DEMS/GOP/INTELLIGENCE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump was set to be briefed later Tuesday [2-6-18] afternoon on a classified Democratic memo that rebuts GOP allegations of partisan motives in the federal investigation of his former campaign aide, as the president decides whether to authorize the document’s release.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told reporters Tuesday that Mr. Trump hadn’t yet read the Democratic document. ‘He has it. It’s pretty lengthy,’ Mr. Kelly said of the 10-page memo. ‘We’ll get some people down to brief him on it.’
The GOP-controlled House Intelligence Committee on Monday voted unanimously to release the Democratic memo defending the federal investigation into Carter Page, a former foreign-policy adviser on the Trump campaign. Democrats drafted that document in response to a GOP-authored memo released last week that suggests wrongdoing in how the government got warrants from a federal judge to conduct surveillance on Mr. Page.
Democrats said the GOP memo was an attempt to discredit a wide-ranging Justice Department probe, led by special counsel Robert Mueller, into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, an investigation that is also looking into potential obstruction of justice by the president and his aides.”
-Rebecca Ballhaus and Byron Tau, “Trump to Be Briefed on Democratic Surveillance Memo,” The Wall Street Journal online, Feb. 6, 2018 03:53pm