FBI expresses ‘grave concerns’ over Republican memo’s accuracy

WASHINGTON: The FBI said on Wednesday it had “grave concerns” about the accuracy of a top-secret House Intelligence Committee memo alleging anti-Trump bias within the Justice Department, challenging President Donald Trump’s pledge to release it.
But a few hours after the rare public rebuke by the top US law enforcement agency, a Trump administration official said the memo was likely to be released on Thursday.
“The FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it,” the FBI said in a statement. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
The FBI declined to say if Director Christopher Wray, who viewed the memo during the weekend, approved the statement. Trump named Wray to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation after firing Director James Comey last May.
The memo has become a lightning rod in a partisan fight over investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election and possible collusion by Trump’s campaign, which Russia and Trump have both denied.
Justice Department officials have also said releasing the memo could jeopardize classified information.
Representative Devin Nunes, the intelligence committee’s Republican chairman who commissioned the document, dismissed the FBI and Justice Department objections to its release as “spurious” in a statement on Wednesday.
Although White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said on Wednesday that Trump had not yet read the document, the president told lawmakers after his State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night that there was a “100 percent” chance the memo would be released.
A White House official said the four-page document was delivered to the White House on Monday after the committee voted to release it. Administration lawyers were working against a Friday deadline to determine if any of it should be redacted to protect national security, the official said.
Late on Wednesday, Representative Adam Schiff, the intelligence committee’s ranking Democrat, said he had discovered Nunes had sent a version of the Republican memo to the White House that was “materially altered” and thus was not what was approved for release by the committee’s vote.
A spokesman for Nunes did not immediately respond to a request for comment. And an aide to Schiff did not immediately respond when asked how Schiff had obtained that information.
Republicans, who blocked an effort to release a counterpoint memo by the panel’s Democrats, say their document exposes anti-Trump bias by the FBI and the Justice Department in seeking a warrant to conduct an eavesdropping operation.
Democrats say the memo selectively uses highly classified materials in a misleading effort to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Justice Department’s Russia probe, and Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who hired him.