“A much-hyped memo that shows alleged government surveillance abuse during the 2016 campaign has been released to the public and cites testimony from a high-ranking government official who says the FBI and DOJ would not have sought surveillance warrants to spy on a member of the Trump team without the infamous, Democrat-funded anti-Trump dossier.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released the memo Friday. The White House responded by saying the memo “raises serious concerns about the integrity of decisions made at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the FBI to use the government’s most intrusive surveillance tools against American citizens.”
Fusion GPS, was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through law firm Perkins Coie. It included salacious and unverified allegations about Trump’s connections to Russia.
The memo, which has been at the center of an intense power struggle between congressional Republicans and the FBI, specifically cites the DOJ and FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, saying the dossier “formed an essential part” of the application to spy on him.
(…) The memo states that in December 2017, then FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe testified that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” from the FISA court “without the Steele dossier information.” (Read more: Fox News, 2/02/2018) (Archive)