United States President Donald Trump
has reason to cheer after the release of the formerly classified
Republican memo. "It totally vindicates me," he claimed on
Twitter on Saturday (February 3).
Trump's fellow Republicans in the US
House of Representatives released on Friday a previously classified
memo that portrays senior officials from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and Justice Department as being biased against him in
the federal investigation into potential collusion between his 2016
presidential campaign and Russia.
The memo raised questions about what
its Republican authors called "the legitimacy and legality"
of FBI and Justice Department interactions with a special court to
gain permission to eavesdrop on former Trump campaign advisor Carter
Page, an oil industry consultant with numerous contacts in Russia. It
cited "a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to
protect the American people from abuses" related to the court,
set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
A remaining issue is whether Trump
uses the memo as rational for firing Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein, who appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017
after the president fired FBI Director James Comey, and oversees
Mueller's work.
Democrats said the memo
mischaracterizes highly sensitive classified information as part of a
coordinated propaganda effort to discredit the FBI and Justice
Department and terminate Mueller's investigation, which potentially
threatens Trump's presidency.
US Special Counsel Robert Mueller's
team wanted to question President Donald Trump as part of the
investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential
elections. The investigation also reportedly involved a probe into
whether the President obstructed justice when he allegedly asked
ex-FBI Director James Comey to drop an inquiry into former National
Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the
FBI about his conversations with the Russian Ambassador, becoming the
first senior White House official to cut a cooperation deal in
Mueller’s inquiry.
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