WASHINGTON _ The House Intelligence Committee released a controversial classified memo Friday that Republicans say reveals improper government surveillance during the 2016 presidential race _ which President Donald Trump said shows a pro-Democratic tilt at the FBI and Justice Department _ but that the FBI warned is inaccurate.
Given the intense partisan furor that preceded its release, the top-secret document seems far less explosive than Republicans had claimed, and far less dangerous to national security than Democrats had asserted. It neither proves an anti-Trump bias at the FBI and Justice Department nor reveals previously unknown intelligence sources and methods.
The findings "raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality" of FBI and Justice Department interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and represent "a troubling breakdown" of legal processes to protect the American public from surveillance abuses by the government, the memo's Republican authors wrote.
Critics, including some leading Republicans, fired back that the memo shows no wrongdoing or misdeeds, and that it served only to undermine the ongoing special counsel investigation into whether anyone in Trump's orbit assisted Russian meddling in the 2016 election or sought to obstruct justice later.
At its heart, the four-page memo says that Justice Department and FBI officials relied in substantial part on research funded by Democrats to obtain a surveillance warrant to secretly eavesdrop on New York energy consultant Carter Page because of his meetings with Russian officials.
Page already had stepped down as a foreign policy adviser to then-candidate Trump when the warrant application was filed on Oct. 21, 2016, less than a month before the election.
The memo asserts that material collected by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele on Trump's ties to Russia formed an "essential part" of the FBI and Justice Department application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.
That warrant authorized government surveillance of Page for 90 days. It was reauthorized three times, including after Trump took office last year. A senior Democratic staffer on the House Intelligence Committee said each authorization came from a different member on the 11-judge bench.
The three renewals may indicate that the FISA court judges believed the counterintelligence operation was bearing fruit. But the memo faults the FBI for failing to tell the judges that Steele, who is identified in the memo as "a longtime FBI source," was working for Fusion GPS, a company hired by lawyers for Hillary Clinton's campaign to collect opposition research on Trump.
The memo says Steele was paid more than $160,000 for his research, which later appeared in a much-criticized dossier that was leaked to the media. The memo says Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source after he disclosed his FBI ties to a reporter for Mother Jones magazine on Oct. 30, 2016.
Arguably the memo's strongest claim is that Andrew McCabe, then deputy director of the FBI, testified to the House committee last December "that no surveillance warrant would have been sought ... without the Steele dossier information."
The memo doesn't quote McCabe, however, and Democrats immediately said that it gave a misleading account of his classified testimony. McCabe, whom Trump had repeatedly criticized in recent months, abruptly stepped down from the FBI this week ahead of his planned retirement.
The memo confirms for the first time, however, that the criminal investigation now led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was begun not as a result of the spying on Page, but from a separate inquiry into another Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.
The Papadopoulos information, reportedly his claims to an Australian diplomat in July 2016 that the Russians had obtained damaging emails from the Clinton campaign, "triggered the opening" of the broader FBI investigation, the memo says. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty last October to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials, and is cooperating with federal prosecutors.
In a statement Friday, Page applauded the memo's release. "The brave and assiduous oversight by Congressional leaders in discovering this unprecedented abuse of process represents a giant, historic leap in the repair of America's democracy," he said.
Trump declassified the memo on Friday and gave the green light for the House Intelligence Committee to make it public. "It's a disgrace what's happening in this country," he told reporters in the Oval Office.
Earlier, the president tweeted that the "top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans _ something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!"
Democrats, in turn, accused the White House and Republicans of using the memo to politicize a legitimate investigation into a foreign power's attempt to influence a U.S. presidential election, and of undermining public confidence in the criminal investigation led by Mueller.
"Unlike almost every House member who voted in favor of this memo's release, I have actually read the underlying documents on which the #NunesMemo was based," tweeted Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "They simply do not support its conclusions."
Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican and head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the GOP attacks would benefit Russian President Vladimir Putin by raising doubts about the U.S. justice system.
"The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests _ no party's, no president's, only Putin's. ... If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin's job for him," McCain tweeted.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and a strong Trump supporter, said he remains "100 percent confident" in Mueller. "The contents of this memo do not _ in any way _ discredit his investigation," he said.
"It's clear to me that this laughable hack job of a memo was a whole lot of nothing, hyped up to undermine the Mueller investigation," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., one of the harshest critics of government surveillance practices.
James B. Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director last May for what the president later called "this Russia thing," offered a similar critique on Twitter.
"That's it? Dishonest and misleading memo wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what? DOJ & FBI must keep doing their jobs," he wrote.
A White House statement said the memo "raises serious concerns about the integrity of decisions made at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the FBI to use the Government's most intrusive surveillance tools against American citizens."
There was no immediate comment from the FBI, but the association that represents FBI agents said it would not permit partisan bias to color its investigations.
"The American people should know that they continue to be well-served by the world's preeminent law enforcement agency," it said. "FBI Special Agents have not, and will not, allow partisan politics to distract us from our solemn commitment to our mission."
The GOP memo came out despite efforts by senior Justice Department and intelligence officials to block or delay its release.
On Monday, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein went to the White House to ask John F. Kelly, the chief of staff, to call Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and ask him to delay a committee vote on releasing the memo. Kelly made the call but Nunes refused, according to a government official.
The Republican-led committee voted along party lines later that day to release the memo. It also voted against the simultaneous release of a rebuttal drafted by Democrats on the panel.
The document was written by aides to Nunes, a close ally of the president, whose committee is conducting an inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
"The Committee has discovered serious violations of the public trust, and the American people have a right to know when officials in crucial institutions are abusing their authority for political purposes," Nunes said in a statement.
The surveillance described in the memo dates back to the early days of the Russia inquiry, before special counsel Mueller was appointed last May. But Democrats feared the document will be used as a political cudgel against the investigation, saying in a statement that the memo is "a shameful effort to discredit these institutions, undermine the Special Counsel's ongoing investigation, and undercut congressional probes."
The memo is based, in part, on FBI interviews with confidential informants, classified documents provided to the FISA court and other sensitive material.
In a highly unusual challenge to the White House, the FBI issued a public statement Wednesday warning that it has "grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy." The statement came after senior FBI officials appealed to the White House to block the memo's release.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, the nation's top intelligence official, also told the White House that releasing the memo could set a troubling precedent for revealing classified information.
The committee vote on Monday sent the memo to the White House, where Trump made clear he wanted it out despite the intelligence community's concerns.
The White House promised a careful review process before the memo would become public, but Trump seemed to have already made up his mind before reading it.
When a Republican congressman approached him after Tuesday night's State of the Union address and urged him to release the memo, the president responded "100 percent" in an interaction captured by a C-SPAN camera.
Republicans have insisted the memo would increase transparency around the secretive surveillance process, and Nunes rejected what he called the FBI's "spurious objections."
"It's clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign," he said in a statement.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., supported Nunes' work on the memo and said it raises "legitimate questions about whether an American's civil liberties were violated."
Democrats accused Republicans of skewing the facts to undermine public confidence in the Mueller investigation.
"This is an effort to circle the wagons around the White House and distract from the Russia probe," said Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.
Schiff made a last-ditch effort to forestall the memo's release on Wednesday night, accusing Nunes of sending a version to the White House that had been "secretly altered" with "material changes." Because of the modifications, Schiff contended, the process for releasing the document needed to be restarted.
A spokesman for Nunes defended the changes as "minor edits" and described Schiff's letter as part of an "increasingly strange attempt" to keep the memo under wraps.
Nunes made headlines last March when he visited the White House compound late at night and then announced the next day that some members of Trump's transition team had come under U.S. surveillance and might have been improperly "unmasked" in intelligence reports.
That led to an investigation by the House Ethics Committee on whether Nunes had mishandled classified information, forcing him to step down from overseeing the Russia inquiry. He was later cleared of wrongdoing.
