The House Intelligence Committee is expected to vote Monday on publicly releasing a memo that Democrats say rebuts a Republican document alleging surveillance abuses that was released Friday.
The GOP memo alleges that federal officials who were seeking a warrant to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page relied on a dossier compiled by ex-spy Christopher Steele, which was financed by Democratic groups, without disclosing as much in an October 2016 surveillance warrant application or subsequent renewals.
Democrats say their memo will show the GOP document to be misleading, factually inaccurate, and intended to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian election interference and links between the Trump team and the Kremlin. Their memo could be released if the panel approves it Monday and the president does not object within five days.
In the meantime, Democrats have been pushing back on a number of claims in the GOP document. They say that the Page warrant was based on more than just the Steele dossier, and that the secret court that approved the warrant “was notified a political actor was involved.”
“The FBI, because they are very careful people, didn’t mislead the judge,” House intelligence Democrat Jim Himes said on Sunday. “The judge had some sense that this information came out of a political context.”
The Republican-drafted memo also says that former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe testified before the intelligence committee in December 2017 “that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.” Democrats say the document “cherry picks” and distorts what McCabe said.
Some Republicans say that the memo shows the origins of the investigation into Russian election interference to be partisan, in that a dossier paid for by Democrats was quietly used to secure surveillance on someone connected with the Trump campaign.
“Had the noncredible DNC funded dossier never been leaked to the media to fuel mass speculation of Russian involvement, and had it not been used as ‘evidence’ to elevate the investigation to the level of requesting FISA warrants, it’s very likely that there would have never been a perceived need for special counsel to be created in the first place,” a spokesman for Republican congressman Jeff Duncan told the Washington Post.
President Donald Trump on Saturday also tweeted that “This memo totally vindicates “Trump” in probe.” But the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, said Sunday that the GOP memo itself undercuts that claim, because it indicates that the FBI opened its counterintelligence probe in July 2016, before the court granted the Page surveillance warrant.
“The memo indicates … this investigation didn’t begin with Carter Page. It actually began with George Papadopoulos, someone who is a foreign policy adviser for candidate Trump and someone who was meeting secretly with the Russians,” Schiff said on Sunday. “So quite to the contrary, even this very flawed memo demonstrates what the origin of the investigation was, and that origin involved the issue of collusion.”
Some Republicans say that the memo raises concerns about FISA surveillance abuses, but does not affect the Mueller probe.
“I’m actually in a really small group, I think, of Republicans that think that this FISA process is suspect and wrong and should not have taken place,” said Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, on Sunday. “There is a Russia investigation without a dossier.”
The DOJ and FBI obtained the Page warrant weeks before the election, though the bureau’s interest in Page dates to at least 2013. Page was not working for the Trump campaign when the warrant was granted in October 2016.
Republicans voted against releasing the Democratic counter-memo alongside their own last Monday, though they agreed to allow the full House to view it in a classified setting. GOP members said the Democratic memo needed to go through the same process as theirs, with some time for other members to review it and for the document to be vetted and “scrubbed.” Committee Democrats have said they will allow the FBI and Department of Justice to vet their memo.
