President Donald Trump on Friday approved the release of a classified House Intelligence Committee memo on alleged FBI abuses, which means the memo can now be made public.
The White House announced that it declassified the Republican-authored memo on Friday.
You can view and read the memo here.
The Latest: White House declassifies a GOP-authored memo, clearing the way for the House Intelligence Committee to release the document. https://t.co/TXChqHuM0T
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 2, 2018
The House Intelligence Committee had voted Monday night to release the classified memo written by Rep. Devin Nunes that alleges abuses by the FBI.
The memo alleges that the FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance law when it used the Democrat-funded Russian dossier to reportedly go after President Trump and his administration. The dossier research was used by the FBI to get a warrant for Carter Page, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser.
The FBI said this week it had “grave concerns” about the memo being released, which prompted a back-and-forth feud between the FBI and the President.
Trump on Friday morning had tweeted: “The top leadership and investigators of the FBI and Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans – something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!”
President Trump tweeted about the FBI. (Twitter)
“‘You had Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party try to hide the fact that they gave money to GPS Fusion to create a Dossier which was used by their allies in the Obama Administration to convince a Court misleadingly, by all accounts, to spy on the Trump Team,’ Tom Fitton, JW,” the President also tweeted Friday morning.
Recently, the FBI’s top agents have come under great scrutiny, as Republican lawmakers continued to call for the release of the memo that is said to reveal an extreme bias against the Trump Administration and the FBI’s abuse of government surveillance powers while investigating the Russian election hacking.
On Monday, the FBI’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, resigned from his post effective immediately. McCabe had served at the FBI for more than 20 years, since 1996. He was expected to retire this year, as he will be up for full retirement benefits mid-March.
The timing of McCabe’s departure was peculiar, as FBI Director Christopher Wray reportedly saw the Nunes memo a day earlier.
The memo purportedly reveals a shocking high-level conspiracy. Republicans demanded it be released to the public, but the FBI and the Justice Department were much more hesitant, especially in light of the recent text message incident, where thousands of messages between FBI officials apparently went missing.
The memo and text messages are said to reveal conspiracy among some of the highest echelons of government, involving the FBI plotting to spy on and upend President Trump and his administration.
While Democrats said the “#ReleaseTheMemo” movement is merely a distraction from the current federal investigation into Russian interference in the Presidential election – and have written a memo of their own, Republican politicians have been front and center pushing for the memo to be published.
Notably, the Intel Committee voted against releasing the Democrats’ memo.
