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'SO ILLEGAL': Trump Refuses to Back Down... Eviscerates Dems in Wake of Memo Release

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President Donald Trump responded to the release of a document produced by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee that seeks to push back on claims made by Republican members of the committee in their own memo.

The Republican memo says that during the 2016 election cycle, the FBI relied heavily on an unverified dossier — paid for the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign — to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant in order to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

According to Republicans on the committee, the FBI did not sufficiently disclose to the FISA court that the dossier originated as a piece of opposition research. Democrats, on the other hand, claim that the FBI did not hide the political nature of the memo.

Not long after the Saturday release of the Democrat memo, Trump took to Twitter to blast the document as a “political and legal bust” that only confirms the FBI acted in an “illegal” manner.


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

In a follow-up post, the president highlighted one important truth that the Democrat memo confirms.

Though the FBI may indeed have informed the FISA court about the political origins of the dossier, the bureau failed to disclose the fact that it was paid for by the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

“Dem Memo: FBI did not disclose who the clients were – the Clinton Campaign and the DNC,” Trump wrote. “Wow!”


The president was far from the only one to issue such a spirited response following the release of the memo. In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the “politically driven document” does nothing to address the concerns raised by Republicans on the committee about how the FBI obtained a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.

Do you believe the Democrat memo effectively counters Republican concerns over improper surveillance of the Trump campaign?

“This politically driven document fails to answer serious concerns raised by the Majority’s memorandum about the use of partisan opposition research from one candidate, loaded with uncorroborated allegations, as a basis to ask a court to approve surveillance of a former associate of another candidate, at the height of a presidential campaign,” Sanders said, according to The Daily Caller.

“As the Majority’s memorandum stated, the FISA judge was never informed that Hillary Clinton and the DNC funded the dossier that was a basis for the Department of Justice’s FISA application,” the statement continued.

Sanders went on to note that the Democrat memo does not not even address that, according to the Republican document, former FBI Deputy director Andrew McCabe once told Congress that without the dossier, there would have been no warrant.

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“The Minority’s memo fails to even address the fact that the Deputy FBI Director told the Committee that had it not been for the dossier, no surveillance order would have been sought,” Sanders said.

“As the president has long stated, neither he nor his campaign ever colluded with a foreign power during the 2016 election, and nothing in today’s memo counters that fact.”

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Joe Setyon was a deputy managing editor for The Western Journal who had spent his entire professional career in editing and reporting. He previously worked in Washington, D.C., as an assistant editor/reporter for Reason magazine.
Joe Setyon was deputy managing editor for The Western Journal with several years of copy editing and reporting experience. He graduated with a degree in communication studies from Grove City College, where he served as managing editor of the student-run newspaper. Joe previously worked as an assistant editor/reporter for Reason magazine, a libertarian publication in Washington, D.C., where he covered politics and wrote about government waste and abuse.
Birthplace
Brooklyn, New York
Topics of Expertise
Sports, Politics




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