Georgia Republican lawmakers on Friday cheered the release of a long-hyped memo alleging that federal law enforcement was politically motivated when it okayed the surveillance of a former Trump campaign official. Echoing their national colleagues, local Democrats warned that releasing the document was reckless and could permanently damage the public’s faith in government.
The state's GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, from the delegation's most senior member down to its newest, championed the release of the so-called Nunes memo as an exercise in government transparency.
“The people deserve the right to know,” Republican U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson said Friday afternoon on Georgia Public Broadcasting’s “Political Rewind.” “Not a history lesson later, but contemporary knowledge. So I think releasing it was the right thing to do.”
After receiving a flood of calls from constituents, several of the delegation’s most conservative Republicans, including Jody Hice of Monroe and Doug Collins of Gainesville, pushed last month for the House Intelligence Committee to okay the document’s release.
Cassville Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk was also a part of that group. He said the memo showed there is “corruption at the top” of the nation’s law enforcement agencies.
“These are the types of things that you expect to happen with the KGB in the former Soviet Union, not the United States of America,” he said Tuesday. “It shows how far away from our constitutional principles we’ve gone.”
Georgia Democrats said the memo was biased and omitted key facts and context. They framed its public release as reckless on the part of the GOP and President Donald Trump, who signed off on the move.
“It is painful to witness firsthand this attack on the remaining pillars of nonpartisan, governance, rules, and procedures,” U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Atlanta, tweeted Friday. “But it is unfathomable and unconscionable to attack our country’s national security personnel and apparatus for political cover and gain.”
Lithonia Democratic U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson said the memo’s release was part of a “coordinated propaganda effort to discredit, disable and defeat the Russia investigation.”
“House Republicans are now accomplices to a shocking campaign to obstruct the work of the Special Counsel, to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the Justice Department and the FBI, and to bury the fact that a foreign adversary interfered with our last election,” he said in a joint statement with other Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee.
The memo also thrust two prominent law enforcement officials from Georgia into the national spotlight.
FBI Director and longtime Atlanta resident Christopher Wray had managed to avoid the limelight since he was sworn in last August, but the memo has put him at odds with President Donald Trump. Wray took the unusual step of releasing a statement earlier this week citing "grave concerns about the material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy." He also reportedly made several personal appeals to the White House to block the document's release.
The memo also included a cameo by former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, the Georgian whom Trump fired last year for defying him on his travel ban. Yates was one of several Justice Department officials to sign off on the surveillance of the former Trump official, Carter Page, in late 2016, according to the document.
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