Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Memo on FBI clears him, Trump tweets
But it confirms investigation on Russia started pre-Page
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Saturday that a contentious memo released by House Republicans “totally vindicates” him in the investigation into Russian election interference, complaining that the “Witch Hunt” would go “on and on” even though there had been no collusion or obstruction of justice.
Trump took to Twitter to proclaim his innocence and denounce the investigation a day after he authorized the release of the contentious classified memo. The document claimed that top law enforcement officials had abused their powers to spy on a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, who was suspected of being an agent of Russia.
“This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” the president wrote in a Twitter post. “But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction ( the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!”
The president is in Palm Beach, Fla., this weekend, and the tweet came minutes after his motorcade left his private club en route to the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.
The memo, while trying to paint the origins of the Russia investigation as tainted, did not clear Trump of either collusion or obstruction
— the lines of inquiry being pursued by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The memo in fact may have undermined Republicans’ effort to cast doubt on the roots of the investigation by confirming that the inquiry was already underway when law enforcement officials obtained a warrant from a secret intelligence court to conduct surveillance on Page.
The four-page document released Friday contends that the FBI, when it applied for a surveillance warrant on Page, relied excessively on an ex-British spy whose opposition research was funded by Democrats. At the same time, the memo confirms that the investigation into potential Trump links to Russia actually began several months earlier, and was “triggered” by information involving a different campaign aide.
The Republican document, which Democrats dismissed as containing cherry-picked information and focusing on an obscure figure in the Trump campaign, confirms that a primary factor in the opening of the investigation in July 2016 was initial contacts between a former Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, and Russian intermediaries. He pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI.
The confirmation about Papadopoulos is “the most important fact disclosed in this otherwise shoddy memo,” Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, said in a tweet Saturday in response to Trump’s assertion that the document vindicated him.
The warrant authorizing the FBI to monitor Page was not a one-time request, but was approved by a judge on four occasions, the memo says, and even signed off on by the second-ranking official at the Justice Department, Rod Rosenstein, whom Trump appointed as deputy attorney general.
Trump has become increasingly open about his dissatisfaction with top law enforcement officials as Mueller continues to interview former and current White House staff members.
Returning to Twitter on Saturday night, Trump quoted from a Wall Street Journal editorial that claimed the FBI had become “a tool of anti-Trump political actors,” writing:
“The four page memo released Friday reports the disturbing fact about how the FBI and FISA appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath…. The FBI failed to inform the FISA court that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier….the FBI became….
“’… a tool of anti-Trump political actors. This is unacceptable in a democracy and ought to alarm anyone who wants the FBI to be a nonpartisan enforcer of the law….The FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators.’ Wall Street Journal”
A NUANCED PICTURE
The underlying materials that served as the basis for the warrant application were not made public in the memo. As a result, the document only further intensified a partisan battle over how to interpret the actions of the FBI and Justice Department during the early stages of the counterintelligence investigation that Mueller later inherited.
The memo’s central allegation is that agents and prosecutors, in applying in October 2016 to monitor Page’s communications, failed to tell a judge that the opposition research that provided grounds for the FBI’s suspicion received funding from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Christopher Steele, the former spy who compiled the allegations, acknowledged having strong anti-Trump sentiments. But he also was a “longtime FBI source” with a credible track record, according to the memo from chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and his staff.
Steele’s research, according to the memo, “formed an essential part” of the warrant application. But it’s unclear how much or what information Steele collected made it into the application, or how much has been corroborated. Steele was working for Fusion GPS, a firm initially hired by the conservative Washington Free Beacon to do opposition research on Trump. Steele didn’t begin work on the project until after Democratic groups took over the funding.
Republicans say a judge should have known that “political actors” were involved in allegations that led the Justice Department to believe Page might be an agent of a foreign power — an accusation he has consistently and strenuously denied.
The memo focuses on Page, but Democrats on the House committee said “this ignores the inconvenient fact that the investigation did not begin with, or arise from Christopher Steele or the dossier, and that the investigation would persist on the basis of wholly independent evidence had Christopher Steele never entered the picture.”
Democrats also said it was misleading and incorrect to say a judge was not told of the potential political motivations of the people paying for Steele’s research.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who has been deeply involved in hotly debated Republican issues such as the Benghazi hearings, said the GOP memo has no impact on Mueller’s Russia probe and that the significance of the dossier has been overstated.
“There is a Russia investigation without a dossier. So to the extent the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower,” Gowdy said in an interview to air today on CBS’ Face The Nation.
Gowdy, who announced recently that he is not running for re-election, said: “The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’ meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice. So there’s going to be a Russia probe, even without a dossier.”
Information for this article was contributed by Emily Cochrane of
The New York Times; by Eric Tucker, Mary Clare Jalonick, Chad Day, Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin, Catherine Lucey, Matthew Daly, Desmond Butler and Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press; and by Jenna Johnson, Devlin Barrett, Karoun Demirjian and Philip Rucker of The Washington Post.