House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., has several more partisan memos up his sleeve, as it looks as though the controversy over cherry-picked classified documents is anything but over.
GOP sources close to Nunes says he has assured them that there is more to come, and Nunes and his team have told panel members associates that they have found further allegedly politically motivated "wrongdoing" by several U.S. agencies, including the FBI, the Justice Department and the State Department, Axios reported.
Nunes is reported to have as many as five additional memos, but "there's no current plan to use the same extraordinary and highly controversial process they just went through," Axios reported.
Last week, the House voted to approve the declassification of the contentious GOP memo that alleged FBI abuse in their obtaining of a FISA warrant for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. It was then approved by the White House, but despite all the hype, the memo was largely a dud, though President Donald Trump seems to believe it "vindicates" him in the ongoing Russia probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Lawmakers on the panel, both Republicans and Democrats, distanced themselves from the president's assertion on Sunday and instead said that the memo does not actually clear him in the investigation.
"Of course not at all," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said, when asked if the memo vindicated Trump. "So quite to the contrary, even this very flawed memo demonstrates what the origin of the investigation was and that origin involved the issue of collusion."
"I actually don’t think it has any impact on the Russia probe," Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who helped Nunes author the memo, said.
He added, "There is a Russia investigation without a dossier. So to the extent the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower."
Democratic lawmakers on the panel are expected to make a push to release their own memo that would highlight the flaws and shortcomings of the recently published Nunes memo. The House Intelligence Committee is expected to meet at 5 p.m. on Monday, and Democrats will be pushing for a vote. If approved by the panel, Trump will have the final say as to whether or not the memo can be published. While the White House insisted in the days before the Nunes memo was released that the president would do so in the name of "transparency," it will be interesting to see what his decision will be regarding a Democratic rebuttal.
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