Politics

House Republicans Release Rebuttal To Democratic Intel Memo

REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Julia Nista General Assignment Reporter
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House Republicans released a rebuttal to the Democratic House intelligence memo Saturday.

The rebuttal focuses on ignored and omitted information in the Democratic memo, which was also released Saturday. The Republicans pounced on several points, including Michael Isikoff’s Yahoo! News article, the DNC and Christopher Steele’s credibility.

The Republican rebuttal argues the Democrat memo is an “unpersuasive attempt to distract from the Committee’s key findings on FISA abuse.”

The Republican rebuttal states, “Amazingly, the Democrat memo does not contain a single reference to the DNC or Clinton campaign, or acknowledge that they funded the dossier, or admit that this information was not provided to the FISA Court.” 

The rebuttal also mentions “the memo ignores that the FBI failed to subsequently inform the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] that Steele provided information to Yahoo News,” and that “Isikoff has publicly confirmed Steele was a source for his article about Page.”

The Democrat memo asserts that the House Republicans do not “cite evidence that Steele disclosed to Yahoo! details included in the FISA warrant, since the British Court filings to which they refer do not address what Steele may have said to Yahoo.” The Democrat memo also asserts that the information given to Yahoo! News may not have been used in the FISC.

The Democrat memo claims that the Steele dossier’s information about Carter Page is corroborated, but the supporting information is heavily redacted in the memo. The Republican rebuttal states, “Nothing in the initial application corroborated these claims about Page, which—to this day—have not been confirmed.” The heavy redaction of the supposed corroborating details of the Steele dossier still leaves many questions.

Other points in the Republican rebuttal are the fact that Russian officials call Carter Page an “idiot,” the Democratic memo was subject to the same scrutiny and process as the Republican memo, and that “the Democrat memo has redactions—which is not surprising given that the 10-page Democrat memo contains much more classified information, including information implicating sources and methods, than the GOP’s declassified 4-page memo.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes also released a statement Saturday, reiterating his position that the FBI spied on an American citizen through the use of an opposing party’s “political dirt” and that “the FISA court was misled about Mr. Page’s past interactions with the FBI.”

Nunes’ statement also said, “It defies belief that the Department of Justice and FBI failed to provide information to a secret court that they had provided to an open federal court regarding their past interactions with Mr. Page.”

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