Ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff said Tuesday night that he plans to have the Democratic memo he and his colleagues wrote to rebut claims in a Republican memo alleging abuses by the FBI in the Russia investigation released this week.
“I actually hope that we’ll do that in the next few days,” Schiff said at an event Tuesday night called “Investigating Russia and Defending Democracy” in San Francisco. “So it’s my goal to have this out this week,” he added. Congress is on a week-long winter recess.
The House Intelligence Committee had voted unanimously to make the memo public, but it needed to be approved by the White House first. The White House declined to make the memo public citing objections by the FBI and the Department of Justice over parts of the memo that revealed highly sensitive information, such as sources and methods, the departments have used in their ongoing investigations.
The White House invited Democrats on the committee to work with the FBI on revising any sections of the memo deemed classified, and subsequently releasing it, something Schiff says they are doing.
“We are negotiating with the FBI. I think that we’re almost concluded and they’ve been cooperating with us in good faith,” Schiff said. “What we want to do is identify any small subset of the memo that could reveal sources or methods. And we gave them our memo well before we even took it up in committee because we wanted their input.”
Schiff said he also hopes that the memo won’t have to be re-submitted to the White House before being released publicly. “It hopefully won’t be necessary to go back to the White House, but I do want to make sure that we have visibility into any concern the FBI has, as opposed to a political redaction that the White House wants to make,” Schiff said.