45* has made his #TrumpRussia complicity more obvious in contradictory approaches to Congressional committee memos, trying to support a weak GOP memo by blocking the Democratic response.
Of course, it was so long since 10 pages is 150% longer than the Nunes memo.
Any claim to transparency however ludicrous, has disappeared. With purportedly five more “memos” in the wings, House Intel committee Devin Nunes continues to do the best he can to obstruct an investigation that now continues on a strangely theatrical path. The latest version tries to play the FBI, much like 45* contrived to make the FBI take the blame for firing Comey with the Rosenstein memo.
Trump’s “inability” to release this particular classified information appears entirely dependent on the president’s own personal determination of what information he considers “properly classified and especially sensitive.”
The key claim in the previous memo—that FBI officials hid the fact that some information used to acquire a warrant to monitor Carter Page had come from a political source—has since been acknowledged as false by the main proponent of the memo, Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes.
Still, that memo has been held up by Trump and his allies as a reason to dismiss the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and any potential collusion with Russia by his campaign. Earlier on Friday, Trump had said that he planned to release the new memo.
Instead, McGahn released a letter encouraging the Intelligence Committee to work with Department of Justice officials to amend the memo, “to mitigate the risks identified by the Department.”
The letter said the DOJ worried the memo’s release would create “especially significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests.” The White House went so far as to attach a letter from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray requesting that portions of the memo not be released.
[...]
When Rosenstein and Wray reportedly had similar objections to the release of the previous memo, those were ignored. Wray had gone so far as to have the FBI publicly release a letter saying the GOP memo was misleading…
slate.com/...
President Trump is just trying to be forthcoming, you see. He wants to get it all out there! Except he clearly doesn't.
There are two gaping holes in this argument: The first is that the White House has shunned transparency in plenty of ways previous administrations haven't, and the second is that its line for transparency in this case is completely arbitrary — and completely self-serving.
Perhaps the White House's biggest anti-transparency move has been withholding President Trump's tax returns, breaking with a practice followed by every president since Jimmy Carter. Trump initially said during the 2016 campaign that he would do so, only to reverse course and claim that his electoral victory was proof that people didn't actually care to see them. (Never mind that a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month showed that 74 percent of all Americans, and even 49 percent of Trump supporters, say they want to see the returns.)
