President Donald Trump on Saturday accused the Democrats of playing politics with classified information, asserting that their memo countering GOP allegations about the conduct of the FBI\u2019s Russia probe was a trap meant to \u201cblame the White House for lack of transparency.\u201d<\/p>\n
Citing national security concerns, the White House notified the House Intelligence Committee on Friday that the president was \u201cunable\u201d to declassify the Democratic memo. White House counsel Don McGahn said in a letter to the committee that the memo contains \u201cnumerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages\u201d and asked the committee to revise it with the help of the Justice Department.<\/p>\n
He said Trump was still \u201cinclined\u201d to release the memo in the interest of transparency if revisions are made.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Democrats sent a very political and long response memo which they knew, because of sources and methods (and more), would have to be heavily redacted, whereupon they would blame the White House for lack of transparency,\u201d he tweeted. The meaning of the \u201c(and more)\u201d was not immediately clear.<\/p>\n
Trump urged the Democrats to \u201cre-do and send back in proper form!\u201d<\/p>\n
The president\u2019s rejection of the Democratic memo was in contrast to his enthusiastic embrace of releasing the Republican document, which accuses the FBI and Justice Department of abusing their surveillance powers in obtaining a secret warrant to monitor former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.<\/p>\n
Even before reading the GOP document, Trump pledged to make it public. It was published in full a week ago over the objections of the Justice Department.<\/p>\n
The Intelligence Committee\u2019s top Democrat, California Rep. Adam Schiff, criticized Trump for treating the two documents differently, saying the president is now seeking revisions by the same committee that produced the original Republican memo. Still, Schiff said, Democrats \u201clook forward to conferring with the agencies to determine how we can properly inform the American people about the misleading attack on law enforcement by the GOP.\u201d<\/p>\n
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said the move is \u201cpart of a dangerous and desperate pattern of cover-up on the part of the president.\u201d California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has read the classified information both memos are based on. She tweeted that Trump\u2019s blocking the memo is \u201chypocrisy at its worst.\u201d<\/p>\n
The head of the House committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who produced the GOP memo, encouraged Democrats to accept the Justice Department\u2019s recommendations and \u201cmake the appropriate technical changes and redactions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has said the GOP memo \u201cvindicates\u201d him in the ongoing Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller. But Democrats and Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who helped draft the GOP memo, have said it shouldn\u2019t be used to undermine the special counsel.<\/p>\n
The House Intelligence Committee voted Monday to release the Democratic memo. Republicans backed the release, but several said they thought it should be redacted. Ryan also said he thought the Democratic document should be released.<\/p>\n
In declining to declassify the document, the White House also sent lawmakers a letter signed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, as well as a marked-up copy of the memo, laying out portions it considers too sensitive to make public. Among those passages are some that the Justice Departments says could compromise intelligence sources and methods, ongoing investigations and national security if disclosed.<\/p>\n
The White House message caps off a week in which Republicans and Democrats on the committee have publicly fought, with the panel now erecting a wall to separate feuding Republican and Democratic staffers who had long sat side by side.<\/p>\n
The disagreements have escalated over the last year as Democrats have charged that Republicans aren\u2019t taking the panel\u2019s investigation into Russian election meddling seriously enough. They say the GOP memo is designed as a distraction from the probe, which is looking into whether Trump\u2019s campaign was in any way connected to the Russian interference.<\/p>\n
Trump declassified the GOP-authored memo over the objections of the FBI, which said it had \u201cgrave concerns\u201d about the document\u2019s accuracy.<\/p>\n
In the Nunes\u2019 memo, Republicans took aim at the FBI and the Justice Department over the use of information from former British spy Christopher Steele in obtaining a warrant to monitor Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The main allegation was that the FBI and Justice Department didn\u2019t tell the court enough about Steele\u2019s anti-Trump bias or that his work was funded in part by Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.<\/p>\n
They argued that the reliance on Steele\u2019s material amounted to an improper politicization of the government\u2019s surveillance powers.<\/p>\n
Democrats have countered that the GOP memo was inaccurate and a misleading collection of \u201ccherry-picked\u201d details.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Donald Trump on Saturday accused the Democrats of playing politics with classified information, asserting that their memo countering GOP allegations about the conduct of the FBI\u2019s Russia probe was a trap meant to \u201cblame the White House for lack of transparency.\u201d Citing national security concerns, the White House notified the House Intelligence Committee on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21613,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21614,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21612\/revisions\/21614"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}