FBI in public fight with Trump over Russia memo
White House rejects claim that dossier was doctored
WASHINGTON — In a public clash of wills with the White House, the FBI declared on Wednesday it has “grave concerns” about the accuracy of a classified memo on the Russia election investigation that President Donald Trump wants released.
The FBI’s short and sharp statement, its first on the issue, laid bare a Trump administration conflict that had previously played out mostly behind closed doors in meetings between top Justice Department and White House officials.
“As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the FBI said.
Further complicating the memo’s release, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee said late on Wednesday that his committee’s vote to release the memo was now invalid because it was “secretly altered” by Republicans who wrote it.
California Representative Adam Schiff said in a letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes that committee Democrats had discovered changes that were made after the panel voted on Monday to send it to Trump for review.
“The White House has therefore been reviewing a document since Monday night that the committee never approved for public release,” Schiff said in the letter.
Schiff did not detail the changes, and a spokesman for Nunes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has five days from the vote to review the document, and if he doesn’t object then Congress can release it.
In a statement, Nunes countered that it was “no surprise” that the Justice Department and FBI would oppose the release of “information related to surveillance abuses at these agencies.”
“It’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign,” he said.
Nunes’ committee voted on Monday to release the memo, distilled from a much larger volume of documents used by the FBI to get a so-called FISA national security warrant to spy on Trump campaign official Carter Page, who was suspected of espionage.
The dossier includes information on contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele and financed in part by Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Republicans say it provides evidence that the Justice Department actively sought to undermine Trump.
But Democrats say the memo is based on selective information that does not reflect the entire classified file on the FISA warrant application on Page.
Instead, they say, Nunes is running a politically-motivated stunt to smear the Mueller collusion investigation, which is also examining whether Trump tried to obstruct the probe.