The White House finally has released House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff's (D-CA) 10-page rebuttal to the Nunes memo which not only debunks the very foundation of Chairman Devin Nunes' (R-CA) charges of FBI and DOJ abuses but also provides new, substantive information about the intelligence community's investigation into potential Trump-Russia collusion.
The Nunes memo claims the FBI used Christopher Steele's dossier to obtain a warrant to surveil Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page, and when doing so, never told the court who funded the dossier.
The FBI team investigating the 2016 Trump campaign's contacts with Russians had already opened inquiries into multiple people connected to the campaign when it received a controversial dossier alleging illicit ties between then-candidate Trump and the Kremlin, a Democratic memo released by the House Intelligence Committee revealed Saturday.
The dossier, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, wasn't provided to the FBI's counterintelligence team until mid-September 2016, according to the memo. By then, the counterintelligence investigation into Trump's campaign was seven weeks old.
WaPo:
Republican leaders have argued that the former campaign aide, Carter Page, was unfairly targeted, saying the surveillance court that approved the warrant was never told that information from the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, was financed by the Democrats.
According to the Democrats’ memo, Page had been of interest to the FBI for years. It asserts that the bureau had interviewed him multiple times about his contacts with Russian intelligence, including in March 2016 — the same month he was named a Trump campaign adviser, and months before Steele was hired to conduct research on Trump and before he made contact with the FBI.
The court was told that Steele had been approached by a “U.S. person” who had been hired “to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia,” according to a portion of the surveillance applications contained in the Democrats’ memo. Candidate #1 is a reference to Trump.
“The FBI speculates that the U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit candidate #1’s campaign,” the application says.
Rep. Schiff points out that not only were the FBI and DOJ doing their jobs properly, but officials would have been neglecting their responsibility to protect the United States had they not taken a closer look at Carter Page.
Rep. Schiff's memo reveals other important details including the fact that Page may have lied in his testimony to Congress, that four different federal judges (all appointed by Republican presidents) reviewed and approved the FISA warrant and its renewals, and that multiple independent sources have corroborated information in the Steele dossier.
Rep. Schiff says he did not know the White House was releasing his memo today.
WaPo:
“I think the White House tried to bury it as long as they could,” he told The Washington Post in an interview. The Republicans’ decision to release the memo without warning, on a Saturday, is “not what you do when you think you’re vindicated,” he added. “It’s what you do when you think the facts don’t reflect well on you.”
President Trump and Rep. Nunes both refused to acknowledge what the Democratic countermemo said and instead chose to double down on Nunes' original unfounded accusations.
In a message posted on Twitter, Trump responded, “The Democrat memo response on government surveillance abuses is a total political and legal BUST. Just confirms all of the terrible things that were done. SO ILLEGAL!”
In a statement, the committee’s Republican Chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, renewed his allegations, saying: “The American people now clearly understand that the FBI used political dirt paid for by the Democratic Party to spy on an American citizen from the Republican Party.”
“We wanted it out because we think it is clear evidence that the Democrats are not only trying to cover this up, but they’re also colluding with parts of the government to help cover this up,” Nunes said during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hills, Maryland.
Read the Democratic rebuttal memo
House panel releases Democrats’ memo defending FBI surveillance of ex-Trump campaign aide (WaPo)
Democrats Shred Devin Nunes’ Surveillance Memo (Daily Beast)
Democrats' memo charges Republicans trying to undermine Russia probes (Reuters)
Democratic memo: FBI was investigating Trump campaign associates weeks before receiving dossier (Politico)