FBI and Justice Department officials got a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign associate by misleading a surveillance court judge, House Republicans contend in a newly released memo that Democrats have dismissed as a contrived account intended to protect the president.

The Republican memo cites “a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to” the process for obtaining a warrant from a foreign intelligence surveillance court.

President Donald Trump approved Friday’s public release of the four-page memo over the FBI’s objections. Written by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee and drawn from classified information, it alleges that deception early on tainted the FBI’s continuing inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign and whether anyone close to Trump colluded in it.

Trump told reporters Friday that “Congress will do whatever they’re going to do” with the information in the memo. But he added, “I think it’s a disgrace what’s happening in our country” and “a lot of people should be ashamed -- and much worse than that.”

Republican Representative Devin Nunes, who heads the Intelligence panel, said in a statement Wednesday that “top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign. Once the truth gets out, we can begin taking steps to ensure our intelligence agencies and courts are never misused like this again.””

FOREIGN SURVEILLANCE 

The memo focuses on how the FBI persuaded a judge to issue a warrant under the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act in October 2016 to spy on Carter Page, who was a Trump campaign adviser and had worked earlier as an investment banker in Moscow. The Republicans say a judge might not have approved the request for surveillance of Page if the FBI had revealed that Trump’s campaign opponent, Hillary Clinton, and Democrats helped fund research by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, that produced a dossier of unverified allegations against Trump that was used in seeking the warrant.

The memo, written under the direction of Nunes of California, doesn’t directly attack Robert Mueller, the special counsel now running the Russia meddling inquiry. But Democrats have said it was concocted to help Trump by undermining the credibility of his criminal probe.

“What we don’t do is cherry-pick classified information and publish it to protect the president’s hide,” Representative Adam Schiff of California, the Intelligence panel’s top Democrat, said Thursday. Schiff said he fears Trump will use the memo as a pretext to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the Russia investigation and appointed Mueller as special counsel.

“The White House knows it would face a firestorm if it fired Bob Mueller,” Schiff said. “If Rod Rosenstein is fired and someone else takes his place, that is a yes man for the president. Then, they can limit Bob Mueller’s investigation in ways we will never see."

Trump, asked Friday whether he has confidence in Rosenstein, said only: “You figure that one out.”

The Democrats’ concern that the memo will be used to undercut the Russia inquiry was echoed by Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, who said in a statement Friday that “the American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded.”

The FBI, led by Christopher Wray after Trump fired former Director James Comey, also opposed release of the memo, saying in a statement that it had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

The White House decision to approve release of the memo over FBI objections undercuts Wray, who Trump has frequently praised as an effective leader who’s repairing an agency that had been in “tatters.”

#ReleaseTheMemo HASHTAG

House members were permitted to read the memo in private, but not the underlying classified material on which it was based. Yet many Republicans seized on its assertions to demand the memo’s release, with the Twitter hashtag, #ReleaseTheMemo.

While Republicans on House Intelligence approved releasing their memo, they have delayed disclosure of a Democratic document offering counterarguments. A lawmaker familiar with the Democratic response says it argues the FBI used ample information other than Steele’s dossier to get the Page warrant, and that the agency had already been working on information from a friendly country about another Trump associate.

The controversy over the memo isn’t the first involving Nunes, a fierce defender of Trump, and the Russia inquiry. He stepped aside from his committee’s investigation for a time after Democrats and some of his fellow Republicans criticized his announcement in March of last year that classified evidence revealed Obama administration officials improperly “unmasked” the identifies of people close to Trump whose names came up in legal surveillance of foreign individuals.

While Nunes made a show of rushing to the White House with the new information, he later acknowledged it was given to him by a source he had met with on the White House grounds. In the current dispute, Nunes refused to answer questions from Democrats on the Intelligence Committee on whether the panel’s Republican staff consulted with anyone at the White House in drafting the memo.

Page, who’s denied wrongdoing, seems an unlikely subject of so much attention. While Steele’s dossier portrayed him as an intermediary in a conspiracy, White House officials and former Trump campaign aides have dismissed him as someone who offered to help when the candidate’s insurgent campaign lacked foreign policy advisers. They say he made a trip to Russia on his own in 2016, but that they spurned his offers to brief the candidate afterward.