WASHINGTON — A fall 2016 application for a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant targeting a former Trump campaign adviser has become the latest front in the partisan struggle over the investigation into Russia's interference in the presidential election.

Republican aides on the House Intelligence Committee have prepared a memorandum that is said to accuse law enforcement officials of improperly obtaining the warrant. House Republicans are calling for the declassification and release of the report, while Democrats say that it is full of misinformation and is a political stunt.

People familiar with the report told the New York Times that its main allegation was that law enforcement officials failed to adequately explain to the intelligence court judge that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. That, the report is said to claim, suggests that the judge was misled.

The rollout of the memorandum was sudden and intense. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee abruptly moved to make the report available to the entire House at a closed-door meeting Thursday, surprising Democrats who did not know it had been prepared, a participant told the newspaper.

After a party-line vote to make it available, Republicans began declaring that the report draped the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation in scandal.

"I have read the memo," Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, wrote on Twitter. "The sickening reality has set in. I no longer hold out hope there is an innocent explanation for the information the public has seen."

But Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the committee, denounced the report as "a profoundly misleading set of talking points" that were "rife with factual inaccuracies" and created "a distorted view of the FBI." He said the memo's boosters were carrying water for the White House.

Several people familiar with the memo said it contained several pages of bullet points focusing on material drawn from the application materials for a FISA warrant targeting Carter Page, a onetime campaign adviser to President Donald Trump. Page, who had visited Moscow in July 2016 and left the campaign that September, a month before the application, was suspected of acting as a foreign agent for the Russian government. He has denied wrongdoing.

Although the application is said to have drawn on a variety of material, the Intelligence Committee memo apparently focuses on one strand: information from Steele, a former British intelligence agent who wrote the dossier of unverified and salacious allegations that suggested that Trump had been compromised by a Russian intelligence operation.

Steele had been retained to investigate Trump by Fusion GPS, a research firm that had been hired by a law firm working for Democrats. When Steele decided to take the information he was gathering to the FBI in August and October 2016, people familiar with those conversations told the New York Times, he told the bureau's agents only that he was working for interests opposed to Trump's campaign. Fusion GPS, which was under contract with the Democrats at the time, paid around $160,000 for Steele's research.

It is not clear how much of that context — if any — law enforcement officials conveyed to the court.

Two people familiar with the warrant application said law enforcement officials described Steele not as a Democratic-funded investigator, but as a reliable FBI source who had previously provided information about corruption in FIFA, the global governing body for soccer.

Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor who specializes in national security issues, said that disclosing Steele's backers could affect a judge's assessment of his credibility. But Vladeck cautioned that without seeing the warrant application, it was impossible to say whether that information was just "background noise" or pivotal.