Report: Senate Intelligence Committee investigating ex-Trump aide Bannon

The Senate Intelligence Committee is taking a closer look at Stephen Bannon's activities during the 2016 presidential election, including his role at Cambridge Analytica, three people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

Bannon is a former White House adviser, and the committee is examining what he might know about contacts between two Trump campaign advisers, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, and Moscow. Last year, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russians; during the campaign, he spoke with a professor who claimed Russians had "dirt" on Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, Reuters reports. In September, he was sentenced to 14 days in prison. Page, who has extensive business ties to Russia, has not been charged with anything.

Investigators also want to know about Bannon's time as vice president of Cambridge Analytica, a defunct data analysis company. He was there from June 2014 to August 2016, when he left to join the Trump campaign as a strategist. Cambridge Analytica collected the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent, and was hired by the Trump campaign to target potential voters.

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Two people told Reuters staff investigators hope to interview Bannon in late November. Bannon's lawyer, William Burck, told Reuters the committee "has expressed an interest in interviewing Mr. Bannon as a witness, just as they have many other people involved in the Trump campaign. But the committee has never suggested that he's under investigation himself and to claim otherwise is recklessly false."