel would be reviewing the intelligence community’s proposed redactions: “Our review of ODNI’s newly proposed redactions will be as expeditious as possible given the constraints of the pandemic, and we look forward to releasing these transcripts, which relate to misconduct by the Trump campaign and the president himself.” Aides to Grenell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The release of the transcripts themselves has been a saga. The GOP-led intelligence committee voted to send them to the intelligence community for a classification review in September 2018, and then-chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) suggested they could be released in time for the midterm elections. But the panel didn't transmit the transcripts to the DNI's office until November, nine months after the conclusion of an investigation riven by partisan sniping and distrust.

In March 2019, the ODNI informed lawmakers that the White House intended to review the transcripts — a prospect that Schiff rejected as an inappropriate incursion on the committee's request for a classification review. Intel officials agreed not to share the transcripts with the White House, but the episode led to a lengthy standoff. In June, intelligence officials proposed redactions for 43 of the 53 transcripts but indicated the White House wanted access to the remaining ten.

By September, as the House was gearing up for impeachment hearings against Trump, Schiff convened the committee for a vote to release the 43 vetted transcripts as well as two of the 10 stalled transcripts that were determined to include no classified information. The panel unanimously supported his proposal. Nunes, at the time, dinged the DNI's office for foot-dragging, and Schiff said the White House had "hijacked" the process. He indicated he intended to quickly release the vetted transcripts.

But as the impeachment process raged, the transcript matter went on the backburner, where it remained until last week, when Trump allies began demanding that Schiff produce them publicly. As the calls from conservatives mounted, Grenell sent his letter indicating that the issue with the 10 disputed transcripts had been resolved and there are no remaining impediments to releasing them.

It's unclear how quickly the panel can review ODNI's redactions, but the transcripts are expected to reach thousands of pages and reopen matters related to the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia — and the insistence of Trump and his allies that the entire matter was a "hoax" meant to derail his presidency.

President Donald Trump’s pick to police his administration’s massive coronavirus economic rescue effort vowed Tuesday that he would not seek Trump’s permission before reporting to lawmakers.

“Do you plan to gain presidential approval before investigating contacts, issuing reports or communicating with Congress?” asked Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), during a confirmation hearing for Brian Miller, Trump’s pick as a newly created special inspector general for pandemic response.

“No senator,” Miller replied.

Miller’s sworn assertion suggests he plans to uphold the language in the $2 trillion CARES Act, which requires the new inspector general to report to Congress anytime he is impeded in his investigative work. It’s a rejection of the position held by Trump, who in a March 27 signing statement said the newly established watchdog could not be permitted or required to report to Congress without “presidential supervision.”

“I do not understand, and my Administration will not treat, this provision as permitting the [IG] to issue reports to the Congress without the presidential supervision required [by the Constitution],” Trump said in the statement.

In the exchange with Cortez Masto, Miller also indicated that he would inform Congress “immediately” if any agencies asked him to withhold information, and that he would consider any effort to dole out massive sums of taxpayer money to states based “for political gain” a violation that he would review.

The back-and-forth was the most critical of Miller’s two-plus hour confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, which featured a slew of questions from Democrats about whether Miller’s current role as a White House lawyer disqualified him from acting as an independent inspector general.

Miller repeatedly vowed to resist any pressure from the president or other administration officials seeking to undermine his independence. He cited his track record of battling with officials from George W. Bush’s administration as a federal watchdog and vowed he wouldn’t “bend” for anyone in Trump’s orbit either.

But Miller sidestepped questions about whether he played a role, as a White House lawyer, in Trump’s abrupt dismissal of intelligence community watchdog Michael Atkinson last month or the president’s subsequent move to sideline another watchdog, Glenn Fine, who was initially picked to oversee the government’s broad coronavirus response. Miller, too, declined, to say whether he agreed with Trump’s characterization of Atkinson as a “disgrace to IGs.”

The hearing quickly became a skirmish in Congress’ broader confrontation with Trump’s efforts to dismantle or assert control over the independent watchdogs charged with monitoring his administration. Republicans largely backed Miller, rejecting suggestions that he might not be independent enough of the president. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) called such suggestions “innuendo.”

Miller is the first inspector general nominee to come before the Senate since Trump began a concerted effort to remake the community of federal watchdogs and remove those he has deemed, without basis, as acting with an anti-Trump bias. And Senate Democrats have raised concerns about whether a White House aide can truly exercise independence from a president determined to tighten his grip on the inspector general community.

“Looking at the last 20 years, we found only one IG candidate was nominated while serving in the White House counsel’s office, another nominee served in the White House counsel’s office under an earlier administration,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. “Both of them resigned, one for politicizing the office, the other for a lack of independence. Not a great track record.”

Miller and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who appeared via video, sparred as she pressed him to make commitments on what might constitute potential abuses worthy of investigation.

Though he first resisted engaging in what he called "hypotheticals" — she said he made the commitments earlier to her in private — he agreed that a bailed-out corporation that lays off employees could spur an investigation, as well as companies that lobbied the White House and Congress before receiving funds.

"Certainly, situations where companies are spending the money for profits and laying off workers seems to be a situation that I would want to investigate," he said.

Under questioning from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Miller said all inspectors general should be willing to face firing for providing honest information to their superiors.

"You should never be afraid of stating the truth and if you have to be fired, you’re fired," he said. "But you always have to be prepared, at least, to walk away from your job."

For his part, Miller, who Trump tapped as “special inspector general for pandemic response,” pledged to operate free of political influence, in rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. Miller, who is likely to be confirmed in the Republican-controlled Senate, would oversee a $500-billion fund managed by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve meant to shore up companies and industries ravaged amid the coronavirus crisis.

“I think independence is vital for the effective operation of any inspector general,” Miller said in response to questioning from the committee’s chairman, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). “I met with resistance throughout my tenure as inspector general. I conducted investigations of major contractors, much to the chagrin of leaders at the GSA … Ultimately I was proven right.”

To emphasize his willingness to buck a Republican administration, Miller recounted an investigation of President George W. Bush's GSA administrator, Lurita Doan, in which she marshaled agency officials to resist his investigation and described him as a "terrorist." He said he persisted with his probe and that ultimate Bush demanded her resignation.

The hearing became Democrats’ first chance to shine a public light on the independence of IGs since early April, when Trump fired Atkinson over his handling of a whistleblower complaint accusing the president of wrongdoing — one that ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment in the House and acquittal in the Senate.

Since then, Trump also demoted Glenn Fine, the inspector general picked by colleagues to broadly overseeing the government-wide coronavirus response and nominated a replacement for the Health and Human Services inspector general, after accusing her without evidence of being an anti-Trump partisan.

Warren said Miller should have been disqualified for the position after working as one of Trump's impeachment attorneys, but she said "you will however have the chance to defend your independence and your integrity by your actions."

"If you stick to the commitments that you have made here, and you are an aggressive watchdog, then I'm prepared to work with you," she said.

"I would like to work with you, even if you don't vote for my confirmation as you indicated yesterday," he responded.

Democrats bristled at Miller’s response to questions about his role, as a White House lawyer, in responding to a GAO investigation of the president’s handling of military aid to Ukraine — a central issue that led to Trump’s impeachment. Miller replied to a GAO inquiry on the matter by deferring to a response from the White House budget office and declining to provide additional information to auditors. Miller told lawmakers Tuesday that his response was simply to avoid a duplicative response and that he was simply “answering the mail.”

The Federal Reserve, backstopped by Treasury funds, last month revealed programs designed to provide $2 trillion in support for the economy for a wide range of businesses as well as state and city governments with hemorrhaging budgets.

Trump indicated in his signing statement that he rejects requirements that inspectors general unilaterally communicate with Congress — and that he will ultimately decide whether the inspector general is able to speak to lawmakers about that issue, emphasizing that inspectors general are executive branch officials who report to him. His statement, though, ignores the long-standing independence afforded to inspectors general, which Trump has repeatedly tested during his term.

Though Democrats have raised the loudest alarms about Trump’s treatment of inspectors general, some Republicans, too, have gently encouraged him to reconsider his posture, including Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and James Lankford (R-Okla.).

John Ratcliffe was on a mission Tuesday.

Sitting for nearly three hours before the Senate Intelligence Committee, President Donald Trump's pick to lead the country's 17 intelligence agencies worked hard to shed his reputation as a partisan Republican and stalwart defender of the president — repeatedly breaking with Trump’s attacks on the U.S. intelligence community as he sought to ease his path to Senate confirmation.

Under intense and sometimes combative questioning during his confirmation hearing, the Texas congressman vowed to be an independent voice and said senators shouldn't dwell on the past.

“I want to look forward, not back,” said Ratcliffe, who made a name for himself as a member of the president’s impeachment defense team.

Still, senators grilled Ratcliffe about previous statements that seemed to echo the president’s charges about a “deep state” trying to undermine his agenda, with Democrats seeking to portray him as a partisan warrior. His responses to their questions at times ran counter to his previous posture as a fiery defender of the president against former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the House’s impeachment inquiry.

But Ratcliffe repeatedly pledged to separate politics from intelligence work, stressing that the job of a congressman and the job as the nation’s top intelligence official are different. Ratcliffe, Trump’s nominee to serve as the director of national intelligence, pledged to provide the president and members of Congress with “timely, accurate and objective intelligence.”

“Let me be very clear: Regardless of what anyone wants our intelligence to reflect, the intelligence I provide, if confirmed, will not be impacted or altered as a result of outside influence,” Ratcliffe said, adding that he would provide intelligence briefings to the president even if he knew Trump would disagree with the conclusions, or if he believed his job were at risk for doing so.

“Anyone’s views on what they want the intelligence to be will never impact the intelligence that I deliver — never,” Ratcliffe said under intense questioning by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “I won’t shade intelligence for anyone.”

Ratcliffe also said he never discussed “loyalty” with the president before he was picked. When asked to name an instance in which he broke with Trump, Ratcliffe named the president’s initial decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

Tuesday’s confirmation hearing comes amid an unprecedented global health crisis and ahead of the 2020 presidential election, which national security officials have long warned will be a prime target for interference from foreign adversaries like Russia. Senators in particular focused on Moscow’s election interference, in addition to the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ratcliffe has relatively little experience working in the intelligence field, though he has served on the House Intelligence Committee for more than a year.

Trump initially chose him for the DNI post last year, but Ratcliffe withdrew from consideration just days later amid questions about whether he embellished aspects of his resume from his time as a U.S. attorney in Texas. He was first elected to the House in 2014.

Ratcliffe can be confirmed with a simple majority, and this time around, no Republicans have signaled opposition. After the hearing, Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) praised Ratcliffe and said he hoped to send the nomination to the Senate floor as soon as next week.

“He answered everything, and I think he did a very successful job at one, verifying that he's more than capable of this job, and two will serve in an independent capacity,” Burr told reporters.

In addition to Ratcliffe’s qualifications, the hearing focused extensively on the committee’s recent conclusions about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — namely, that the Kremlin’s malign activities were carried out with the intention of boosting Trump’s candidacy.

That conclusion contradicts the House intelligence panel’s 2018 report which disputed the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment that Moscow interfered with the goal of helping Trump. The president himself has also rejected that view.

Ratcliffe during Tuesday’s hearing said he had no reason to dispute either committee’s conclusion, but said he has not yet seen “the underlying intelligence to tell me why there is a difference of opinion between the two committees.” He also pledged that he would not dismantle the intelligence community’s election security unit ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and said Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a very bad actor.”

Ratcliffe gained national prominence last year during the House’s hearing with Mueller, in addition to the impeachment hearings. Ratcliffe endeared himself to the president after grilling Mueller on a host of issues, and he continued that streak during the impeachment investigation, using his perch on the Intelligence and Judiciary committees to fiercely defend the president against Democrats’ charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Ratcliffe later faced tough questions about his views on whistleblowers, given his criticisms of the official whose whistleblower complaint about the president’s conduct toward Ukraine sparked the impeachment inquiry last year.

“I don’t want to re-litigate old issues of what happened with the impeachment inquiry,” Ratcliffe said under questioning from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

The whistleblower complaint was handled with a “lack of due process” during the House’s impeachment inquiry, Ratcliffe said, adding that he did not personally have an issue with the unnamed whistleblower’s actions. But Ratcliffe repeatedly slammed the whistleblower during the impeachment hearings, even implying that the individual lied about Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Ratcliffe said he does not have enough information to assess whether Trump acted appropriately when he fired Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general and the official who transmitted the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to the congressional intelligence committees. But he said he has “no issues” with Atkinson based on his experience with him, adding: “I think he did what he thought was right.”

Later in the hearing, the Texas Republican pledged to be “laser-focused” on the origins of the novel coronavirus.

Last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence took the unusual step of issuing a public statement acknowledging that the clandestine community continues to “rigorously examine” whether the outbreak “began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” the city in China where the virus was initially identified.

Trump undercut that statement hours later when he claimed he had seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” that the coronavirus originated from the lab, though he declined to offer details.

If he is confirmed to the post, Ratcliffe would replace another Trump ally, Richard Grenell, atop the nation’s intelligence apparatus. Grenell has drawn the ire of congressional Democrats over his fiery personality and his reputation as a GOP political operative.

“Some have suggested that your main qualification for confirmation to this post is that you are not Ambassador Grenell,” Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) said. “But frankly, that is not enough.”

Trump appointed Grenell in an acting capacity after forcing out the previous acting director, Joseph Maguire, after learning that Maguire had authorized congressional briefings on Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2020 campaign.

Republican senators have been eager to install a permanent nominee to lead the intelligence community, and several of them have commented favorably about Ratcliffe’s qualifications.

“[U.S. intelligence officials] deserve, and the country needs, the certainty of a permanent, Senate-confirmed director of national intelligence,” Burr said.

And Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of Senate GOP leadership, lamented that the post “has gone vacant for too long.”

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on Monday that the American economy needs to reopen quickly and that tens of thousands of more Americans may die from the novel coronavirus, insisting that Americans are “gonna have to” accept that.Speaking to CNN correspondent Dana Bash on her The Daily DC podcast, Christie—who now works as an ABC News contributor—pushed for the reversal of stay-at-home orders in order to open up businesses and ramp up economic activity.Confronted with recent models that now show that as many as 135,000 Americans will die due to decreased social distancing amid the pandemic, Christie essentially threw up his hands and said there really wasn’t a choice.“Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can—but the question is, towards what end, ultimately?” Christie said. “Are there ways that we can thread the middle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what?”Echoing previous comments he’s made that the country cannot wait to reopen the economy, the former Trump transition team member asserted that “we’re going to destroy the American way of life” if people don’t immediately get back to work.Bash then asked the ex-governor if the public could accept reopening following reports that a White House model is now projecting a daily death toll of 3,000 by June 1. “They’re gonna have to,” Christie bluntly replied. “We’re in the midst of a pandemic that we haven’t seen in over 100 years. And we’re going to have to continue to do things.”Asked how he would tell the American public about the need to reopen if he were the president, Christie responded: “The message is that the American people have gone through significant death before.”“We sent our young men during World War II over to Europe, out to the Pacific, knowing, knowing that many of them would not come home alive,” he said. “And we decided to make that sacrifice because what we were standing up for was the American way of life. In the very same way now, we have to stand up for the American way of life.”About half the states have begun to reopen public spaces and their economies in recent days despite cases growing in many areas and the confirmed U.S. death count from coronavirus approaching 70,000. President Donald Trump, who has called for states to “LIBERATE,” casually conceded during a Sunday Fox News town hall that the final death toll could reach 100,000 after claiming just a few weeks ago that it would be half that number.Chris Christie Clashes With ‘The View’ Hosts on ImpeachmentRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.