FBI, Trump in open conflict over classified GOP memo
WASHINGTON — In an extraordinary public break with the White House, the FBI warned Wednesday that it has “grave concerns” about a disputed Republican memo on secret surveillance during the 2016 campaign that President Donald Trump has promised to release and that Democrats say is filled with distortions.
The FBI said it only had a “limited opportunity” to review the classified four-page memo prepared by aides to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., a close Trump ally who chairs the House intelligence committee. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the nation’s premier law enforcement agency said in a two-paragraph statement.
The public pushback escalates a bitter conflict between the White House and senior officials at the Justice Department, who approved the FBI statement, as well as senior figures in the intelligence community, who previously warned that release of the classified GOP memo could endanger national security.
The FBI warning, which Nunes
dismissed as “spurious objections,” raises the stakes in the growing Republican effort to discredit the criminal investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller into whether Trump or his aides collaborated with Russian meddling in the election or obstructed justice.
In the latest twist in the saga over the memo, California Rep. Adam Schiff charged Wednesday night that Nunes “secretly altered” the memo before he sent it to the White House for review. Schiff is the ranking Democrat on the committee that Nunes chairs.
In a letter to Nunes, Schiff wrote that committee Democrats had discovered changes that were made after the panel voted along party lines Monday to release it. The vote sent the memo to the White House, giving Trump five days to decide whether to object to its release.
“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.
He did not say what had changed in the memo, or why it was significant. A spokesman for Nunes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Schiff called for Nunes to withdraw the memo and for the committee to hold a new vote next Monday.
FBI leaders have clashed with presidents in the past, but usually behind closed doors. Historians struggled Wednesday to find a precedent for the bureau’s public challenge to the White House.
“It’s like a neon billboard blinking, ‘Danger, don’t you dare do this,’ ” said Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University professor who studies the presidency. “This is a sign of war.”
The FBI decided to go public after FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is supervising Mueller’s probe, failed to convince the White House or House Republicans that the GOP memo is misleading and its underlying classified material should stay secret.
Wray was allowed to read the classified memo Sunday in a protected room at the House, but was not given an opportunity to suggest changes, according to two officials familiar with the process. He asked to make his case in a private briefing with House committee members, but that offer was declined.
The FBI statement was not issued in Wray’s name, but from the bureau, an effort to defend an institution that Trump and his allies have said is part of a “deepstate” conspiracy of entrenched national security officials to take down the president.
The latest clash is likely to erode Trump’s relationship with Wray. Trump appointed Wray as FBI director after he fired James Comey last May for what the president later said was “this Russia thing.” Comey’s dismissal sparked a national uproar and led to Mueller’s appointment as special counsel.
Despite Wray’s concerns about the memo, the GOPled House committee voted on a party line Monday to release it. The committee voted against simultaneously releasing a written rebuttal from Democrats, who claim the GOP memo deliberately misstates facts for partisan purposes.
The decision then moved to the White House, and Trump told a lawmaker after his State of the Union address Tuesday night that he was “100 percent” planning to release the memo. On Wednesday morning, John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, said on Fox News Radio that the memo “will be released here pretty quick, I think, and the whole world can see it.”
The Republican memo reportedly claims that the Justice Department misinformed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a secret warrant to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, an adviser in Trump’s campaign who had business ties to Russia, and that it shows the FBI has an anti-Trump bias.
Democrats and law enforcement officials say the four-page GOP memo “cherry-picks” information from a much longer application to the FISA court. Those documents typically run 50 to 60 pages.
Nunes served on Trump’s transition team, and rallied to his defense when Trump falsely claimed last year that President Barack Obama had his “wires tapped.” Nunes has argued that the FBI has treated Trump unfairly.