Washington: US President Donald Trump on Friday accused the justice department and the FBI of a “pro-Democrat bias”, saying their top leadership had “politicised” the probe against the Republicans, ahead of the possible release of a highly controversial memo.
The memo penned by House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes and approved for release by the House committee earlier this week alleges that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) abused its surveillance tools during its probe into the alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 US presidential election.
Trump’s accusation is a rarest of the rare instance as it maligns people he appointed to their roles, including FBI director Christopher Wray whom he nominated after firing former FBI director James Comey in May.
The tweet also puts Trump squarely on the side of the Republican lawmakers who view the memo as a document that exposes the nefarious designs of the FBI.
“The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicised the sacred investigative process in favour of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago,” Trump said in a tweet (sic).
“Rank and File are great people!” he added.
In a follow-up tweet, Trump quoted from a recent speech given by American activist and president of conservative watchdog operation Judicial Watch Tom Fitton in which he alleged the Democrats attempted to conceal their funding of a dossier that accused Trump of personal ties to the Kremlin.
“'You had Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party try to hide the fact that they gave money to GPS Fusion to create a Dossier which was used by their allies in the Obama Administration to convince a Court misleadingly, by all accounts, to spy on the Trump Team,” Tom Fitton, JW”, Trump wrote.
Trump’s tweet came as he is set to approve the release of a highly controversial memo that reportedly shows improper surveillance of one of his campaign aides, which the FBI says is “inaccurate”.
On January 31, the FBI released a rare statement to express their “grave concerns about the material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy”.
The memo apparently accuses the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the FBI of abusing a surveillance programme known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) during the 2016 election campaign.
The allegation is that the FBI ran surveillance on a member of Trump's campaign.
