President Donald Trump on Friday approved release of a controversial memo on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “bias” and “surveillance abuse” — hours after lashing out at both FBI and the Department of Justice, accusing their top leadership and investigators of having “politicized” the investigative process to favour Democrats.
It’s “a disgrace what is happening in our country”, Trump commented during a brief media interaction after giving his approval for the release of the four-page memo, drafted by Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee, after disregarding the FBI’s concerns over making the memo public.
“It’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign,” Republican Congressman Devin Nunes said as he attacked the FBI for stonewalling lawmakers for nearly a year on matters related to the probe into the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“Once the truth gets out, we can begin taking steps to ensure our intelligence agencies and courts are never misused like this again,” said Nunes, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said:
Earlier in the day, Trump delivered a stinging attack on the FBI and the Justice Department on Twitter. The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago,” he tweeted, adding: “Rank & File are great people!”
Over the past couple of days, the FBI and the Justice Department had lobbied hard against the memo’s release. The FBI had said it was “gravely concerned” that key facts were missing from the memo, which, it said, left an inaccurate impression of how the agency conducted surveillance under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Signals from the White House on Thursday that Trump was likely to approve the release began to fuel speculation that FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, might quit in protest if the memo was made public, despite his concerns over the sensitive information as also the inaccuracies in it.
The four-page memo, drafted by Republicans, was voted by the committee on Monday and sent to the White House for approval for release. A counter-memo drafted by Democratic lawmakers was voted down by the panel.
The memo, according to The Washington Post, alleges that the FBI, while obtaining a surveillance warrant, relied in some part on a dossier of allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump that was underwritten by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Citing people familiar with the document, The Post reported that the memo alleges that the former British spy who wrote the dossier passed bad information to the FBI that was presumably used in the application to spy on Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser.
Democrats view the memo issue and its likely approval by the White House as part of a larger effort to undermine and discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe into the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Trump, in a second tweet, quoted from a speech given by the leader of a conservative watchdog group on how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party tried to hide the fact that they “gave money to GPS Fusion to create a Dossier which was used by their allies in the Obama Administration to convince a Court misleadingly, by all accounts, to spy on the Trump Team”.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, apparently supportive of the release of the memo, has taken the stand that it is “not an indictment of the FBI or the Department of Justice”.
He also went on to say that the memo “does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the deputy attorney general (Rod Rosenstein)”. Ryan called the memo the product of Congress employing oversight of the executive branch.
Rejecting Ryan’s assertion, Congressman Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, argued that the memo was designed to impugn the FBI’s credibility, undermine the investigation and give the president additional fodder to attack the process. “It’s a tremendous disservice to the American people,” Schiff told CBS News.