The Justice Department has provided all members of the House Intelligence Committee with access to a two-page document that the FBI used to initiate its original counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, an official confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday.
Committee chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) had requested access to the unredacted document, complaining that previous “heavily” redacted versions were not adequate to the committee’s own investigation.
According to a Justice Department official, the remaining redactions in the document are “narrowly tailored to protect the name of a foreign country and the name of a foreign agent.” Specifics have been replaced with identifiers like “foreign official” and “foreign government,” the official said.
“These words must remain redacted after determining that revealing the words could harm the national security of the American people by undermining the trust we have with this foreign nation,” the official continued, adding that they appear “only a limited number of times, and do no obstruct the underlying meaning of the document.”
Nunes had threatened to hold FBI Director Chris Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in contempt and initiate impeachment proceedings against them if they did not comply with the request for the unredacted document.
[give_form id=”79809″] [contentcards url=”http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/382764-doj-gives-house-intel-original-document-that-prompted-russia” target=”_blank”]