Finally, in July 2017, the FBI allowed lawmakers to see the memos. But the bureau made sure the information in the memo was severely restricted.<\/p>\n
For the Senate Judiciary Committee, which directly oversees the FBI, the bureau allowed only two committee staffers to see the memos. They had to go to the FBI, and an FBI minder was in the room at all times. They were not allowed to make copies or take notes. The FBI later took the memos to the Senate to allow Grassley to read them. But the same rules applied: FBI minder, no copies, no notes.<\/p>\n
The no-notes restriction was unusual, because committee staff had been allowed to take notes from the Trump-Russia Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, applications, which were highly classified. Some of the Comey memos were not classified at all.<\/p>\n
And, of course, both Republicans and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee had asked to be given the memos, not be given a chance to read them. That still hasn\u2019t happened. \u201cThe chairman and ranking member asked for copies of the memos,\u201d said a committee spokesperson Wednesday. \u201cThe FBI has yet to actually turn over those documents to the congressional committee tasked with overseeing the bureau and the Justice Department.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the House side, Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., among a few others, was allowed to read the memos under the same conditions: FBI minder, no copies, no notes.<\/p>\n
What struck Gowdy was the general absence of classified information in the memos or any other reason they should remain secret. Out of a total of seven memos, the FBI had marked four as classified at the \u201csecret\u201d or \u201cconfidential\u201d levels \u2014 not the highest level \u2014 but even with those memos, it appeared to Gowdy that they could be released publicly with only minimal blacking-out.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat would need to be redacted would be incredibly small and really would not interfere with the substance of the memos,\u201d Gowdy told me in a phone conversation Wednesday. \u201cI read them a long time ago, and I still don\u2019t know why they\u2019re not in the public domain. If they were really helpful for the Democrats, they would have been leaked a long time ago.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That would be my assessment, too. Anything that is even vaguely useful to the cause of damaging Trump is leaked by Adam Schiff in just a few minutes. This is the reason we still don\u2019t know what is in the Democrat \u201ccounter memo\u201d on the use of the Trump dossier in Carter Page\u2019s investigation.<\/p>\n
Gowdy went further last month:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.redstate.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/gowdy-rosenstein-620x387.jpg\")