.@judgenap: “I hope [@POTUS] releases it.” https://t.co/FqpR43qp2G pic.twitter.com/sFfJMUBGX2
— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 6, 2018
Fox News’s Judge Andrew Napolitano said he hopes President Trump allows the release of the memo drafted by Democrats to counter a GOP-crafted document alleging surveillance abuses at the Department of Justice.
“I hope he releases it because it will show who’s spinning, who’s exaggerating,” Napolitano said Tuesday on “Fox & Friends,” which Trump is known to frequently watch.
He also said if the Democratic memo comes out, the “pressure will build for the raw intelligence on which” both memos have been based to be revealed.
{mosads}
“That will send the intelligence community through the roof,” he said, “because this stuff is never, ever made public.”
The House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously Monday to release the Democratic memo.
The 10-page classified document now goes to President Trump, who has five days to block its release if he so chooses. It remains an open question whether he will.
On Friday, Trump declassified the GOP memo, drafted by staff for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). The memo alleged that senior Justice Department officials inappropriately relied on a piece of opposition research paid for in part by Hillary Clinton to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. It claims that without the so-called Steele dossier, no surveillance warrants would have been sought.
The Democratic memo is expected to lay out a point-by-point rebuttal of the assertions in the Nunes memo and make the case that the FBI had good reason to spy on Page as part of the counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign.
Trump this past weekend claimed the GOP memo “totally vindicates” him in the probe into Russian election interference and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Napolitano said earlier this week that Trump wasn’t vindicated by the GOP memo, saying Trump’s comments were just “the president being the president.”
“I don’t think he should have a false sense of confidence,” Napolitano said in a previous Fox News appearance. “I understand why he says things like that; it gins up his base and it may help him politically, but legally it’s of no moment.”
During a press conference last year, Trump called Napolitano a “very talented legal mind.”