Democrats and FBI want to look at Nunes' Memo
https://archive.fo/c8SDYWASHINGTON—A fight is intensifying over a memo that its Republican authors say describes abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies in probing Russian election interference, as Democrats and law-enforcement officials demand additional access to the document and the classified intelligence underpinning it.
A senior Democrat on Tuesday requested that all members of the House Judiciary Committee be granted access to the intelligence that the memo was based on. A day earlier, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had not been granted access to review the memo’s contents by the House Intelligence Committee.
The four-page document has been made available to all House members; some GOP lawmakers have been calling for the memo to be released to the public.
The document, written by GOP staff of the House Intelligence Committee, raises concerns about the way the Justice Department used information from Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official, in its application for secret court orders and warrants during the 2016 campaign, according to people who have seen the document.
Mr. Steele in 2016 produced a 35-page dossier of raw, unverified intelligence alleging connections between President Donald Trump and Russians. The president has repeatedly dismissed the allegations. Senior U.S. intelligence officials summarized the findings in a two-page addendum to a classified briefing given to Mr. Trump before he took office a year ago.
According to the people who have seen the document, it is drawn from highly classified material concerning surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the bedrock law authorizing spying on suspected foreign agents. The process of obtaining a FISA warrant is one of the most highly-guarded secrets in U.S. intelligence.
Democrats say the document is a partisan attempt to discredit the FBI and, ultimately, special counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation into Russia’s links to Trump associates during the campaign. Democrats also note that while hundreds of lawmakers have now read the memo, only a handful of senior lawmakers of both parties have seen the FBI material on which the document was based.
“They’ve invited a whole bunch of members to view a highly biased and inaccurate summary of some extremely classified intelligence that none of these members will ever be able to look at. The result will be rumors, mischaracterizations and lies at the expense of the FBI,” said Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat on the Intelligence committee.
Conservatives in recent days have been pushing for the release of the memo on social media, saying it would back up their assertion that law-enforcement officials were biased against Mr. Trump.
“The reality is that if the memo were damaging to the republicans the democrats would have leaked it by now,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter Friday.
One senior Democrat who has see most of the FBI materials on which the memo is based said on Tuesday that the paper was a “conspiracy theory” concocted by Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a California Republican. Mr. Nunes served on the Trump transition team and previously stepped down from leadership of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe after questions about his handling of classified information were investigated by the House Ethics Committee. He was cleared of any wrongdoing by the panel.
“You and I have had the opportunity to review many of the documents that the intelligence committee claims are the basis for its memo,” wrote Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat and the party’s senior representative on the Judiciary committee, in a letter to his Republican counterpart on the panel.
Mr. Nadler called for the Judiciary Committee leadership “to make those documents available to our full Committee membership and to mitigate the damage done by Chairman Nunes and others.”
The FBI also has been pushing for access to the document.
“The FBI has requested to receive a copy of the memo in order to evaluate the information and take appropriate steps if necessary. To date, the request has been declined,” a spokesman for the bureau said.
A spokesman for Mr. Nunes didn’t respond to a request for comment, but many Republicans on Capitol Hill say that the material contained in the document alarmed them and that it should be released publicly.
“The memo has now been made available to all members of Congress. I’ve read it. And it is disturbing,” said Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican. “I think it ought to be declassified and let the public have access to it.”