Trump seized on what memo could mean
Clued in to ideas about document via Fox shows before reading it
WASHINGTON – Even before he’d read the memo, President Donald Trump seized on what it could mean.
The president first learned of the House Intelligence Committee document last month from some Republican allies in Congress and watched it take hold in the conservative media, including on some of his favorite Fox News programs, according to seven White House officials and outside advisers.
The classified memo sent to the Oval Office by the committee’s majority Republicans asserted that the FBI and Justice Department abused their surveillance powers to monitor the communications of a onetime Trump campaign associate. Trump told confidants in recent days that he believed the memo would validate his concerns that the “deep state” – an alleged shadowy network of powerful entrenched federal and military interests – had conspired to undermine the legitimacy of his presidency, according to one outside adviser.
That adviser and the others weren’t authorized to publicly discuss private conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Trump’s decision to authorize the memo’s public disclosure was extraordinary, yet part of a recent pattern. Like few of his predecessors, Trump has delivered repeated broadsides against intelligence and law enforcement agencies, working in tandem with some conservatives to lay the groundwork either to dismiss or to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Russia investigation.
“This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” the president tweeted Saturday from Florida, where he was spending the weekend. “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!”
Trump had dismissed forceful pleas from the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the second-ranking Justice Department official, Rod Rosenstein, to keep the memo under wraps. They said the four-page document was inaccurate and lacked critical context, and they made their views known in a remarkable public statement objecting to its release. Democrats said the memo, which disclosed material about one of the most tightly held national security processes, selectively used Republican talking points in an effort to smear law enforcement.
Trump was undeterred. He told allies he believed the memo would reinforce his belief that accusations of collusion between his 2016 campaign and Russian officials were false and part of the conspiracy to discredit his victory.
Several aides cautioned that the memo did not contain convincing evidence of a conspiracy, while others urged him to black out sections on intelligence-gathering methods, according to a White House official. Other advisers, inside and outside the West Wing, questioned why his administration had allowed the memo to overshadow his State of the Union address.