White House mulls release of Dem’s response memo
WASHINGTON — President Trump met with a top Justice Department official yesterday to review a classified Democratic memo on the Russia investigation, less than a week after he brushed aside objections from the same agency over releasing a Republican account.
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 panel over the committee’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
The Democratic document is intended to counter the GOP memo, which suggested the FBI withheld critical information about a tainted dossier — including that it was paid for by the Clinton campaign and was largely deemed unsupported — when it obtained a surveillance warrant on a onetime Trump campaign associate.
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.”
White House chief of staff John Kelly said he’s instructed officials to complete an evaluation of the Democratic memo no later than tomorrow. After that, Kelly said, “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 said the Democratic version is “not as clean a memo as the first one.”