The House Intelligence Committee will be voting Monday on the decision whether to declassify a Democratic counter memo to the one Republicans released Friday which shows bias within the Justice Department.
If during the meeting on Monday night the committee approves the Democratic rebuttal memo then the document will be sent to President Donald Trump, who will be making the final decision as to whether the document is to be made public.
Several committee Republicans have shown willingness for the Democratic memo to be declassified but not before it has been vetted.
Charles Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, said that President Trump will have to agree to release the document, saying that it is a “fundamental fairness.”
The Republican memo that was released on Friday shows that senior Justice Department officials used information from the Steele dossier, which was financed as an opposition research document during the 2016 campaign. The DOJ officials used that dossier in order to approve surveillance warrants on Carter Page who was a member of Trump’s transition team as well as a former Trump campaign adviser.
Trump and other Republicans said that the memo released on Friday is proof that the Justice Department is biased against the president in the Russia investigation. Trump on Saturday morning tweeted that the document “totally vindicates” him.
Meanwhile, Democrats are saying that the memo is a misleading document, addiding that it was intentionally probed and picked in order to undermine the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
According to The Hill, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee crafted a memo of their own, based on the same classified documents the Republicans used, which they say will provide more context and fill in omissions in the Republican document.
“What we are going to learn if and when the Democratic memo is released, what we will learn is that it is not true that this [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant was awarded solely on the basis of the Steele dossier. We will also learn that the FBI, because they’re very careful people, didn’t mislead the judge,” Democratic Representative Jim Himes, who sits on the committee, said Sunday morning.
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