The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee late Wednesday accused his Republican counterpart of pulling a bait-and-switch and sending a “secretly altered” version of a controversial GOP memo to the White House.
The committee, on a party-line vote Monday, approved sending a GOP-crafted report to President Trump, accusing the FBI and Department of Justice of abusing their power in investigating a Trump campaign aide.
The FBI has said it vehemently opposes release of the memo, pushed by Chairman Devin Nunes (R-California).
But that controversial four-page report, said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), isn’t the same one that their committee considered Monday.
“This evening the Committee Minority discovered that the classified memorandum shared by the Committee Majority with the White House is not, in fact, the same document that Members of the House of Representatives have been reviewing since January 18, 2018 and that the Committee Majority voted on Monday to release to the public,” Schiff wrote in an open letter to Nunes.
“Upon our discovery that the document sent for public review had been secretly altered, the Majority belatedly afforded the Minority an opportunity this evening to compare the document transmitted on Monday night by the Majority to the White House with the document made available to all House members since January 18.”
Schiff continued: “After reviewing both versions, it is clear that the Majority made material changes to the version it sent to the White House.”
The White House said early Tuesday evening it’s conducting a legal and national security review of the memo before deciding whether to release it.
But then, hours later, as he was leaving the House floor following his State of the Union address, Trump was caught on tape saying “100 percent” he’d release it.