Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein met with Trump to discuss a classified memo that Democrats say will counter GOP allegations that the FBI abused its spying powers while investigating the president's 2016 campaign. | Andrew Harnick/AP Trump meets Rosenstein to discuss Dem memo

Donald Trump met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein Tuesday to discuss a classified memo that Democrats say will counter GOP allegations that the FBI abused its spying powers while investigating the president's 2016 campaign, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.

White House chief of staff John Kelly told reporters earlier Tuesday that Trump had received the document, which is Democrats' response to an earlier memo by Republicans that was made public last week. A House panel voted Monday in favor of making the Democratic document public too.


Later on Capitol Hill, Kelly told reporters that he has asked key lawyers and national security officials involved in the declassification process to complete a final evaluation of the Democratic memo by no later than Thursday. The chief of staff signaled there could be redactions to the document, saying "this is not as clean a memo as the first one."

"Where the first one was very clean relative to sources and methods, my initial cut is, this one is a lot less clean," Kelly said after leaving an immigration-focused meeting with top congressional leaders. "But at the end of it all, it’ll be guys like Rod Rosenstein, Chris Wray from the FBI, certainly the national security attorneys at the White House giving the president recommendations.”

Sanders said Trump met with Rosenstein to discuss "differences between the two memos." She said the administration would follow a similar course to review the Democratic memo as it had the GOP version.

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"The American people can expect this memo to go through the exact same process that the Republican memo went through, which involved bringing all of the stakeholders from a legal and national security perspective to weigh in before making a determination," Sanders said. "We didn't release the memo prior to the review process being complete, and we're not going to do that this time."

Trump has five days to review the new memo. Its author, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), said he is concerned the White House could try to make political changes before allowing it to be released.

“What I'm more concerned about ... is that they make political redactions," the California Democrat said. "That is, not redactions to protect sources or methods, which we’ve asked the Department of Justice and the FBI to do, but redactions to remove information they think is unfavorable to the president. That could be a real problem, and that's our main concern at this point.”