Rep. Pete King Wednesday urged President Donald Trump to release a GOP memo that alleges the FBI misused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to obtain a surveillance warrant used against former campaign aide Carter Page.
"As far as any concern about national security, this was shown to the director of the FBI and some of his top aides on counterterrorism, intelligence and they could not find one factual error in the memo, and they could also not find any threat at all to national security," King, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" co-host Bill Hemmer. "That should not be a concern."
However, the FBI on Wednesday issued a statement urging Trump not to release the memo after all, saying it has "grave concerns" about its accuracy.
The FBI, in an public statement, said it only got a limited opportunity to review the four-page memo, drafted by House Intelligence committee members, including King.
"As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy," the FBI said.
Further, King said, it will be much more difficult if Trump doesn't approve either releasing or declassifying the memo, or make any decision it by the weekend, as at that point it would return to a closed session of Congress, allowing all 435 members to vote on it.
"That would be much more protracted and more of a risk of something coming out," King said. "So no, I would urge him to release it."
The lawmaker said he could not go into detail on the memo, "other than the fact that you will see there have been either intentional abuses or very severe negligence on FISA, dealing with the FISA courts and actions by the FBI at the highest levels and the Department of Justice. That's really as far as I can go as to what the specifics are."
King also said he wanted to make it clear that he and Trump support "99.9 percent" of the people in the FBI.
"What we are talking about is a handful of people who either made serious mistakes or knew what they were doing and in either event it really was an injustice," said King.
King also rejected the continuing controversy over whether Trump's campaign colluded with Russians during the 2016 election.
"I've heard how many hours of testimony from every key witness in this," King said. "I've listened to all the Democratic unending questions, repetitive questions. I haven't heard one word of anything incriminating whatsoever."
Further, King said he does not think the investigation should have been started in the first place, but because it has, it has to be completed.
"This whole thing is really, I think, tragic, that a year has been spent looking into a crime that never was committed, an incident that never occurred, there has been no collusion so far that I've seen at all with Russia by anyone in the Trump campaign, certainly not by the president himself."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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