A Republican lawmaker on the House Intelligence Committee said the memo put together by the Democratic minority to counter that of Chairman Devin Nunes should be released because of its “sloppy” rebuttal.
“House Intel should vote to release the Schiff counter-memo. It’s basically a sloppy, Chewbacca defense rejoinder to the Nunes memo that unwittingly buttresses concerns raised in the Nunes memo,” said Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., on Twitter Tuesday afternoon.
The “Chewbacca defense” is a means to win an argument by deliberately and nonsensically confusing the intended audience as opposed to using facts. It was infamously used in an episode of South Park in 1998 satirizing the closing argument given by O.J. Simpson’s lawyer.
House Intel should vote to release the Schiff counter-memo. It’s basically a sloppy, Chewbacca defense rejoinder to the Nunes memo that unwittingly buttresses concerns raised in the Nunes memo.
— Ron DeSantis (@RepDeSantis) January 30, 2018
On Monday night, the GOP majority voted to make the four-page classified memo put together by Nunes public, but keep the counter-memo compiled by Ranking Member Adam Schiff private to House members only.
Now, the decision is in President Trump’s hands, who now has a maximum of four days to explicitly object to the memo’s release, or then House Intel can do so at week’s end. Trump can also release it anytime before the deadline, and the full House can override Trump if he objects to its release.
Democrats say their memo fills in the “misleading” blanks of the Republicans’ memo, which reportedly details alleged surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and FBI, and also names Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, and former FBI Director James Comey.
The memo reportedly alleges that senior Justice Department and FBI officials abused the process of obtaining a warrant under FISA, the classified surveillance program, specifically that of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in early 2017.
The Justice Department said releasing the Nunes memo would be “extraordinarily reckless,” but has not commented on the reported Democratic one, nor confirmed it has seen either or both.
