About two weeks after President Donald Trump blocked a Democratic rebuttal to the controversial FISA memo released by the Republicans, Congress released the newly redacted memo Saturday.
While the original FISA memo alleged that the FBI and Department of Justice used the unverified Christopher Steele dossier to get a warrant to spy on former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page and misled the FISA court while doing so, the Democratic response said that Page already was known to be a Russian government agent.
“DOJ met the rigor, transparency and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA’s probabl[e] cause requirement by demonstrating: contemporaneous evidence of Russia’s election interference; concerning Russian links and outreach to Trump campaign officials; Page’s history with Russian intelligence; and (redacted) Page’s suspicious activities in 2016, including in Moscow,” the memo read, via USA Today.
Said Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee: “Our extensive review of the initial FISA application and three subsequent renewals failed to uncover any evidence of illegal, unethical, or unprofessional behavior by law enforcement and instead revealed that both the FBI and DOJ made extensive showings to justify all four requests.”
The rebuttal was blocked by Trump because “because the Memorandum contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages.” A week before that, though, Trump had overridden the objections of the FBI and DOJ to release the original memo, written by Rep. Devin Nunes.
You can read the entire 10-page rebuttal here.
