Sen. Cory Booker has declared plans to release a House Intelligence Committee memo related to anti-Trump bias within the FBI and the Justice Department as “treasonous.”
Sirius XM’s Mark Thompson of “Make It Plain” invited the New Jersey Democrat onto his show to discuss the impending publication of a memo penned by Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican and House Intelligence Committee chairman. Mr. Booker lamented the lawmaker’s work, which is likely to erode the credibility of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“If it’s undermining, senator, ought we consider these very actions to be obstructive themselves?” Mr. Thompson asked, according to an excerpt posted Wednesday on YouTube.
“Well, obstructive, I might say tantamount to treasonous in the sense of: when you violate the intelligence community’s mandates around classified documentation and what should be released, you could be betraying or, especially if you’re revealing sources and methods or giving some color to sources and methods, you are actually endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community and our ability to source intelligence,” Mr. Booker replied, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“So, to me, this is something that could be potentially viewed as treasonous,” he concluded.
The FBI issued a statement Wednesday expressing “grave concerns” regarding the memo’s release, for which lawmakers voted along party lines.
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“The FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it,” the agency said. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Monday night that the memo should be released due to “extreme bias” displayed in text messages between former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
“The fact is, I think it’ll speak for itself and I think it’ll answer a lot of questions,” the lawmaker, member of the House Oversight Committee, said. “We knew before the text messages came out — we suspected the fix was in on the Clinton investigation. Now that Strzok-Page text messages have come on we know the fix was in.”
Mr. Strzok, the FBI’s former No. 2 counterintelligence official, was removed from the agency’s Russia probe after investigators at the Justice Department viewed texts with Ms. Page, his mistress. He also worked on the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s secret email server.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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