President Donald Trump has authorized the release of a controversial Republican memo, and has sent word to the House Intelligence Committee the document may be made public, a White House official said.
There were no White House-initiated redactions to the memo, a House aide said.
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The highly anticipated memo, that is purported to show government surveillance abuse, was at the center of an intense power struggle between congressional Republicans and the FBI has been declassified ahead of its expected release later Friday, Fox News has learned.
According to sources, the memo includes testimony from a high-ranking government official that without the infamous Trump dossier, the FBI and DOJ would not have secured surveillance warrants to spy on at least one member of the Trump team.
It also claims the FBI and DOJ used media reporting to lend credibility to the dossier, while the firm behind the dossier, Fusion GPS, briefed major American news outlets to include New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, New Yorker, Yahoo and Mother Jones.
The memo shoes that after former British spy Christopher Steele was cut off from the FBI, he continued to pass information, as did Fusion GPS, through Justice Department Official Bruce Ohr. Ohr’s wife Nellie began working for Fusion GPS as early as May 2016.
It also claims evidence that Steele has a personal animus for the President Trump.
The impending release of the four-page memo comes after the House Intelligence Committee voted earlier this week, over Democratic objections, to make the document public. This led to a rare and stunning rebuke from the bureau, which said Wednesday they had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
The memo includes alleged abuses involving FISA, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The White House has backed the memo’s release, calling for “transparency.”
On Jan, 31, 2018, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes issued the following statement today:
“Having stonewalled Congress’ demands for information for nearly a year, it’s no surprise to see the FBI and DOJ issue spurious objections to allowing the American people to see information related to surveillance abuses at these agencies. The FBI is intimately familiar with ‘material omissions’ with respect to their presentations to both Congress and the courts, and they are welcome to make public, to the greatest extent possible, all the information they have on these abuses. Regardless, it’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign. Once the truth gets out, we can begin taking steps to ensure our intelligence agencies and courts are never misused like this again.”
Developing.