Republicans charge bias, legal ‘breakdown’ in contentious memo on Russian Federation probe

Senior officials at the bureau and the Justice Department knew all of this, but declined to tell the judge who approved the warrant, according to the memo.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, said, “I think this is a separate issue”.

“Talk is cheap”, he added, and “the work you do is what will endure”.

“You do long-term damage to these institutions if you convince a large swath of the American public that they can’t be trusted”, Vladeck said.

Trump said over the weekend that the GOP memo “totally vindicates” him.

As US Senator John McCain, one of the last Republican holdouts against Trump, put it in a furious statement: “In 2016, the Russian government engaged in an elaborate plot to interfere in an American election and undermine our democracy”.

Former FBI head James Comey, who was sacked by Trump previous year after refusing to pledge loyalty to the president, tweeted after the memo’s release: “That’s it?” The FBI this week expressed “grave concerns” about the memo and called it inaccurate and incomplete. At the same time, the committee’s Republicans blocked Democrats from simultaneously releasing a rebuttal memo.

White House spokesman Raj Shah said Monday that if the committee sends the Democratic memo to the White House, officials “will consider it along the same lines” as they did the Nunes memo.

Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said Trump’s decision to allow the release of the memo was “part of a coordinated propaganda effort to discredit, disable and defeat the Russian Federation investigation”. “It all just further undermines not just the specific conclusions of the Nunes memo, but the larger point it’s being invoked by the President and his supporters to make”. Democrats said it was a set of cherry-picked claims aimed at smearing law enforcement and that releasing the memo would damage law enforcement and intelligence work.

The Senate’s top Democrat is calling on President Donald Trump to officially approve the release of a Democratic memorandum said to counter claims made in the memo he declassified Friday at the request of Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.

President Donald Trump’s first White House chief of staff says he never felt the president wanted to fire special counsel Robert Mueller. “So I think they were compelled to take the action they did today”. The officials were not authorized to be quoted about private deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Instead, as part of an agreement with DOJ officials, Nunes said one Democrat and one Republican were allowed to read the documents.

But several Republican lawmakers played down the memo’s significance for Mueller’s probe, including Representative Trey Gowdy, a member of the intelligence committee and one of the authors of the four-page memo.

The classified memo from Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is written to push back against the central allegations of the Republican memo from Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. Democrats say the court was notified. “This memo, frankly, has nothing at all to do with the special counsel”, he told “Fox News Sunday”.

“To suggest otherwise is a weird distraction from the abuses detailed in the memo, which the public will hopefully soon be able to read for themselves”, Langer said.

In a tweet posted Saturday morning, Trump continued his attacks against his own FBI and Justice Department for its investigation into potential collusion between Russian Federation and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Republicans have intensified their pressure on the Justice Department as Mueller’s probe has moved closer to Trump’s inner circle. Even if the motion succeeds, Trump has five days to block it. Mr. McCabe in fact presented the material as part of a constellation of compelling evidence that raised serious suspicions about Mr. Page, a former Moscow-based banker who had been on the F.B.I.’s radar for years, according to those familiar with the memo.