2 Weeks After Trump Blocked It, Democrats Release Rebuttal of G.O.P. Memo [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Source: NYT

House Democrats released a heavily redacted memorandum on Saturday that was drafted to counter Republican claims that top F.B.I. and Justice Department officials had abused their powers in spying on a former Trump campaign aide.

President Trump blocked the memo’s outright release two weeks ago, with the White House counsel warning that the document “contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages.” Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee had since been haggling with the F.B.I. over redactions.

Democrats have insisted that Mr. Trump’s deference to national security concerns in the case was hypocritical and politically motivated. Just a week before blocking their memo’s release, the president had ignored similar objections from the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to declassify the contents of a rival Republican memo, which was based on the same underlying documents. Mr. Trump asserted, incorrectly, that the Republican document vindicated him in the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference.

The release of the Democratic rebuttal was expected to be the final volley, at least for now, in a bitter partisan fight over surveillance that has driven deep fissures through the once-bipartisan Intelligence Committee and at times pitted Mr. Trump against his own Justice Department and F.B.I.

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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/us/politics/democratic-memo-released-fbi-surveillance-carter-page.html

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The redacted memo:

http://docs.house.gov/meetings/ig/ig00/20180205/106838/hmtg-115-ig00-20180205-sd002.pdf