In statement attributable to FBI director – appointed by Trump – agency raises concerns about ‘material omissions of fact’ in document

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The FBI said on Wednesday it had “grave concerns” about Donald Trump’s apparent intention to release a memo said to contain classified information about the bureau’s investigation into one of the president’s campaign aides.

After both Trump and the House speaker, Paul Ryan, made public statements supporting the so-called Nunes memo’s release, which the US president said he “100%” backed releasing, the fight over its fate took an extraordinary twist with the highly unusual FBI statement ultimately attributable to its director, Trump’s appointee Christopher Wray.

The clash between Wray and Trump is only the latest flare-up in what officials warn is an increasingly dangerous showdown between the White House and justice department, with a cycle of firings and retaliatory leaks potentially culminating in a spectacular firing or similar move by Trump that could threaten a constitutional crisis.

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“We have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the FBI said in its statement.

A Trump administration official told Reuters the memo was likely to be released on Thursday.

The memo in question, which Democrats have said cherry-picks classified material to make Russia investigators look bad, was assembled by the House intelligence committee chairman, Devin Nunes, a staunch Trump supporter and a member of his transition team.

Nunes issued a combative statement in reply, accusing the FBI of “surveillance abuses” and dismissing what he called the bureau’s “spurious objections” to the release of the memo. However, Nunes opposes the release of a parallel memo written by Democrats.

Though the Nunes memo’s precise contents are unknown, it is believed to describe a supposedly flawed request by the FBI to extend surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide.

The memo is being treated as potentially explosive in part because it is said to place responsibility for the supposedly flawed request at the door of the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the Trump-Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump used the mishandling of another FBI investigation as a pretext for firing former director James Comey in May 2017. The axe fell on Comey after Trump requested a loyalty pledge from the director which Comey said he declined to give.

Q&A What is the Nunes memo? Show Hide 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

Trump made a similar request of Rosenstein, CNN reported for the first time Wednesday, in a December meeting in which Trump is said to have asked whether the deputy attorney general was “on my team”.

“Of course, we’re all on your team, Mr President,” Rosenstein replied, CNN quoted unnamed sources as saying.

The prospective removal of Rosenstein, whom Trump has attacked elsewhere, would constitute a grave threat to the special counsel investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia, analysts have warned.

Trump reportedly sought to exact a loyalty pledge from a third top justice department official, asking former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe whom he voted for in the presidential election in a meeting following Comey’s firing. McCabe stepped down in a surprise announcement Monday.

Eric Holder, the former attorney general, issued a warning about releasing the Nunes memo on Wednesday. “People must understand what is at stake by release of the bogus, contrived Nunes memo,” Holder wrote on Twitter. “It uses normally protected material and puts at risk our intell capabilities in order to derail a legitimate criminal investigation. This is unheard of - it is dangerous and it is irresponsible.”

Trump signaled his intention to release the memo during his departure Tuesday night from the House chamber, following his first State of the Union address.

Approached by a representative who urged him: “Mr President, let’s release the memo,” Trump was heard to reply: “Don’t worry, 100%. Can you imagine?”

Congressional Republicans have aggressively followed Trump’s lead in attacking the Russia investigators, briefly floating allegations last week of a “secret society” at work within the FBI to hobble Trump, before those allegations were retracted.

“Let it all out, get it all out there, cleanse the organization,” Ryan told colleagues at a breakfast event Tuesday, referring to the FBI.

That sentiment was part of a larger effort to discredit the FBI among Republicans, who cheered the announcement on Monday that McCabe, the deputy FBI director, would step aside earlier than formerly announced.

The move was interpreted in some quarters as a power play by Wray, whose interests in the matter were assumed to be aligned with the president who appointed him.

That picture was complicated by the release of the FBI statement on Wednesday, and by reports that Wray had sought to dissuade the White House from releasing the Nunes memo in a meeting Monday between Rosenstein and the White House chief of staff, John Kelly.

Republicans have likewise echoed Trump’s attacks on Mueller, whom Trump ordered fired in June 2017, according to a New York Times report, only to back down amid resistance from White House lawyers.

Mueller reports to Rosenstein, who has testified before Congress that he alone has the power to fire the special counsel.

Further complicating the memo’s release, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee said late on Wednesday that his committee’s vote to release the memo was now invalid because it was “secretly altered” by Republicans who wrote it.

Adam Schiff said in a letter to Nunes that committee Democrats had discovered changes that were made after the panel voted Monday to send it to Trump for review.

“The White House has therefore been reviewing a document since Monday night that the committee never approved for public release,” Schiff said in the letter.

A spokesman for Nunes said the changes were “minor edits to the memo, including grammatical fixes and two edits requested by the FBI and by the minority themselves”.

The Associated Press contributed to this report