President Donald Trump and the White House reacted immediately after the House Intelligence Committee released a Democratic rebuttal memo to its Republican counterpart on Saturday.
Trump took to Twitter call out the findings of some of the document, calling it a “bust.”
The Democrat memo response on government surveillance abuses is a total political and legal BUST. Just confirms all of the terrible things that were done. SO ILLEGAL!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2018
Dem Memo: FBI did not disclose who the clients were – the Clinton Campaign and the DNC. Wow!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2018
“This politically driven document fails to answer serious concerns raised by the Majority’s memorandum about the use of partisan opposition research from one candidate, loaded with uncorroborated allegations, as a basis to ask a court to approve surveillance of a former associate of another candidate, at the height of a presidential campaign,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a lengthy and scathing statement.
Sanders continued, “As the Majority’s memorandum stated, the FISA judge was never informed that Hillary Clinton and the DNC funded the dossier that was a basis for the Department of Justice’s FISA application. In addition, the Minority’s memo fails to even address the fact that the Deputy FBI Director told the Committee that had it not been for the dossier, no surveillance order would have been sought.”
The heavily-redacted memo rebutted Republican claims that the FBI did not notify the FISA court that the infamous Steele dossier had political origins in its application. The FBI did include the opposition research nature of the dossier in the FISA application, as revealed in the Democratic memo, but did not specifically disclose that the dossier was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.