2 Weeks After Trump Blocked It, Democrats’ Rebuttal of GOP Memo Is Released

At the conference on Saturday, Representative Devin Nunes of California, the committee’s Republican chairman, said the newly released memo showed that Democrats were engaged in a cover-up and were “colluding with parts of the government” to carry it out.

The Democratic memo underwent days of review by top law enforcement officials after the president had blocked its outright release two weeks ago, with the White House counsel warning that the document “contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages.” On Saturday afternoon, after weeks of haggling over redactions, the department returned the document to the committee so it could make it public.

The release was expected to be the final volley, at least for now, in a bitter partisan fight over surveillance that has driven deep fissures through the once-bipartisan Intelligence Committee.

Representative Adam B. Schiff, the top Democrat on the committee, said on Saturday that the Democratic memo should “put to rest” Republican assertions of wrongdoing against the former Trump aide, Carter Page, in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process.

“Our extensive review of the initial FISA application and three subsequent renewals failed to uncover any evidence of illegal, unethical or unprofessional behavior by law enforcement and instead revealed that both the F.B.I. and D.O.J. made extensive showings to justify all four requests,” he said in a statement.

Republicans, including Mr. Trump, were undeterred. The White House dismissed the Democratic document as an attempt “to undercut the president politically.”

“The Democrat memo response on government surveillance abuses is a total political and legal BUST,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Just confirms all of the terrible things that were done. SO ILLEGAL!”

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The dispute centers on an application by the F.B.I. in October 2016 to secure a secret warrant to spy on Mr. Page, suspected by American law enforcement of being a Russian agent, as well as the subsequent renewals.

Republicans, in their own three-and-a-half-page memo, had claimed that top law enforcement officials abused their most sensitive powers in relying on politically motivated research provided by a former British spy, Christopher Steele.

According to the Republicans, the F.B.I. failed to tell a secret intelligence court that Mr. Steele’s work had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, making it all but impossible for a judge to evaluate the credibility of the information.

But the Democratic document contends that the F.B.I. was more forthcoming to the surveillance court about Mr. Steele than Republicans had let on, and that the information provided by Mr. Steele, a trusted source in the past, was only a small part of the evidence supporting a wiretap.

According to the memo, officials laid out a “multipronged rationale” for spying on Mr. Page, including his past interactions with Russian spies, and informed the court of a counterintelligence investigation then underway into the Kremlin’s covert influence campaign.

Mr. Page, a former investment banker based in Moscow, had been on the F.B.I.’s radar for years, long before his work with Mr. Trump. The Democratic memo reveals that the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Page as late as March 2016 about his contacts with Russian intelligence agents, the same month that Mr. Trump added him to his foreign policy advisory team.

The information from Mr. Steele was about “specific activities in 2016” by Mr. Page, including suspected meetings with close associates of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a July trip to Moscow, the Democrats said.

The document says that the bureau did disclose to the court that it had made use of information that was gathered through politically motivated means and quotes from the application itself.

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“The F.B.I. speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit” Mr. Trump’s campaign, the F.B.I. wrote in the application.

The Democrats said that it would have been inappropriate and inconsistent with standard practice for officials to have disclosed to the court the names of American individuals and organizations that had paid Mr. Steele.

The F.B.I. frequently relies on sources who have agendas, whether it is a gang turncoat or a mafia informer. What is typically seen as important by courts is that the agenda is disclosed to a judge.

In the case of Mr. Page, the surveillance applications were reviewed by four different judges, all appointed by Republican presidents, the document says. Each approved of the request.

The memo also asserts that in applications to renew the wiretap, the F.B.I. provided the court with information from independent sources corroborating Mr. Steele’s findings. Much of the specific corroborating evidence was blacked out.

And, according to the Democrats, the wiretap produced “valuable intelligence” for the F.B.I. that was used to justify its renewal three times. The document once again offers specific examples, which were redacted by the Justice Department.

The warrant application itself remains under seal, and only a handful of lawmakers from either party have seen it. The New York Times has filed a motion asking the surveillance court to take the unusual step of unsealing it.

The Democratic document also rebuts claims by Republicans, including Mr. Trump, that the F.B.I. relied on Mr. Steele’s findings to open its counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016. Information from Mr. Steele, the memo says, did not reach the F.B.I. counterintelligence team investigating Russian meddling until mid-September, well after the investigation had been opened.

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The document challenges several other prominent Republican claims. For instance, the Republican memo asserted that the F.B.I. had presented to the court a Yahoo News article from September 2016 as corroboration of Mr. Steele’s claims, despite the fact that it later emerged that Mr. Steele had been a source for it.

The Democrats said that the article, and another it did not identify, was merely used to inform the court that Mr. Page had publicly denied having the meetings in Moscow.

Republicans on the Intelligence Committee released a point-by-point response to the Democratic document, which they said only confirmed that the F.B.I. had relied on politically motivated material. In a separate document, they wrote that the Democrats had provided a “lengthy but wholly unpersuasive attempt to distract from the committee’s key findings” on surveillance abuse.

Mr. Page, in a statement, called the memo “a smear campaign” by Democrats that only made it more important that the underlying applications be released publicly.

Democrats have insisted that Mr. Trump’s deference to national security concerns in delaying the memo’s release was hypocritical and politically motivated. Just a week before blocking their memo’s release, the president had ignored similar objections from the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to declassify the contents of the rival Republican memo, which was based on the same underlying documents.

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Trump talks new gun measures, gun owners talk ‘betrayal’

As President Donald Trump talked this week about banning “bump stocks” and curbing young people’s access to guns, the gun owners and advocates who helped propel his political rise talked about desertion and betrayal.

Trump’s flirtation with a set of modest gun control measures drew swift condemnation from gun groups, hunters and sportsmen who banked on the president to be a stalwart opponent to any new gun restrictions. In his pledge to make schools safer and curb gun violence after the massacre at a Florida high school, gun advocates see a weakening resolve from the man they voted for in droves and spent millions to elect.

“Out in the firearms community there is a great feeling of betrayal and abandonment, because of the support he was given in his campaign for president,” Tony Fabian, president of the Colorado Sports Shooting Association, said Friday.

The comments highlight how little room the president and his party have to maneuver without angering and activating the politically powerful gun rights community. Trump has not yet formally proposed any legislative plan and he spent much of the week endorsing the notion of arming teachers and school officials — a plan the gun lobby supports. Still, just floating proposals that defy the National Rifle Association and other groups drew threats of political retribution and legal action.

The confrontation is set to test whether Trump, a figure deeply popular with his party’s base, is willing to risk his political capital to take on a constituency few Republicans have challenged.

“The president has a unique ability right now to maybe really do something about these school shootings,” said Rep. Tom Rooney, a Republican from Florida. “Nobody is more popular in my district — and I know in a lot of other people’s districts — than Donald Trump. He’s more popular than the NRA. … So it’s up to him whether or not anything happens with guns.”

After 17 people were killed by a teenager, Trump declared that assault rifles should be kept out of the hands of anyone under 21. He endorsed more stringent background checks for gun buyers, and ordered his Justice Department to work toward banning rapid-fire “bump stock” devices.

Gun Owners of America issued an alert earlier this week urging its 1.5 million members to call the White House and “Tell Trump to OPPOSE All Gun Control!” The organization said anti-gun activists aided by congressional Democrats are trying to convince the president he should “support their disastrous gun control efforts,” the message said. “And sadly, it may be working.”

Michael Hammond, legislative counsel for the Virginia-based group, said the organization doesn’t hesitate to oppose Republican incumbents and candidates whom it deems not sufficiently “pro-gun.” Motivating gun owners to go to the polls — not campaign funding — is the source of the gun lobby’s strength, according to Hammond.

“When they feel gun ownership is threatened, then they’re going to respond as if that’s the pre-eminent issue,” he said.

Paul Paradis, who owns a gun store in Colorado Springs, was enthusiastic about letting teachers carry firearms on campus. But he was incredulous about the notion of outlawing bump stocks and increasing the age requirement for buying a long gun.

“Trump can propose anything he wants but it’s got to get through two houses of Congress and the Supreme Court,” Paradis said.

Colorado has been a test case for the politics of gun control and the ability of gun groups to retaliate against those who vote for it. In 2013, after the Aurora theater shooting was followed by the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, Colorado’s Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a package of gun restrictions, including universal background checks and a ban on magazines that hold more than 15 bullets.

Gun control advocates hoped to roll the program out to other states after showing a libertarian, Western state could pass the bills. But then the NRA backed successful recalls of two Democratic state lawmakers who backed the legislation. The momentum ended.

Democrats won back those seats in the 2016 election. Still, the message has lingered: Democrats have not proposed any major gun legislation since the recalls.

There are an estimated 55 million gun owners in the United States, according to a 2016 national survey conducted by Northeastern and Harvard universities.

The influential National Rifle Association, which spent about $30 million in support of Trump’s presidential campaign, is firmly opposed to raising the legal age for the purchase of long guns from 18 to 21. After floating the idea earlier in the week, Trump declined to reiterate his proposal to increase age restrictions during wide-ranging remarks Friday before the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Trump’s call to restrict bump stocks like the ones used in last year’s Las Vegas massacre triggered outrage among gun owners. The devices allow a shooter’s semi-automatic rifle to mimic a machine gun. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is conducting a review to determine if it can regulate bump stocks without action from Congress.

But several gun rights advocates said the answer is an unequivocal no. Only Congress has the power to make such a move. ATF has received thousands of comments as part of the review and many are from gun owners who see potential regulation as a slippery slope that will lead to administrative bans on triggers, magazines and even firearms themselves.

“If there was an art of the deal, then this would be a deal breaker,” said Brandon Combs, president of the California-based Firearms Policy Coalition, making a reference to the title of Trump’s 1987 book on business. The coalition said in a statement Tuesday that it would take legal action if necessary to resist Trump’s “outrageous lawlessness.”

“Gun owners have been burned too many times over the years,” Combs said. “Politicians do whatever they want when they get into office.”

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Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.

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Contact Richard Lardner on Twitter at http://twitter.com/rplardner

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