After weeks of talk about the “memo” , outlining alleged abuses of secret surveillance by the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation, the House Intelligence Committee has declassified it.
The memo confirms what critics of a “compromised” FBI had accused from the start.
“The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications,” according to the Washington Examiner.
The Steele dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC via Fusion GPS.
In other words the FISA court was able to conduct surveillance on the Trump campaign because of the Steele dossier, which was a politically funded document and which critics say is a compromise of the FBI’ s integrity.
The surveillance was started when Obama was still president, confirming Trump’s allegations of “Obama spying on him”.
Late, in April 2016, Marc Elias — a top Democratic campaign lawyer — retained Fusion GPS through his firm of Perkins Coie on behalf of both Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to VOX
The Steele dossier was essentially responsible for the echoes of Trump- Russia collusion , which has been talked about endlessly since the day Trump took office.
The FBI waged a campaign to stop this memo from being released. Only the threat of contempt charges and other forms of pressure forced the FBI and Justice to give up the material. Democrats had fought against this memo from being declassified in a dramatic fashion since the day the public started hearing about the memo; shortly after an online campaign by Trump supporters started with the “#releasethememo” hashtag.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi, even claimed that the people online demanding to memo be declassified were not even real people but “Russian bots”.
You can read the entire memo here: FISA MEMO