House

Nunes: We actually want the ‘ridiculous’ Dem memo released

by Rebecca Savransky 02/11/18 02:10 PM CST

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on Sunday said he actually wants the Democratic rebuttal to a now-infamous GOP-crafted surveillance memo to be released.

“We actually want the Democratic memo out. We think it’s ridiculous on the face of it,” Nunes said during an interview on Fox News. “We think it’s very political about how they attack myself, they attack Chairman Gowdy, they turn Carter Page into some super-secret Russian spy, they talk about how Christopher Steele is a really, really good source when we know that he lied to the FBI.”

Nunes said he doesn’t know why Democrats on the committee aren’t spending the weekend “redacting it so that we can get it back to the White House so the president can declassify it.”

Nunes’s comments come after the White House announced last week President Trump was not ready to approve the release of the Democratic memo.

{mosads}White House counsel Don McGahn wrote a letter to Nunes explaining that “although the president is inclined to declassify” the Democratic memo, the administration believes it would create “especially significant concerns” for “national security and law enforcement interests.”

Trump on Saturday tweeted that the Democrats knew their memo would have to be heavily redacted.

“The Democrats sent a very political and long response memo which they knew, because of sources and methods (and more), would have to be heavily redacted, whereupon they would blame the White House for lack of transparency,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Told them to re-do and send back in proper form!”

Nunes said during the interview that it’s not a “surprise” Trump blocked the release of the Democratic memo.

“The Democrats have been on TV all weekend long. Their memo is sitting at the House Intelligence Committee down at the bottom of the Capitol waiting to be redacted,” he said. “If they really wanted to get it out, they’d be down there all day yesterday redacting it, getting it back over to the White House so that the public can know what’s in it.”