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President Is Expected to Release Rival Memo

Two leading Senate Republicans released a document late Tuesday that they said bolstered Republican allegations that the Justice Department relied heavily on a politically-tainted dossier in seeking permission from a secret federal court to eavesdrop on a former Trump campaign aide.

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, quoted from Justice Department requests to the court to spy in late 2016 and last year on the former aide, Carter Page.

A classified Democratic memo seeks to rebut the Republican accusations of political bias. President Donald Trump is expected to allow that memo to be made public, but is likely to redact parts of it, people close to the White House said.

That decision is certain to anger Democratic lawmakers, who expressed concern on Tuesday that the president would edit the memo — not for national security reasons but to remove parts that he viewed as politically embarrassing or damaging.

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The Senate letter accuses the FBI of relying largely on unverified information produced for the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to convince a federal judge of the need to eavesdrop on Page.

The letter said the Justice Department’s initial application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Page, filed in October 2016 after he had left the Trump campaign, “appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations” posed by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had been working with a research firm paid by the Democrats.

Republicans have said that the so-called Steele dossier was the main justification for the FBI’s investigation into possible Russian influence over the Trump campaign, casting doubt on the inquiry’s legitimacy. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have said that Republicans are distorting the roots of the inquiry in an effort to bolster Trump.

Last week, Trump declassified a memo by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that leveled similar allegations to those posed by Grassley and Graham.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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MAGGIE HABERMAN, SHARON LaFRANIERE and MICHAEL D. SHEAR © 2018 The New York Times

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