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As the number of documented contacts between Trump campaign aides and Russian officials grows, congressional investigators are increasingly looking at the events that occurred around those meetings to determine if they provide evidence of a Russian influence campaign.

Whether there was any collusion there is of keen interest to our committee, said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. This could all be coincidence or could be collusion.

Trump has continually denied lingering allegations that associates of his campaign had been in contact with the Russians. In a Feb. 16 news conference, Trump underlined previous denials, saying, "I have nothing to do with Russia. I told you, I have no deals there, I have no anything," and said that "the news is fake."

Senior Republican leaders in Washington have said they remain unconvinced the timeline points to anything out of the ordinary.

We have seen no evidence from any of these ongoing investigations that anybody in the trump campaign or the trump team was involved in any of this, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) told ABC Newss Mary Bruce. We've been presented with no evidence that an American was colluding with the Russians to meddle in the election.

A key period that is gaining interest from investigators is July 2016, as the Republican National Convention got underway in Cleveland. On July 18, party insiders took the unusual step of altering the official GOP platform by watering down its position on the use of force to protect the Ukraine from Russian incursions.

The champagne corks were going off when that happened, said Paul Joyal, a Russian intelligence expert and managing director of National Strategies.

Two days later, on July 20, the Russian Ambassador to the United States surfaced in Cleveland, meeting at different points with then-Senator Sessions (R-AL) who served as a campaign advisor and now as Trump's Attorney General and with a one-time Trump foreign policy adviser named Carter Page. Page later denied any meeting had occurred, telling PBS Newshour, I had no meetings. No meetings.

That same week, on July 22, WikiLeaks posted the first of the hacked Democratic party e-mails.

July seems to be a key month, Schiff told ABC News.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told ABC News he considered that month to be a turning point. He said investigators are likely to explore how hackers changed their approach to releasing stolen material.

The selective leaking of that information in a way that was I think initially just to throw chaos into the election but increasingly about mid-summer switched from let's just throw chaos into let's favor Mr. Trump at the expense of Hillary Clinton, Warner told ABC News.

He specifically noted the timing of leaks revealing Clinton campaign chairman John Podestas emails. The first of those leaks occurred just hours after Trump had suffered a public relations blow from the release of embarrassing hot mic recordings of Trump on the Access Hollywood entertainment program in 2005.

That was more than coincidence, Warner said.

Schiff cautioned that it remains far too soon to draw any conclusions.

I see as my responsibility is to follow the facts wherever they lead, Schiff said.

ABC News' Cho Park, Alex Hosenball and Paul Blake contributed to this report.

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Democrats plumb election timeline for Trump-Russia clues - ABC News

Amid growing calls from Democrats for an investigation into the Trump administration 's ties to Russia , the President tweeted an old photo of Chuck Schumer with Vladimir Putin and called the top Senate Democrat a "hypocrite."

"We should start an immediate investigation into @ SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite!" Trump tweeted Friday afternoon, with an accompanying photo of Schumer and the Russian president eating doughnuts together.

The photo is from Putin's 2003 trip to New York for the opening of a Russian gas companys station, The Hill reports .

Schumer fired back on Twitter, writing, "Happily talk re: my contact w Mr. Putin & his associates, took place in '03 in full view of press & public under oath. Would you &your team?"

The online spat comes after revelations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. twice in 2016, which he did not disclose during his confirmation hearing. Sessions said Thursday he would recuse himself from any investigations into the Trump campaign, but he denies any wrongdoing in meeting with Russia. Still, the disclosure fanned the fire under Schumer and other Democrats calling for an independent probe into Trump's relationship with Russia.

"We have an obligation to get to the truth," Schumer said in a press conference Thursday calling for an independent prosecutor to conduct an investigation. "We must evaluate the scope of Russia's interference in our elections and assess if agents of their government have penetrated to the highest level of our government. Nothing less than the sanctity of our dear democratic process, the primacy of rule of law, and the integrity of our executive branch is at stake."

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President Trump Hits Back at Democrats With Photo of Chuck Schumer and Vladimir Putin - TIME

The group includes rabbis and bishops and pastors from Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopal congregations.

The group includes rabbis and bishops and pastors from Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopal congregations.

Faith leaders press for immigration reform

Interfaith leaders gathered Friday at the Catholic Chancery in downtown Houston in an urgent plea to Congress to stop separating families and push for a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally

The coalition says they have grown frustrated in the first months of President Donald Trump's administration after a series of executive orders and policy changes targeting immigrants in the country illegally.

"We've put them in an untenable position," said Lutheran Bishop Michael Rinehart. "We've been stuck in this situation for years, and these are very good people who are contributing to our tax base and our economy."

Under the Obama administration Immigration and Customs Enforcement focused their priorities on deporting felons and criminals. But the recent deportation of a Houston-area man without a criminal record and a college student who spoke out against the new policies at a news conference have stunned immigrant communities throughout the country.

Advocates are highlighting the case of Jose Escobar, a Houston father who had been granted temporary protection in 2012 and was deported Thursday. They say his case is in sharp contrast to the drug dealers and gang members Trump said the administration was having great success in deporting.

The father of two and husband to a United States citizen was detained during a check-in last month with immigration officials. Escobar's legal status was essentially lost when his mother believed he was automatically included in her visa renewal application. He was deported back to his home country of El Salvador, a country he hasn't seen in 16 years.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo said the outlook deported immigrants face is bleak. The process of legally coming back to the United States involves returning to a country many no longer know, applying for a green card remotely and waiting, in some cases, for years to have their cases heard.

"It is impacting the lives of real people in our congregations," Rinehart said. "We have seen the turmoil in our own communities that has already been created."

The group urged Congress to consider a "compassionate" path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants illegally in the United States, including 1.4 million who came to the U.S. without authorization as children known as "Dreamers."

The federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program does not provide legal status, but lets those who came to the United States as minors obtain a renewable two-year work permit.

"Our DACA children, our Dreamers, should be given the ability to fully embrace the American dream with access to citizenship," said the Rev. John Ogletree of the First Metropolitan Church.

There's a sense of urgency at Houston's first and biggest Mexican-American church, said Father Tim Gray.

Gray said between 80 and 90 percent of Our Lady of Guadalupe's congregation are of a vulnerable legal status and could be affected by the recent shift in immigration policy.

"I'm here to show our concern for the status of the people that have been living here for many years and are now being threatened," Gray said. "People that consider themselves residents they have families, they have homes, they have jobs. They're here for many years and suddenly they're realizing that that could all disappear."

Rinehart said individual parishes are educating their members on emergency plans in case they are detained, but can do little to actually prevent it from happening or provide resources after they have been deported.

At his first address to a joint Congress on Tuesday, Trump hinted at a softer stance on immigration law. The possibility of a path to citizenship is a significant pivot from his previously bold stance, anchored by his campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border.

The interfaith group began meeting almost a decade ago. DiNardo, the Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, said their primary focus is to advocate for immigration reform.

"We first spoke out because we thought there was a real chance something could be done," DiNardo said. "We think religiously it's important, and morally it's important."

The cardinal said the softened rhetoric gave the coalition hope that reform could be more attainable than they previously thought.

"The fact that the president mentioned the other night that Congress should work on this is a sign of hope," DiNardo said. "That's the only place where it can be done."

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Faith leaders press for immigration reform - Chron.com

After a bit of a head-fake on Tuesday afternoon, President Trumpopted not to call for comprehensive immigration reform in his speech Tuesday night. Instead, he spoke obliquely about a bipartisan way "to achieve an outcome that has eluded our country for decades" -- without referring to the path to legal status he had been flirting with.

So yet again, we're left wondering what Trump's real intentions are onimmigration reform. And I'll admit that I'm skeptical he's really changed his spots, given his history of hard-line rhetoric. (CNN quotes a Trump administration official saying it was all a "misdirection play" -- whatever that means.)

But here's the thing: If there's one Republicanwho could make comprehensive immigration reform happen -- if he wanted to -- it's Trump.

The big sticking point has always been that the GOP base has chewed up and spit out every attempt at comprehensive reform over the last decade-plus, no matter the poor soul who took the lead. George W. Bush and John McCain tried and failed, then Marco Rubio did. All of them ran into a base that recoiled at legalizing those who broke the law when they came to the United States, and congressional GOP support quickly dried up.

But Trump has shown a remarkable knack for getting the Republican Party to kick its political purity habit and bend on its principles. He's effectively morphed the GOP into an anti-free trade party that is okay with massive infrastructure spending and doesn't care that its president is a late-comer to social conservatism. Trump's appeal has always been about his tone rather than the details, which he's often worked out and fudged as he's gone along.

"I think Donald Trump has an ability to solve the problem unlike anybody in recent times," Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Wednesday night. "We always pass the bill in the Senate like 68 votes. It goes to the House. My Republican colleagues in the House -- it always dies. I think Trump has the ability to tell the right, you know, this is a good deal, take it. "

And we don't have to look too far back for an example of how Trump could do it on immigration.

Back in August, it looked like Trump was flirting with comprehensive reform. As it happens, Ann Coulter had just released a book deifying Trump and saying"there's nothing Trump can do that won't be forgiven ... except change his immigration policies."

But plenty of hard-line conservatives did seem ready to forgive even such an apostasy.

Trump, in fact, originally suggested he might be open to "softening" his approach to immigration reform on Sean Hannity's show -- after Hannity tossed a softball of a question that might as well have come from an immigration reform activist. "Is there any part of the law that you might be able to change that would accommodate those people that contribute to society, have been law-abiding, have kids here, would there be any room in your mind?" Hannity asked.

After Trump said "there certainly can be a softening," Hannity didn't push back or probe further.

There was also, as Callum Borchers noted at the time, a remarkably muted response from Breitbart News, the purveyor of hard-line, nationalist immigration policies if there ever was one. The website basically reported what Trump said and didn't bother to add any context or commentary. The Drudge Report let it slide too.

And The Post's Ed O'Keefe and Jenna Johnson reported from a Trump rally in Florida that Trump supporters weren't really bothered by the rhetorical shift:

Hes calmed it down, a little bit, but hes still going, said [Babs] Buffington, 75, who attended Trumps campaign rally here Wednesday afternoon. Hes still going to build the wall.

Her daughter agreed.

Thats the most important thing, said Krista Kosier, 51. Hes still going to build the wall. Hes still going to get rid of the murderers and rapists and those wreaking havoc in our country.

(Side note: "Babs Buffington" is a real person's name.)

Rush Limbaugh got in on it, too. Rather than knocking Trump for going soft, he relished the fact that Trump supporters weren't ditching Trump over the possible immigration flip-floppery. He was apparently happier it was giving the press fits and didn't care so much that Trump might be throwing in the towel.

"Trump supporters don't care what he does or what he says because there is no way they are going to do anything that helps elect Hillary Clinton," said Limbaugh. "It's no more complicated than that."

It is slightly more complicated than that, of course. Trump supporters and the GOP base are much more willing to give Trump a pass on stuff like this not just because he's not-Clinton, but because they believe his heart's in the right place -- which is not an assumption many of them were able to make with the likes of Bush, McCain, Mitt Romney and Rubio. That gives Trump plenty more latitude to do things on policy that the base might have ideological issues with in another politician.

Whether or not Trump actually wants to do comprehensive immigration reform, again, is very much an open question. And if he attempted it, perhaps it would ultimately go as poorly for him as it did for those who tried and failed before him.

But he is also uniquely suited to make it happen -- if he wants.

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Why Trump could be the one man to make immigration reform happen if he wanted to - Washington Post

The Detroit News Published 10:44 p.m. ET March 2, 2017 | Updated 13 hours ago

An extended family of eight from Colombia are detained Feb. 25 near Hemmingford, Quebec.(Photo: Geoff Robins / Getty Images)

President Donald Trump dropped hints this week that he is open to comprehensive legislation reform that deals with both border security and the roughly 12 million immigrants who are living in the United States illegally.

Congress should take advantage of the opening and present him with a bill that replaces a hodgepodge of executive orders with legislation that brings sensible reform to immigration policies.

And they dont have to start from scratch.

A decade ago Congress and then-President George W. Bush got close on a package of reforms that would have both secured the borders and provided a path to normalization for people in the U.S. without legal permission.

It was a solid plan, forged from a bipartisan compromise, but unfortunately never got a vote.

That package included funding for 300 additional miles of vehicle barriers on the southern border, 120 more surveillance towers and 20,000 extra Border Patrol agents.

Such a beefed up security force should be able to accomplish the same thing as Trumps proposed border wall, but at a fraction of the cost and less political fallout.

Also, the bills would have given visa priority to high-skilled workers, something Trump mentioned in his speech to Congress Tuesday. American industry needs more immigrant talent to grow the economy.

It would also have provided legal status to immigrants here illegally and a path toward citizenship.

The latter provision sticks in the craw of hardliners who believe its possible to round up and deport 12 million people. It isnt, and pretending otherwise hinders a realistic immigration solution.

A Bush-style plan would still allow for the deportation of immigrants who commit felonies, and it should. But it hangs on to immigrants who are working and living productive lives, and are needed in Americas workforce. An estimated 85 percent of those 12 million fall into that category.

At the same time, the additional border security should keep the number of immigrants here illegally from growing.

Getting the border under control and normalizing those who are already here would allow the United States to focus on more controlled and selective immigration that brings in the talent the country needs, as well as leaving the door open for opportunity and asylum seekers who want to come here to grow and be safe.

Other bills introduced in that era and supported by Bush would have expanded the guest worker program to accommodate farm workers and others who want to come to the U.S. for a season and then return home. Such a program would reduce the incentive to sneak across the border illegally.

Again, these bills were the product of bipartisan negotiations. Whether putting together legislation in that fashion is possible in todays divisive, hateful climate in Washington is uncertain.

But there should be enough agreement on the core principles of immigration reform increased border security, a path to normalization and a welcome mat for those with vital skills that a comprehensive package can be passed that solves the problem far more effectively than a giant wall ever could.

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Editorial: Commit to real immigration reform - The Detroit News