The White House has officially received a classified memo written by Democrats defending the unprecedented decision by the FBI and Department of Justice decision to spy on one of President Trump’s advisers during the 2016 campaign and it is considering whether publicly release it.
The president has until Friday to approve the document’s public release, omit certain details — or hold it back entirely.
On Tuesday, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff, who authored the paper, said he feared the Trump administration would “politically redact” it by omitting passages it finds embarrassing.
“That is, not redactions to protect sources or methods, which we’ve asked the Department of Justice and the FBI to do, but redactions to remove information they think is unfavorable to the president,” Mr. Schiff told CNN. “That could be a real problem.”
Republican lawmakers are concerned that Mr. Schiff and Democrats are trying to set Mr. Trump up by intentionally including sensitive information in their 10-page memo that will have to be redacted, giving anti-Trump forces ammunition.
Mr. Schiff and other Democrats had repeatedly argued against releasing the GOP’s four-page memo, saying it would reveal important “sources and methods” and undermine national security. It did not.
House Judiciary committee member, Rep. John Ratcliffe, said the Schiff memo has more sensitive information than the GOP memo and should be changed prior to release.
“I’m of the opinion that there are sources and methods, considerable sources and methods, that need to be heavily redacted or edited, and I would hope that would take place before it’s declassified and made public,” Mr. Ratcliffe, Texas Republican, said on Fox News.
On Monday night, the House Intelligence committee voted to release the Schiff memo — which Democrats say counters a GOP paper made public last week by Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican and chairman of the panel.
The GOP memo says the surveillance warrant on former Trump aide Carter Page was partly justified by the anti-Trump dossier funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic Party — and injected political bias into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process. It also says the FBI failed to make clear the dossier was opposition research funded by the Clinton camp.
The Schiff memo is said to argue that the GOP mischaracterized classified data in an overall effort to undermine the credibility of the DOJ, the FBI and especially special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian election meddling. The Democrats say legitimate reasons outside the anti-Trump dossier caused the government to wiretap Mr. Page.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday said Mr. Trump had met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to discuss both documents.
“The president has seen the [Schiff] memo,” she said. “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. When that’s completed, the president will be given a thorough briefing on the findings and we’ll make a determination at that time.
Mr. Schiff admitted Democrats were limited in their ability to fight White House omissions but could seek a declassification review from the FBI and DOJ to release the compete document.
The New York Times on Monday asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to unseal the secret documents actually underlying Mr. Page’s surveillance warrant, which both memos draw from.
David Schulz, one of the attorneys representing the Times, said it is the first time the court has ever been asked to unseal a specific warrant application.
• Dan Boylan can be reached at dboylan@washingtontimes.com.
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