The following article by Brent D. Griffiths was posted on the Politico website February 4, 2018:
House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff said Sunday that the Republican memo about alleged FBI misconduct does not vindicate President Donald Trump.
“Of course not at all,” Schiff (D-Calif.) told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”
“What the memo indicates is the investigation didn’t begin with Carter Page, it actually began with George Papadopoulos, someone who was a foreign policy adviser for candidate Trump and someone who was meeting secretly with the Russians and talking about the stolen Clinton e-mails,” Schiff said.
“So quite to the contrary, even this very flawed memo demonstrates what the origin of the investigation was and that origin involved the issue of collusion.”
President Donald Trump, who approved the release of the memo authored by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and other GOP lawmakers, tweeted Saturday that the memo “totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe.” The document contains allegations about how top FBI and Justice Department officials were allegedly not forthcoming about the use of Christopher Steele’s dossier in their FISA request to spy on Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.
Pointing to the fact that Nunes previously came under fire for working too closely with the White House on classified matters, Schiff speculated that the Republican’s staffers could have coordinated the entire memo process with the White House.
“I think it’s very possible his staff worked with the White House and coordinated the whole effort with the White House,” Schiff said.
Schiff and other Democrats, along with some conservatives, have slammed Nunes for pushing to release the previously classified information. The California Democrat called the document a “political hit job” and warned that it could do long-term damage to the intelligence community.
“Sources are going to dry up because of what the Republicans on the committee are doing now,” Schiff said. “There’s a compact between our community and the intelligence community, you give us your deeply held secrets and we will hold them in good confidence and won’t abuse them.”
View the post here.