Around 1 p.m. (ET) on Friday, a reporter asked Donald Trump if he’d release the Democratic response to the Republicans’ discredited “Nunes memo.” The president didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he replied. “It’s going to be released soon.”
By Friday evening, that was no longer true.
Citing national security concerns, the White House on Friday formally notified the House intelligence committee that President Donald Trump is “unable” to declassify a memo drafted by Democrats that counters GOP allegations about abuse of government surveillance powers in the FBI’s Russia probe.
White House counsel Don McGahn said in a letter to the committee that the memo contains “numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages” and asked the intelligence panel to revise the memo with the help of the Justice Department. He said Trump is still “inclined” to release the memo in the interest of transparency if revisions are made.
Trump himself weighed in via Twitter, complaining that the Democratic document was “political and long” — remember, he’s not much of a reader — and designed specifically to be rejected.
In a missive the president almost certainly didn’t write himself, the tweet added that the memo’s Democratic authors knew it “would have to be heavily redacted, whereupon they would blame the White House for lack of transparency.”
Raise your hand if you believe Donald Trump personally wrote a tweet featuring the word “whereupon.”
Regardless, the president’s concerns might be marginally more credible if he’d raised similar questions about the Republicans’ memo two weeks earlier. His own FBI told the White House it’d be dangerous for the White House to approve the release of the “Nunes memo,” but Trump ignored the warnings, deciding to release the document before reading it. Now, when it’s a Democratic response, suddenly the White House prefers caution?
Let’s also note that the Democratic report couldn’t be too sensitive — since Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously to release to the public.









