Senator Dives Into Russian History in Pursuit of Answers

For a while now, Senator Mark R. Warner has taken to thinking like a Russian.

The Virginia Democrat is losing himself in a book about the Romanovs, eager to absorb the country’s theories of war, teasing staff members for insufficient knowledge of Tolstoy and Nabokov. He has been sending messages over the encrypted app Signal, just to be safe.

Such is the head space of Capitol Hill’s top Democrat investigating ties between President Trump’s orbit and Russian intelligence — a former rising star in the party, frozen in the ascent for years now.

As Republicans resist calls for a select committee or special prosecutor to oversee the matter, the Democrats’ best hope for acquiring answers most likely remains an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, where Mr. Warner is vice chairman.

The result, at the height of anti-Trump fervor and Wall Street-bashing progressivism in the Democratic Party’s base, is a spotlight trained brightly on a southern-state centrist with a nine-figure net worth, a decade-old itch to be president and, until recently, according to friends and former aides, a healthy disdain for the institution he serves.

“I’ve never seen him seized by a responsibility as much as he is now,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who has known Mr. Warner since law school and succeeded him as the state’s governor in 2006. “He’s a man on a mission.”

“There have been some times when I’ve been put in kind of ‘timeout’ for being too bipartisan,” he said during a 40-minute interview last week in his Senate office, sipping acai-blueberry pomegranate Vitaminwater from a plastic cup. “Man alive, you cannot make this partisan.”

The minefields are many, politically and procedurally, as Mr. Warner strains to hold the committee together and maintain his own credibility with peers in both parties.

He is working to assuage the concerns of Democrats who suspect that Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the committee’s chairman, is not especially interested in a thorough investigation.

But he has taken care not to alienate Mr. Burr, a vocal Trump supporter during the campaign.

“I’ve got to get this Russia right,” Mr. Warner said at one point in the interview, seemingly too preoccupied to supply a missing noun.

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