Two weeks after President Donald Trump blocked its release on national security grounds, the House Intelligence Committee on Saturday released a 10-page memo intended to counter Republican claims that the FBI acted inappropriately in pursuing a warrant to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Saturday released their redacted response to a Republican memo on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, as Democrats charged that the GOP omitted numerous details about the FBI’s probe during the campaign for the White House. “The FBI supplied information to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Russia might be colluding with Trump campaign associates,” Democrats said in a press statement announcing the release of the memo, which had been held back earlier this month after the White House raised questions about details included in the ten page memo. Trump had said earlier this month that the unredacted memo “contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages.”

Schiff’s memo was written to counter a four-page Republican memo, written by Rep. Devin Nunes, which alleged that the FBI’s decision to include allegations made in a dossier prepared by British ex-spy Christopher Steele in a FISA warrant application called into question the “legitimacy and legality of certain [Justice Department] and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

The Justice Department had argued against that memo’s declassification, citing “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

Moments after he was fêted as a conquering hero at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the memo’s release on Saturday was a body blow to his credibility as a government watchdog. Schiff and other Democrats charge that the Republican memo led by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes of California is misleading and omits key facts, including that the FISA application did state that ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, was paid by a political entity. FBI Director Christopher Wray also expressed concerns about the Nunes memo, publicly warning the White House that omitted information could impact the memo's veracity. The release of the Schiff memo caps an unprecedented and tumultuous period for the committee, which has now voted to release two classified documents using an obscure committee rule that had never been invoked previously in the panel’s history.
A memo written by Democrats on the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is released, countering the Republican memo released on February 2.