Shortly after the release of the memo, the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee said in a statement that they hope to release their own memo on February 5. "What matters is whether, based on the totality of the circumstances, the information came from a credible source".

Re "Let's put this Russia nonsense behind us" (Jan. 31): Indeed Joseph McCarthy's use of the House Un-American Activities Committee to track down and persecute Hollywood's "communists" and others inspired hysteria at the time. He said he would think about it and asked me to think about it.

The so-called Nunes memo, which was authored by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, has been hotly contested by lawmakers and intelligence officials. "Americans must be able to trust that the FISA process is above reproach". It is tragic, if all too predictable, that this President would allow the release of the memo despite FBI and DOJ's expressions of 'grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the [Republicans'] memo's accuracy'.

Republicans have hyped the memo's release for weeks, calling it "worse than Watergate", while Democrats and the FBI have warned that the document omits key context and that making it public could damage national security and further undermine the public's faith in the nation's premier law enforcement organisations. Well, we now know that the FBI supplied the court with the Steele dossier in order to argue for Page's continued surveillance.

Later, House Republicans homed in on the IRS for delaying applications for nonprofit status from politically conservative organizations.

"To the extent that Putin's goal is to weaken us an emphasize our internal division, which was certainly one of the conclusions that the intelligence community reached, yes absolutely [he succeeded]", Litt added.

Former FBI Director James Comey on Friday skewered the Republican memo that alleges the FBI abused its surveillance authority. In the 1970s, I watched as John Dean described President Nixon's suppression of evidence of the burglary of Democrat's offices as producing a "cancer" on the presidency.

Hosko said he talked with some FBI officials before the memo was made public and got the impression that Director Christopher Wray didn't want to get into a public battle over the memo.

Did the FISA court fail to receive all relevant information about the dossier?

The Pentagon-led review of the US nuclear arsenal and the policies that govern it was ordered by President Trump a year ago. This tracks the whole method of Trump's defense, which is to begin the story in the middle. Is the "classified Nunes memo" a smokescreen for diversion?

He joined the Justice Department in 1998 and in 2003 became assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, where he worked under then deputy attorney general Comey.

Most of the allegations in the Nunes memo had already been aired, and others were quickly discredited as misleading or undercut by other information that was excluded from the memo. The memo doesn't expand on why that is a problem.

Confirming his decision to declassify the document, Mr Trump said it was a "disgrace what's going on in this country".

President Donald Trump's fellow Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives released on Friday a previously classified memo that portrays senior officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department as being biased against him in the federal investigation into potential collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. Instead, the declassified information largely revolves around the publicly available Steele dossier's relationship in getting a FISA warrant to spy on President Donald Trump's former campaign adviser Carter Page. "It was at its core to divide the American people and pit us against each other". The fact that Trump and his allies so vehemently oppose to letting them out speaks volumes about that.