It's the memo that everyone is talking about, but no-one can (really) talk about. Depending on whom you ask, it will either explode the entire basis for the Trump-Russia investigation or is an inflammatory collection of rumours and conjecture.
Donald Trump Jr has tweeted about it. More than 200 members of Congress have seen it. A social media hashtag - #releasethememo - has been pushed by interested parties including, it appears, a sizable number of pro-Russian Twitter bots. So what, exactly, is this memo?
The document was written by staffers working for Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, which is holding hearings on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and, seemingly of equal interest to the congressman, investigating allegations of anti-Trump bias in the US intelligence community. Mr Nunes made headlines last March when he visited the White House and then publicly announced that some members of Donald Trump's post-election team had been the subject of "incidental surveillance" by US intelligence agencies. He later had to step down from overseeing the Russian hearings because he was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for possibly sharing classified intelligence with the White House. He has since been cleared in the matter by the ethics panel, but he has not returned to his previous position. The four-page memo is said to draw on highly classified information about FBI surveillance practices that, according to many of the Republicans who have read it, were abused by the intelligence community in order to undermine Mr Trump's campaign and, subsequently, his presidency. The memo reportedly asserts that the decision to begin surveillance of Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page was based on the so-called Steele dossier - the collection of largely unsubstantiated raw intelligence gathered by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. That set the ball rolling for broader investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, an inquiry that continues, under the direction of special counsel Robert Mueller, to this day. Members of the intelligence community dispute this claim and insist that Page was on the counter-intelligence radar long before the dossier research, which was funded by anti-Trump conservatives and later Democrats, was ever circulated. What else might be in it?
The memo may also reportedly contain - or reference - evidence of anti-Trump sentiment from high-level FBI officials, possibly including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, the top FBI Russia expert involved in the bureau's 2016 election investigations and who later moved over to Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation. Strzok has been in the headlines for text messages he exchanged in 2016 with an FBI colleague with whom he was having an extramarital affair. The messages, many of which have already been publicly released, show the two criticising candidate Trump, as well as other politicians and Justice Department officials. Conservative commentators and some politicians have expressed concern that other messages, dating from late 2016 through the early days of the Trump presidency, were not preserved by the FBI due to misconfigured mobile phones. If all this sounds rather vague, it's because the memo has yet to be made public. Lots of people are talking about what it means, but few are giving any specific details about what it contains.
What are Republicans saying?
As the "secret" memo circulates through the halls of Congress, many conservatives are saying it contains explosive revelations. Iowa Congressman Steve King has compared the allegations in the memo to the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, saying they're "worse than Watergate". "I've read the memo," says Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, who has been one of the sharpest critics of the Mueller investigation. "It has surprised and horrified many of us." He said that the memo will not just lead to firings within the FBI, but also criminal prosecution. Other Republicans have downplayed the implications of the memo.
source: www.bbc.co.uk
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