President Trump speaks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House last week. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
President Trump on Friday accused the top leadership of the Justice Department and FBI of having “politicized the sacred investigative process,” posting an incendiary tweet hours before the expected release of a controversial congressional memo alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI.
“The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
He added: “Rank & File are great people!”
The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans – something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018
The president’s statement on Twitter came on day that he is expected to approve the release of a memo that suggests that the origins of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election were tainted by political bias.
The memo alleges that the FBI, when obtaining a surveillance warrant, relied in some part on a dossier of allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump that was underwritten by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Law enforcement and intelligence officials have expressed “grave concerns” about the memo’s release, saying it contains classified information and inaccuracies.
The four-page memo was written by Republican staffers of the House Intelligence Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
It alleges that the British former spy who wrote the dossier passed bad information to the FBI and suggests that information was used in the application to conduct surveillance on the former campaign adviser, Carter Page, according to people familiar with the document.
In a separate tweet Friday morning, Trump quoted Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative educational foundation, alleging that the memo was wrongly used to convince a court to authorize the surveillance and “spy on the Trump Team.”
“You had Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party try to hide the fact that they gave money to GPS Fusion to create a Dossier which was used by their allies in the Obama Administration to convince a Court misleadingly, by all accounts, to spy on the Trump Team.” Tom Fitton, JW
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018
Trump has told aides and confidants he believes the memo will vindicate his claim early last year that the expansive Russia investigation overseen by Robert S. Mueller III is a “witch hunt.” He has long expressed frustration, both publicly and privately, with his Department of Justice and, specifically, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who is supervising Mueller’s work.
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