The classified Republican memo that has become a lightning rod in the battle between Republicans and Democrats over federal surveillance tactics is poised to be released as early as Friday, a move that’s likely to start a new battle over what it says about the trustworthiness of the Justice Department and the FBI.
Thursday night, Republicans were still playing up the importance of the memo, after spending weeks hinting that it will show the government used cherry-picked information from Democrats to launch an investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign team.
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said Thursday night that the “earth-shaking” memo reveals abuses that are “worse than Watergate.” He said that after House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said the memo represents the House’s oversight work and that releasing it would help bring accountability to the FBI.
Democrats, on the other hand, were predicting a collapse of confidence in federal institutions based on half-truths and out-of-context information that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., pulled from his committee’s investigation in a bid to protect Trump from the ongoing Russia probe.
One Democrat, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., was calling for an emergency hearing to understand what problems the FBI has in releasing it, a request Republicans were unlikely to fulfill.
The release of the memo may challenge both Republican and Democratic narratives of how the political world will be changed forever once Americans can read it for themselves, and finally judge whether any of the apocalyptic predictions were warranted.
But regardless of the public reaction, the political dispute is likely to continue and intensify, since that’s been the story of the Nunes memo since it was first revealed.
Just last month, it was reported that Nunes put together a four-page memo on the surveillance community and possible abuses by top officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI in their use of the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
On Jan. 18, the committee voted to allow all House members to review the report in a secure room in the Capitol.
Then, during the brief partial government shutdown, GOP lawmakers streamed into the House’s safe spaces to view the document. Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Ron DeSantis of Florida, Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, and Matt Gaetz of Florida were among those who started talking about its damning contents.
On Jan. 24, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said that the Democratic minority was preparing its own memo to counter the GOP’s “misleading one.”
On the same day, the Justice Department warned Nunes that releasing the GOP memo would be “extraordinarily reckless” and said it was “unaware of any wrongdoing” related to the FISA process. Democrats pointed to that as evidence that Republicans should pull back the memo instead of risking unspecified damage to U.S. national security.
But Republicans fired back that it would be irregular for agencies under investigation by lawmakers to gain access to their documents.
“Agencies that are under investigation by congressional committees don’t typically get access to the committees’ investigative documents about them, and it’s no surprise these agencies don’t want the abuses we’ve found to be made public,” Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, said at the time.
On Jan. 27, Republicans on the committee voted to release the Republican memo, while Democrats opposed it and fumed on the sidelines that the GOP also voted not to release their countermemo.
Republicans defended the move by saying the Democratic memo hadn’t gone through the same, lengthy process that the GOP memo went through.
The House vote threw it over to President Trump, who had the option of keeping the memo out of public view. But Trump and his administration made it clear they were ignoring Democratic warnings and would release it.
“The president is OK with it,” a senior administration official told reporters Thursday. “I doubt there will be any redactions. It’s in Congress’ hands after that.”
Schiff made a last-minute attempt to stop it by saying in a late Wednesday letter that Nunes “secretly” altered the memo after the Monday vote, thus giving the White House a different copy.
Nunes conceded Wednesday night that small edits were made, but dismissed the minority party’s complaints as an attempt to create a “bizarre distraction from the abuses detailed in the memo.” The version Trump plans to declassify contains only “technical edits” made at the request of the FBI, he said.
Democrats then demanded a new vote to release the memo, but a House Intelligence Committee source told the Washington Examiner late Thursday that does not and would not happen.
The only last question is: What’s in the memo? That question had some Republicans worried that after all the fighting, the contents may not be worth it.
“If the memo is released, we’re going to know whether it does or it doesn’t have sensitive national security information in it. And if it does, it will be clear that it should never have been released. However, if it does implicate the FBI and practices that are unseemly, then that’s a whole other story,” GOP strategist Ron Bonjean told the Washington Examiner.
“But if it’s misleading, then of course it could have a boomerang effect that would not be helpful,” he explained. “Once it comes out and if it’s assessed that it is damaging information, then there’s surely going to be fallout on congressional oversight committees, as well as at the White House, about what to do next.”
