Drew Angerer/Getty Images DOJ briefs lawmakers on classified material behind GOP’s Russia memo

The Justice Department on Tuesday afternoon is briefing the House Judiciary Committee on the highly classified material that was used to craft a Republican memo alleging misconduct by senior FBI officials.

The memo, released in February by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, alleged that top FBI agents misled a federal court to obtain a warrant to spy on a former Trump campaign aide in October 2016. The FBI and top Democrats have called the memo misleading, arguing that it omitted context to paint the FBI officials in a negative light.


Only a handful of lawmakers, though, have actually seen the highly classified intelligence that undergirded the GOP memo and a Democratic rebuttal also released last month. They include Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), senior members of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as Reps. Bob Goodlatte (D-Va.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the top Republican and Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

Schiff and Nadler argued in advance of the release of the GOP memo — which was declassified by President Donald Trump — that members of their committee should be given access to the underlying intelligence in order to determine the accuracy of the claims. But their demands were rebuffed at the time.

“Too many of our colleagues appear to be constructing their own version of history,” Nadler wrote to Goodlatte in late January. “Our members should have the benefit of access to the actual record without delay.”

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The briefing won’t include access to the underlying documents themselves, according to a source familiar with the format, but will give lawmakers a chance to ask questions of top Justice Department officials about the underlying intelligence.

The briefing for Judiciary Committee members comes amid calls by Gowdy and Goodlatte for a special counsel to investigate the FBI’s actions during the 2016 election, including its handling of its controversial surveillance program known as FISA.

"We believe that, in the case of certain decisions made and not made by the Department of Justice and FBI in 2016 and 2017, both an actual conflict of interest exists and separately, but equally significantly, the public interest requires the appointment of a Special Counsel," the GOP lawmakers wrote to Attorney General Jeff Sessions earlier this month.

The Intelligence Committee memo released by Republicans accused top FBI officials of obtaining a warrant to spy on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October 2016 based on material included in a dossier compiled by former British intelligence agency Christopher Steele. The so-called Steele dossier described an intricate, years-long plot by the Russian government to cultivate a relationship with Trump and help him win the 2016 election. It also alleged Russians possessed compromising information about Trump that could be used as leverage.

Trump and his allies in Congress have fiercely rejected the dossier as a fiction, and they’ve suggested that the FBI relied on the document without sufficient corroboration to obtain the authority to spy on Page. They also contend the FBI obtained its surveillance warrant without notifying a judge that Steele’s work was underwritten by the campaign of Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, which hired the firm that contracted with Steele to produce the dossier.

Democrats, in their rebuttal memo, countered that the FBI did disclose the political origins of the dossier and followed standard protocol by omitting the name of the campaign and the firm, Fusion GPS, from its warrant application.