White House vets Democratic memo
Release of response to GOP one is up to Trump after security scrutiny
WASHINGTON — Days after brushing aside objections from the Justice Department and releasing a secret Republican memo, President Donald Trump met with a top agency official to review a classified Democratic memo on the Russia investigation.
The dueling memos — and Trump’s silence so far on whether he will release the Democratic version — have set up a standoff between Trump and congressional Democrats and deepened partisan fights on the House Intelligence Committee.
The memos have become the recent focus of the committee’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, shifting attention away from investigations into whether Trump’s campaign was involved.
The Democratic document is intended to counter the GOP memo, which criticized methods the FBI used to obtain a surveillance warrant on a onetime Trump campaign associate. The House panel voted unanimously Monday to release the Democratic memo, sending it to the White House. The president has until the end of the week to decide whether to make it public.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to discuss differences between the two memos and “we are undergoing the exact same process that we did with the previous memo, in which it will go through a full and thorough legal and national security review.”
Trump and some Republicans have criticized Rosenstein for his oversight of the Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mueller’s team is to interview former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon next week, two people familiar with the plans confirmed. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about details of the interview.
Bannon is expected to face questions about key events during his time in the White House including Trump’s firings of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former FBI Director James Comey.
Also Tuesday, the House intelligence panel gave Bannon another week to negotiate the terms of a private interview, as the White House has put limits on what he can tell Congress. Bannon was under subpoena to appear Tuesday as part of the panel’s Russia probe, but Republicans pushed the deadline to next week as talks about the terms of his interview continued.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, said Bannon’s lawyer has told the committee that the White House will permit him to answer only 14 yes or no questions. He said Bannon is barred by the White House from talking about matters during the presidential transition, his time at the White House and communications with Trump since he left in August.
Schiff said the panel is in rare bipartisan agreement that the terms offered are unacceptable.
“Should Bannon maintain his refusal to return and testify fully to all questions, the committee should begin contempt proceedings to compel his testimony,” Schiff said.
MEMO FRICTION
Despite unity on the Bannon interview, partisan tensions continued to run high on the committee regarding lawmakers’ dueling memos.
Schiff and other Democrats have raised questions about whether the committee chairman, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California, coordinated with the White House in drafting the GOP memo.
After the document’s release last week, the president quickly seized on it to vent his grievances against the nation’s premier law enforcement agencies and said it “totally vindicates” him in the Russia investigations.
“The goal here is to undermine the FBI, discredit the FBI, discredit the Mueller investigation, do the president’s bidding,” Schiff said, adding that he thinks “it’s very possible” that Nunes’ staff worked with the White House.
Nunes was asked during a Jan. 29 committee meeting whether he had coordinated the memo with the White House. “As far as I know, no,” he responded.
He refused to answer when asked whether his congressional staff members had communicated with the White House. He had previously apologized for sharing with the White House secret intelligence intercepts related to an investigation of Russian election interference before talking to committee members.
According to lawmakers who have read the Democratic memo, it’s about 11 pages long and has annotations and explanatory notes.
The Senate’s top Democrat, Minority Leader Charles Schumer, issued a statement calling on Trump to move quickly to release the memo and “allow the public to make their own judgment on the facts of the case.” There should be “no question” that it can be released because it’s based on the same underlying documents as the GOP memo, he said.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said Tuesday that the memo isn’t “as clean” as the one produced by Republicans and made public last week.
After emerging from a meeting with congressional leaders, Kelly told reporters that he’s instructed officials to complete an evaluation of the Democratic memo no later than Thursday.
He said that then, “we’ll brief the president on it and he will have a decision to make” on whether to declassify it entirely or perhaps declassify it with some redactions.
He added that his initial conclusion is that the Democratic version is “not as clean a memo as the first one.”
The Republican memo released Friday alleges misconduct by the FBI and the Justice Department in obtaining a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor former Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. Specifically, the memo takes aim at the FBI’s use of information from former British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled a dossier containing allegations of ties between Trump, his associates and Russia.
The GOP memo’s central allegation is that federal agents and prosecutors, in applying in October 2016 to monitor Page’s communications, failed to inform fully a judge about Steele’s political bias and that his opposition research was funded in part by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
RUSSIAN DEBT SANCTIONS
Separately, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday that the U.S. isn’t pursuing sanctions against Russian government debt, after issuing a report that concluded such a move would risk widespread financial turmoil.
“We’re targeting specific sanctions to bad individuals and companies as opposed to sanctions on debt,” Mnuchin said during a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.
The Treasury Department report, obtained by Bloomberg News last week, concluded that expanding sanctions to new Russian sovereign debt and derivatives could destabilize markets and spread beyond Russia to have “negative spillover effects into global financial markets and businesses.”
Investors had interpreted the report’s findings as an indication that the U.S. had taken debt market penalties off the table despite pressure from Congress for additional sanctions on Russia for its meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Still, David Malpass, treasury undersecretary for international affairs, said Friday that the department hadn’t ruled out sanctioning Russian debt.
The report is an analysis of possible effects, not in any way a road map for or against sanctions,” he said.
Congress ordered the report on the impact of potential sanctions on Russian sovereign debt in legislation passed in August. It marked another instance in which the Trump administration appeared to take a softer line on Russia than many in Congress had hoped.
The administration refused to add new sanctions on Russia’s defense industry and issued a public list of “oligarchs” that was less-targeted than expected. President Vladimir Putin said last week that he had decided not to proceed for the moment with planned retaliation for the U.S. move.