![]() ![]() The details of what exactly the Justice Department verified from the dossier were redacted, but the memo does outline three points that were made in the dossier that the Justice Department corroborated on its own.Īll three were redacted. FBI verified some information in Steele dossier Page remains a central figure in the congressional investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election but has not been charged with wrongdoing by special counsel Robert Mueller. The memo alleges that during the meeting Page was offered compromising information on Hillary Clinton, who was running against then-candidate Donald Trump. “As early as (redacted), a Russian intelligence officer (redacted) targeted Page for recruitment,” reads one partially released sentence - followed by another blacked-out passage about Page’s response.ĭuring a trip to Russia during the 2016 election, he is accused of meeting with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Igor Divyekin, another senior Kremlin official, the memo said. Those still-secret passages appear to detail Page’s “suspicious” activities in Moscow in 2016 and his past relationships with Russian spies. At least 14 of the blacked-out portions of the Schiff memo come immediately following or in the same sentence as Page’s name. The committee’s chairman, Devin Nunes, R-Calif., says the FBI relied too much on a dossier by Steele.īut the Schiff memo suggests the FBI had independent reasons for investigating Page - reasons that were redacted from the released version of the Schiff memo. The central issue in the back-and-forth memos from the House Intelligence Committee is the evidence used to secure a warrant to eavesdrop on Page. FBI knows more about Page than it’s saying Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who helped draft the Republican memo, said early this month that the FISA warrant applications relied on more than Steele's dossier but that the warrant would not have been issued without it. The warrant made "only narrow use" of information in Steele's dossier, Democrats say, adding that the Justice Department also included the "assessed political motivation of those who hired him." The memo says that when a FISA surveillance warrant was requested for Page, the Department of Justice outlined his relationships with Russian spies and other officials over the years and during the 2016 presidential campaign. It received Steele's dossier in mid-September, more than six weeks later. The timeline in the Democratic memo says the FBI decided to start its investigation into Page in late July 2016. The FBI was already investigating Page, who had been assessed to be an "agent of the Russian government," prior to the FBI receiving the dossier. FBI didn't rely solely on dossierĭemocrats say the FBI did not rely on the controversial dossier written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which was in part funded by Democrats, when they started investigating Page. More: Read: Full text of Democratic intelligence memo 1. More: Democratic memo alleges FBI started spying on Carter Page prior to getting dossier The Democratic memo pushes back on a number of claims Republicans made in their memo released earlier this month, throwing details of the FBI's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election into an almost he-said-she-said story. President Trump dismissed the Democratic memo, released Saturday, as a “total political and legal bust' and called Schiff a "bad guy." ![]() "I’m not surprised, frankly, that the White House tried to bury this memo response as long as they could," said Schiff of California on CNN's State of the Union. "But it’s important for the public to see the facts, that the FBI acted appropriately."Ī redacted version of the memo compiled by Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was released in response to a GOP memo that alleged the FBI abused its power to conduct surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Adam Schiff on Sunday defended a memo released this weekend that rebutted allegations that the FBI and Justice Department had acted improperly in their investigation of the Trump campaign. ![]()
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