The Trump administration’s Department of Justice is fighting a Republican push to release a classified, GOP-drafted memo that alleges government abuse of foreign intelligence laws in the Trump-Russia investigation.

In a letter to the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, the Justice Department warned that releasing the memo without first consulting the department and the FBI would be “extraordinarily reckless” and could endanger national security.

“We believe it would be extraordinarily reckless for the Committee to disclose such information publicly without giving the Department and the FBI the opportunity to review the memorandum and to advise the HPSCI of the risk of harm to national security and to ongoing investigations that could come from public release,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, wrote Wednesday to Rep. Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

The letter, first reported by ABC News, was posted in full by CNN. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice confirmed the letter’s authenticity to BuzzFeed News.



“Indeed, we do not understand why the Committee would possibly seek to disclose classified and law enforcement sensitive information without first consulting with the relevant members of the Intelligence Community,” wrote Boyd, a Trump appointee.



In what has become the latest partisan melee over congressional and FBI investigations into Russian election interference, Nunes — whose staff on the Intelligence Committee wrote the memo — and other House Republicans have been discussing since last week how to release the top-secret document to the public. The power to declassify documents rests with the executive branch, but the committee could invoke a rarely used rule to send the decision to the president.

Republicans on the committee voted last week to allow all members of the House to read the memo, which purports to detail abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the FBI and Justice Department in the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. The memo reportedly suggests that an application by the FBI to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking a warrant to spy on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, misled the judge about its reliance on information from former British spy Christopher Steele, who wrote a controversial dossier that alleged Trump-Kremlin links.

Since then, cries from both House Republicans and right-wing media to release the memo have grown. The committee reportedly could vote as soon as next week on whether to move to have the memo released.