A controversial Republican memo that details surveillance practices on the Trump campaign was released Friday and claims that a scandalous but unverified dossier and a news article were used as sources to begin the spying.
President Donald Trump declassified the memo Friday and released it back to Capitol Hill. It was made public sometime around noon.
House Intelligence Committee Report On FISA Abuses by The Federalist on Scribd
Written by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the document partially outlines how the Department of Justice obtained a top secret FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page, who did some foreign policy work for the Trump campaign, in October 2016.
According to the memo, a dossier put together about then-candidate Trump was among the materials used to obtain the warrant. That document was written by former British spy Christopher Steele, who was paid more than $160,000 by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign — both through a law firm — to research and write the document.
Most of the claims in the document, including one that Trump had prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room with him in 2013 and that Russia had enough dirt on him to blackmail him, have not been verified.
Another piece of information used on the FISA application, according to the memo, was a Sept. 23, 2016 Yahoo News article that focused on Page's July 2016 visit to Moscow. He gave a speech in the Russian capital that month in which he was critical of U.S. policy toward Russia.
In 2013, the Russians unsuccessfully tried to recruit Page to work as a double agent.
Nunes also wrote that Steele's communications with the media led to the FBI suspending and later terminating him as a source sometime after the FISA warrant was obtained.
"Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September — before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October — but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts," the memo reads.
Further, Steele is quoted in the memo as telling former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr that he "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president."
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