White House chief of staff John Kelly hinted Tuesday that President Trump could redact some of the information in a classified memo written by Democrats on U.S. surveillance of Trump's campaign.
"This is not as clean a memo as the first one," Kelly told reporters after a meeting on Capitol Hill. “This is a different memo than the first one, it’s lengthier ... But again, where the first one was very clean relative to sources and methods, my initial cut is this one is a lot less clean.”
The House Intelligence Committee voted Monday to release the Democratic memo, one week after the committee voted to release a Republican memo outlining possible abuses of surveillance authority under the Obama administration. The Democratic memo rebuts the GOP memo, and the committee vote sent it to Trump to decide what to release, and possibly what to redact in order to avoid revealing sources and methods.
Kelly said the memo is going through the same process at the White House the first memo went through, including checks by the Justice Department, FBI, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats' team, and the White House's national security lawyers.
He said he expects an evaluation of the memo to come to his desk by Thursday, after which he will discuss it with the president and confer with the likes of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
"He'll have a decision to make as to what he wants to do with it," Kelly said, mentioning the possibility of declassifying the memo with redactions.
The memo written by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, is 10 pages long, compared to the four-page memo written by Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif.