Collins: Slow the release of FBI memo

The House should put the brakes on its release of a classified memo until the Justice Department is able to review — and potentially redact — portions of the memo that may compromise U.S. intelligence tactics, GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Tuesday.

The House Intelligence Committee could release the memo as soon as this week, after voting on Monday afternoon to declassify the House GOP’s classified document outlining alleged wrongdoing by the FBI while monitoring the Trump campaign in 2016. But Collins, a Senate Intelligence Committee member, argued that a partisan rush to unveil the document could be a mistake.


“The preferable approach would be for the committee’s leaders to sit down with the Justice Department — which has raised significant concerns about the release of the memo — and go through it and see if there’s specific provisions that should be redacted in order to protect sources and methods used by our intelligence agencies and our law enforcement,” Collins said. “That is really an important step that should be taken.”

FBI director Chris Wray has viewed the memo, but the committee has not engaged in the kind of extensive discussion with the agency that Collins prefers. The Senate Intelligence Committee went back and forth with the CIA for years before releasing portions of a classified report on torture practices.

“We sat down with the CIA and gave them the opportunity to fact check the report, to dispute certain portions of it, and then we made decisions on that,” Collins said. But with regard to the House memo, she said “that kind of iterative process appears not to have occurred. And I just think when you realize that intelligence methods and sources are at stake here, that that kind of process should be gone through first.”

Collins said she doesn’t oppose ultimately releasing the GOP memo and a competing Democratic memo rebutting the House GOP, but said “both need to go through the declassification process.”

