Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday he aims to have a memo written by Democrats on the panel released this week, after President Trump declined to release it earlier in the month.
Democrats say their memo was written as a rebuttal to provide greater context to a Republican memo that was released earlier this month, which outlines abuses by the FBI and the Justice Department against the Trump campaign.
“I actually hope that we’ll do that in the next few days,” Schiff, a Democrat from California, said at an event Tuesday night called “Investigating Russia and Defending Democracy” in San Francisco. “So it’s my goal to have this out this week,” he added, even though it was pointed out that the House is on recess this week.
Although the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee voted to make the Democrat’s memo public earlier this month, Trump refused to declassify it, citing “significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests.”
As a result, Schiff has been working with Justice Department officials to determine what must be redacted and what can remain in the memo ahead of its release.
In an interview with Esquire published Tuesday, Schiff said that Democrats have made “a lot of progress” on their work to release their memo and that an arrangement could be unveiled shortly.
He further explained at the San Francisco event Tuesday that he hopes this arrangement will allow Democrats to sidestep another White House review.
“We are negotiating with the FBI. I think that we’re almost concluded and they’ve been cooperating with us in good faith,” Schiff said Tuesday. “What we want to do is identify any small subset of the memo that could reveal sources or methods. And we gave them our memo well before we even took it up in committee because we wanted their input. I think we’ll resolve that very shortly, and we could put the memo out. It hopefully won’t be necessary to go back to the White House, but I do want to make sure that we have visibility into any concern the FBI has, as opposed to a political redaction that the White House wants to make.”
The Democrat’s memo is reportedly 10 pages. The Republican’s memo was four.
