Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, attacked the release of the FISA memo, arguing that it does not serve the interests of America, “only Putin’s.”

McCain said in a statement:

In 2016, the Russian government engaged in an elaborate plot to interfere in an American election and undermine our democracy. Russia employed the same tactics it has used to influence elections around the world, from France and Germany to Ukraine, Montenegro, and beyond. Putin’s regime launched cyberattacks and spread disinformation with the goal of sowing chaos and weakening faith in our institutions. And while we have no evidence that these efforts affected the outcome of our election, I fear they succeeded in fueling political discord and dividing us from one another. The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests – no party’s, no president’s, only Putin’s. 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. Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.

The White House and the House Intelligence Committee released the FISA memo on Friday.

Last December it was revealed that it McCain who passed the Steele dossier to former FBI Director James Comey. McCain met with Andrew Wood in Halifax, Canada at the Halifax Security Forum in Canada in November 2016, and they discussed the dossier.

McCain had his associate David Kramer travel to London to meet with Steele and get briefed on the dossier. They arranged to get a hard copy of the dossier to McCain, and he gave it to Comey.

The memo describes how senior Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials used the unverified Trump dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign staffer Carter Page. The memo also details how those senior officials in the DOJ and the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on how the Trump dossier was actually opposition research funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).