California congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that the panel is negotiating with the FBI about narrowly redacting sensitive information contained in a memo intended to counter a Republican document alleging surveillance abuses.
But Schiff described the information that the Bureau identified as broad and characterized by whether or not it is already public. He suggested that this sweeping identification occurred at the request of the White House, which said last week that it could not declassify the Democrats’ memo due to the volume of sensitive information inside.
“What the White House must have asked, and I can only speculate on this, is ‘FBI and Department of Justice, give us the expansive list of everything in the Democratic memo that has not already been declassified,’” Schiff said during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast.
“The FBI has identified in the memo . . . essentially everything that isn’t already a matter of public record,” he said. “We need to go through that and identify what remains classified that would implicate sources or methods or investigative interests. Everything else should be declassified, is our view.”
He added that “much of” what the FBI has identified as “not-yet-declassified” has already been declassified in publicly available sources, such as court documents.
The GOP memo alleges that federal officials relied on a politically-motivated dossier—compiled by ex-spy Christopher Steele and paid for through an intermediary by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee—in obtaining a warrant to monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page. Steele’s research represented an “essential part” of the initial surveillance application, claims the GOP memo, but the warrant and subsequent renewals did not fully disclose the political origins of the research.
Schiff has described this Republican memo as “misleading” and said it “cherry picks” information. The sensitive information at issue in the Democrats’ memo, he suggested, is information that was deliberately “left out” of the Republican memo.
“We supplied the material facts but . . . some of them are still obviously not public,” he said. Schiff added later that the Democrats’ memo includes information from the original warrant and subsequent renewals.
The White House said last week that it was “inclined to declassify” the Democrats’ memo, but that it could not because of the amount of “classified and especially sensitive passages.” It provided the panel with a version of the memo marked up by the Department of Justice and FBI that highlights the passages of concern, and directed DOJ personnel to be available to help the committee in the redaction process.
Schiff had promised, previous to the White House determination last Friday, that he would allow the DOJ and FBI to vet and review the Democrats’ document. He said on Wednesday that the FBI did not take issue with the “accuracy” of their memo, “largely because we’ve taken material facts from the” court application itself.
