It has been three days since the House Intelligence Committee voted to release a classified document crucial to the FBI’s investigation into President Trump. The document, an internal memo that allegedly debunks the validity of the FBI’s case into Trump, is now a cause of major controversy in Washington.
Committee Approves Release
On Monday night, members of the Joint Intelligence Committee voted along party lines to de-classify an internal memo proving that the case Robert Mueller led against Trump was invalid. According to Republican members of the committee, the memo details the FBI using Democrats’ opposition research to validate a search warrant allowing the agency to keep tabs on the president’s campaign. Democrats disagree. They think the memo is another attempt for the GOP to improve Trump’s image.
‘The Memo is Inaccurate’
On Wednesday, the FBI also weighed in on the ongoing debate between the two parties, calling the memo inaccurate at present. The agency stated that the document has factual omissions that impact on its accuracy. If it were to be released to the public, people would only be getting one side of the whole document.
The FBI is not the only group concerned about the accuracy of the memo in question. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the lead Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has his own concern about it. He is not concerned about the omission of certain details, however. His argument stems from the fact that the memo about is different from the one set before the committee on Monday.
On Wednesday night, Rep. Schiff wrote an open letter to the head of the Intelligence Committee calling him out on providing the White House with a memo that according to him was not cleared by the committee. “White House is therefore reviewing a document the Committee has not approved for release,” Schiff wrote on his Twitter handle on Wednesday.
Many people agreed with Schiff’s assessment, including another Democrat on the committee. The Democrat confidentially spoke to NBC News, remarking that the changes committee majority leader Rep. Nunes was not “cosmetic.” A spokesman for Nunes had previously confirmed that the head of the Intelligence Committee had indeed changed the memo, but only to the extent of “fixing grammatical errors” and adding edits supposedly requested by the FBI and Democratic Party.
The question of whether or not to release the memo to the public now rests with Trump, who has less than a week to make his decision.
