House Speaker tries to tamp down furor over memo on FBI conduct | McClatchy Washington Bureau

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday that “there may have been malfeasance” in the early stages of the FBI’s investigation into Russian election meddling, but said that is “a completely separate matter” from the way Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller has conducted the inquiry since taking charge last May.

Amid an escalating, partisan clash over a vote by Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee to make public a damning memo about the FBI, some GOP legislators moved to tamp down expectations that its release could damage or derail the 19-month-old investigation that has focused on whether Russians colluded in any way with Trump’s campaign.

Over the last two weeks, partisan acrimony has been at a fever pitch, particularly on the House Intelligence Committee, whose chairman, California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, authored the memo without Democratic input.

“They’re pushing this out as the greatest abuse in history, 10 times worse than Watergate,” California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top-ranking Democrat on the panel, said in a phone interview. “It’s all being used to impeach the credibility of the FBI and the special counsel.” Schiff pointed out that when the committee voted to release the Nunes memo Monday, it refused to simultaneously release a Democratic memo aimed at providing context to the GOP allegations.

On Monday, Trump defied a congressional deadline and refused to impose new sanctions on Russia as a result of its election intervention. The Senate minority leader, New York Democrat Charles Schumer, Tuesday demanded to know whether Trump's decision was related to the arrival in the United States of Russia's foreign intelligence chief, Sergey Naryshkin, who is currently under sanctions and normally would be barred from entering the country.

Nune stepped aside from the Russia inquiry last spring while facing an ethics inquiry into his disclosure of potentially classified information. New questions emerged this week about the thoroughness of that inquiry before Nunes thanked the panel for “completely clearing” him.

In recent months, Nunes launched a separate, rump investigation into the conduct of the FBI and Justice Department in their probes of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official business while she was secretary of state and of Russia’s election interference. The inquiry has examined the conduct of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has overseen Mueller’s investigation since Attorney General Jeff Sessions withdrew from the Russia investigations early last year after disclosures of his own Russia contacts during the campaign.

With Monday’s abrupt announcement that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe would retire weeks ahead of schedule, three FBI officials and a Justice Department official have been removed or stepped aside from the investigation in the face of allegations they were politically biased against Trump. Separately, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017, after pressuring him to drop a probe of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who since has pleaded guilty to a single count of lying to investigators and is now cooperating with Mueller’s investigation.

Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who has seen the classified memo, said at his weekly news briefing that he believes there “are legitimate questions about whether an American’s civil liberties were violated” when the FBI obtained a surveillance warrant from a secret U.S. intelligence court in October 2016. Numerous published reports have identified the subject of the electronic surveillance as Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy adviser who also drew the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents over his contacts with Russians in 2013.

Page has testified to congressional committees, but there has been no indication to date that he is a central figure in Mueller’s investigation.

The Nunes memo also has been reported to focus on allegations that the FBI used a so-called dossier of information on the Russian intelligence operation, gathered as political opposition research by former British spy Christopher Steele, to help justify the warrant, even though Steele’s work was mostly financed by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Democrats have protested that the Republican memo could expose “sources and methods” of intelligence gathering by U.S. agencies and damage relations with their foreign partners. The Justice Department, too, has expressed concerns about the memo being released before officials there have had a chance to review it and comment about potential harm to national security if it is declassified.

FBI Director Christopher Wray and "others" reviewed the memo before Monday’s vote, Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said Tuesday, but she declined to comment further.

Schiff said, however, that Wray was permitted to read the memo on Sunday, but was not invited to change or redact language to protect sensitive information.

“They only went thru the exercise of showing it to the director so they could at least say they showed it to one person at the FBI,” he said.

Under procedures governing classified information, President Trump now has five days to review the memo and decide whether to declassify it.

Nunes created a firestorm when it was disclosed last year that, while leading the House committee’s examination of Russia’s meddling, he had been in contact with White House aides. Two watchdog groups then asked for an investigation into whether he revealed classified information in publicly questioning whether Obama administration officials had improperly unmasked the identities of surveillance subjects. In December, the ethics panel cleared Nunes.

But a congressional source told McClatchy Tuesday that the ethics inquiry was far from complete since its members lacked access to classified information, confirming reporting by the Atlantic.

“After his bizarre effort to collude with the White House to create a scandal over unmasking procedures, Devin Nunes was supposed to recuse himself from everything related to the Russia investigation,” the source told McClatchy. The Ethics Committee “had to close the investigation without reaching any conclusions about his behavior because they couldn’t get access to the highly sensitive, classified intelligence Nunes was misrepresenting in his frantic search to help provide cover for the President,” the source said.

Paul Rosenzweig, a former top lawyer on the staff of Independent Counsel Ken Starr during his investigation of former President Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, spoke up on behalf of Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein.

"The idea that some portray him as a partisan or a shill is nonsensical," said Rosenzweig, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank. Rosenstein is a Republican who was considered for the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush and appointed a U.S. attorney in Maryland by President George W. Bush before Trump nominated him to be the Justice Department’s No. 2 official.

Rosenzweig also questioned allegations that the FBI mishandled the warrant application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, noting that such applications usually range between 30 and 100 pages and “are subject to a high degree of vetting and scrutiny, a fact that does not seem to be true of the Nunes memo."

Republican Rep. Michael Conaway of Texas, who has led the House committee’s inquiry in place of Nunes, dismissed concerns that Nunes had created the memo after recusing himself from the Russia investigation.

He said Nunes’ inquiry is unrelated to the Russia investigation, but rather is “a process issue with the FBI.”

"This is process about something else and we've got a pretty clear line of demarcation between us," Conaway said. "He's staying out of the Russia stuff, still."

Another Republican committee member, Rep. Tom Rooney of Florida, said release of the memo may not be as momentous as Republicans have claimed. "People are probably not going to be as shocked as they think that they're going to be," Rooney said.

And North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a leader of a deeply conservative Republican caucus, said Ryan warned members against disclosing any sensitive information. "We need to make sure that we don't share anything classified until, and if, it gets unclassified," Meadows said. "At this point we're waiting to see what the president decides," he said.

He later tweeted that he had read the Democrats’ “counter-memo.” Meadows contended that it “contains several factual errors and sourcing issues.”

“When these are fixed, I believe the memo should be made public to all Americans,” he said. “But let's be clear: nothing in this memo suggests ANY factual inaccuracies in the original memo."

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Texas reporters on a conference call that he supports the memo's release, although he hasn't seen it.

Cornyn, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he has been briefed on the memo and there is "reason to believe that this is an important part of the restoration of the FBI’s reputation."

He said what is already publicly available suggests "the American people do have some reason to believe that there was some misconduct there that should be corrected."

"Hopefully the FBI and the Department of Justice will ultimately regain their reputation as an objective law enforcement agency and not one engaged in politics," he said.