Two weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump blocked its full release, the House Intelligence Committee published a blacked out version of a classified Democratic memo aiming to counter a GOP narrative that the FBI and Justice Department conspired against Mr. Trump.
The document attempts to undercut and add context to some of the main points from a declassified Republican memo made public earlier this month. In that memo, Republicans went after the FBI and the Justice Department over the use of information compiled by British spy Christopher Steele in obtaining a secret warrant to monitor the communications of one-time Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.
‘Funded by Hillary’
The GOP memo included the assertion that the FBI obtained a surveillance warrant without disclosing that Mr. Steele’s anti-Trump research was paid for by Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
The Democratic memo says the Justice Department disclosed “the assessed political motivation of those who hired him” and that Mr. Steele was likely hired by someone “looking for information that could be used to discredit” Mr. Trump’s campaign. The Democratic memo also asserts that the FBI’s concerns about Mr. Page long predate the compilation of memos drafted by Mr. Steele. It also says that the Justice Department provided “additional information from multiple independent sources that corroborated Mr. Steele’s reporting”.
The memo also details Russian attempts to cultivate Mr. Page as a spy. It cites a federal indictment of two Russian spies who allegedly targeted Mr. Page for recruitment and notes that the FBI interviewed him based on those suspicions in March 2016.
