If the claim that the Obama administration improperly spied on the Trump campaign is just a wild conspiracy theory, Democrats should be clamoring for the memo’s release, McCarthy writes. It also suggested that Nunes himself has not read the underlying intelligence that it is said to form the basis of the four-page memo.
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“This memo reflects the result of months of diligent investigation by the Committee”.
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have drafted a document they say will counter Republican efforts to discredit the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. House Republicans have since advocated that the memo be disclosed to the public – in a campaign called #ReleaseTheMemo – and it is believed that they will seek to use an obscure House rule to publish it.
Trump allies want the memo released, with Iowa Congressman Steve King saying the allegations are “worse than Watergate”. Burr said he would not discuss “anything that goes on with what we did or didn’t ask for, what we did or didn’t get, what we did or didn’t conclude”. This was confirmed by Rep. Mike Conaway, who formally took over the Intelligence Committee’s “Russiagate” investigation from Nunes when the latter stepped aside early a year ago.
“I haven’t looked at the memo, and I haven’t seen the memo”, he said. Chuck Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman. Chuck Grassley and Johnson wrote that the IG told them last month that the IG’s office had received all text messages between Strzok and Page from November 30, 2016, to July 28, 2017, contradicting the gap reported in the cover letter. Any classified documents that still reside with the intelligence community can only be declassified by President Trump.
As Senate moderates pushed their leader to make a commitment to have a bipartisan immigration vote, House conservatives on Tuesday were pushing their leadership to tack to the right on the issue.
But it is believed to allege that US investigators improperly handled the Steele dossier and improperly obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
As the New York Times reported Wednesday, the memo in question “centers” on a FISA warrant on Carter Page, submitted by investigators in the fall of 2016.
Democrats on the Intelligence Committee, not surprisingly, don’t find the document that big a deal.
“The documents that supposedly inform these talking points are highly classified”, the panel’s Democrats said in a joint statement. “This is by design”. The contents of the memo are not yet known to the public, so the commentary is the familiar game of shaping reaction to it.
The DOJ says releasing it would be “reckless”, especially if Nunes doesn’t show it to the department first, which he is refusing to do.
A letter sent to Nunes this week from Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd urged that the document not be released before DOJ had a chance to review it for possible national security damage.
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For what it’s worth, Boyd said in his letter that the Justice Department is “currently unaware of any wrongdoing” but that any such bias “cannot be tolerated”.
