The House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Monday to publicly release a Democratic memo intended to counter a now-public Republican document that alleges surveillance abuses against a former Trump campaign adviser.
Monday’s vote came hours after President Donald Trump condemned the panel’s top Democrat Adam Schiff as “one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington” who “must be stopped.” Trump now has five days to decide whether to block the release. A White House spokesman said Monday that the Democrats’ memo would follow the same process as Republicans’.
“We will consider it along the same terms … which is to allow for a legal review; national security review, led by the White House Counsel’s Office; and then, within five days, the president will make a decision about declassifying it,” said spokesman Raj Shah.
If Trump objects to the release of the Democratic memo, the matter could come before the full House for a vote.
“We think this will help inform the public about the many distortions and inaccuracies in the majority memo,” Schiff told reporters after the vote Monday evening. He added that the FBI and Department of Justice, whose officials are subjects of the GOP memo, are in possession of the Democratic memo and are vetting it.
Trump said Saturday that the GOP memo “totally vindicates” him in the ongoing Russia election interference probe that includes any links between the Trump team and the Kremlin. The president declassified the Republican memo last week.
Schiff on Monday said that another Democrat on the panel had “again and repeatedly” questioned Republican chairman Devin Nunes on whether he or his staff had coordinated with the White House on the memo.
“Mr. Nunes refused to answer the questions,” Schiff said. “At the very end of the hearing, he gave a very lawyerly, written response, saying that the White House had not been involved in the actual drafting of the memo.”
A transcript of the meeting will be released in coming days, he added. Nunes has previously said he did not coordinate with the president or the administration on the release of the memo.
The GOP document alleges that some FBI and Department of Justice officials relied on a controversial dossier compiled by ex-spy Christopher Steele, and financed by Democratic groups, in obtaining a warrant and subsequent renewals to monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page. The application and renewals did not disclose the “political origins” of the dossier, or Steele’s anti-Trump bias, and the dossier “formed an essential part” of the warrant application, the memo says.
The Democrats’ memo will rebut the claim that FBI officials misled the secret court that approved the warrant, House intelligence Democrat Jim Himes said on Sunday. “The judge had some sense that this information came out of a political context,” he said.
Democrats on the panel also reject the GOP memo’s interpretation of testimony from former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.”
“I asked Andy McCabe, that is not what he said,” said House intelligence Democrat Eric Swalwell. “They have the transcript, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t quote from the transcript.”
And Democrats counter that the dossier is not the only justifying evidence included in the warrant application. They dispute the suggestion that the dossier is bogus and cannot serve as a partial basis for a warrant application.
“Just because it was opposition research … doesn’t mean that it’s wrong,” said Himes. “In fact, we wouldn’t pay a penny for opposition research that was biased.”
Some Republicans say that the Page memo bolsters their belief that the ongoing Russia probe has been partisan from the outset. Others, like House Oversight Committee chairman Trey Gowdy, say the Mueller probe and the memo are separate.
“There is a Russia investigation without a dossier,” Gowdy said Sunday. “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.”
The memo says that the FBI opened its counterintelligence probe into Russian election interference and the Trump campaign in July 2016, after obtaining information about former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
