Adam Schiff’s complaints that Republicans won’t release his FISA memo in tandem with the Devin Nunes being reviewed for release at the White House must be doing damage: a bunch of Republicans, including Tom Rooney, ran to Byron York to try to spin the release process as a fair application of process.
But there was also a rare moment of bipartisanship for the bitterly divided panel. At the same meeting, Republicans and Democrats voted unanimously to make the Democratic memo — the counter-memo to the Republican document — available to all members of the House.
That is the same process Republicans, under chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., followed with their memo. First, make it available to House members. (That happened on Jan. 18.) Later, after members of both parties have had a chance to read the memo, decide whether to release it to the public.
But along the way, an anonymous source who might be Rooney had this to say:
“It was written by attorneys as a rebuttal to our memo, but it’s not going to move their argument forward,” noted one Republican member who has read the Democratic paper. “It’s too detailed, too confusing, and far more personal — they go after [Nunes] again and again.
The member noted that that Democratic memo contains far more classified information — names and sources — than the GOP paper. “It is much more revealing [of classified information],” he said. “It’s going to have to be heavily redacted before it can be released. We wrote our memo with the hope that it would be released to the American people. Their memo will have to be heavily redacted.”
The anonymous source who might be Rooney admits that the Schiff memo contains far more references to names and sources than the Nunes memo.
What the anonymous source who might be Rooney admits is that there are far more names and sources that implicated Carter Page as an agent of a foreign power than what Nunes’ memo — which reportedly focuses primarily on how the Steele dossier served as one source for at least three FISA applications against Carter Page — admits.
Thanks for clearing that up, Congressman Rooney.