Trump claims Nunes memo 'totally' vindicates him as FBI says 'talk is cheap'
President tweets ‘the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on’
FBI director urges agents to ‘keep calm and tackle hard’
Amid swirling partisan rancor in Washington, mere days after Donald Trump appealed for unity in his State of the Union address, the president fired yet another broadside at special counsel Robert Mueller and the investigation into Russian election meddling.
In a Saturday morning tweet, Trump continued to attack the FBI, claiming a contentiously published memo as supposed proof that the Russia investigation is a witch-hunt.
“This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” the president wrote, oddly placing his own name in quotation marks. “But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on.
“Their [sic] was no collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!”
The memo was written by aides to Devin Nunes, chairman of the House intelligence committee and a member of the Trump transition team.
The committee is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election but the inquiry has devolved into a fight about the separate FBI investigation, now led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
On Friday, Nunes published the memo after Donald Trump declassified it.
The memo revolves around a wiretap on Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign, alleging the FBI omitted key information when it applied for the wiretap. The findings “raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DoJ and FBI interactions” with the court that approves surveillance requests, the memo says. It also claims “a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses”.
The memo criticizes investigators who applied for the wiretap, saying they used material provided by an ex-British agent, Christopher Steele, without sufficiently disclosing their source. The memo says Steele was “desperate that Trump not get elected”.
The memo also says texts between an FBI agent and FBI attorney “demonstrated a clear bias against Trump” and says there is “no evidence of any co-operation or conspiracy between Page” and another Trump aide under investigation, George Papadopoulos.
The memo casts deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein in a negative light. Rosenstein could fire Mueller. The president, said to dislike Rosenstein, could fire and replace him.
The FBI argued against the memo’s release. Democrats wrote a rebuttal and sided with the bureau. The president reportedly told associates he believes the memo will help discredit the special counsel.
Alan Yuhas
The four-page memo, which was cleared by Trump and published on Friday by the House intelligence committee chairman, Devin Nunes, against protests from Democrats, the Department of Justice and the FBI, claims bias against Trump within the FBI and focuses on the approval of a surveillance warrant in 2016 to monitor Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser.
The document alleges that in order to obtain its warrant the FBI relied on material from a dossier compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, detailing an alleged years-long campaign by Russia to cultivate Trump and sow discord in the US.
A key assertion in the memo is that the FBI did not include in its warrant application knowledge that the Steele dossier was partly funded by Democrats.
The FBI has struck a defiant tone. Hours after Trump declassified the memo on Friday, against the wishes of the national security community, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, sought to rally his agents.
“Talk is cheap; the work you do is what will endure,” Wray wrote in an internal note leaked to media sources. “We speak through our work. One case at a time. One decision at a time.”
Wray urged his employees to ignore the sensational headlines, writing: “Remember: keep calm and tackle hard.”
The message followed speculation that Wray might resign over the release of the memo, which he had warned against in a rare public rebuke.
Trump and his supporters have declared war on the FBI and justice department, as part of attempts to discredit the inquiry into possible collusion between the Trump campaign in Moscow in the 2016 election and potential obstruction of justice by the president.
The memo has been attacked regarding its inconsistencies and omissions, which critics say show a deliberate attempt to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller.
The document fails to note that the US government surveilled Page after he left the Trump campaign. The application to target Page was made on 21 October 2016, a month after the Trump campaign publicly distanced itself from its former adviser, as his ties to Russia came under public scrutiny.
“He’s certainly not part of the campaign I’m running,” Kellyanne Conway, then Trump’s campaign manager, said in September 2016.
The memo also does not note that material from the Steele dossier was a part of the basis for the application but was not solely used for its justification.
Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said the investigation “would persist on the basis of wholly independent evidence had Christopher Steele never entered the picture”.
The memo confirms that the US government investigation into Russian meddling originated in an assertion to an Australian diplomat by George Papadopoulos, another foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, that Moscow possessed damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
Schiff and Democrats on the House intelligence committee sought to release their own memo, but Republicans on the panel voted to block them from doing so.
Critics fear Trump will use the memo as justification for firing high-ranking officials at the FBI and justice department. The president and his supporters have set their sights in particular on Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who has been tasked with oversight of Mueller’s investigation.
Trump was asked on Friday if he still had confidence in Rosenstein. He told reporters in the Oval Office: “You figure that one out.”
Later in the day, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions – who recused himself from the Russia investigation after misleading Congress about his own contacts with Russians – defended Rosenstein and the justice department’s third-ranking official, Rachel Brand.
The two officials “represent the kind of quality and leadership that we want in the department”, Sessions said.
While most Republicans in Congress have either remained silent or lined up behind Trump regarding the release of the Nunes memo, the Arizona senator John McCain was among the few to break ranks.
“The American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why special counsel Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded,” he said in a statement.
“Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows.”
