White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that “there’s always a chance” the White House won’t release a reportedly anti-FBI memo, a major walk back from President Trump’s comments after the State of the Union Tuesday evening.
After Trump’s first State of the Union address, Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) shook the President’s hand and asked him to “release the memo.”
“Oh, don’t worry. A hundred percent. Can you imagine that?” Trump responded, according to video taken by CSPAN.
CLIP: As President Trump exits the House Chamber, @RepJeffDuncan asks him to #ReleaseTheMemo. #SOTU #SOTU2018 pic.twitter.com/O1hHYFdPxM
— CSPAN (@cspan) January 31, 2018
But, according to Sanders, Trump still hasn’t seen the memo as of Tuesday night. When asked on CNN if there’s a chance Trump wouldn’t release the memo, Sanders said there’s “always a chance.”
“Again, I don’t know, I haven’t seen the memo,” she said. “I can’t make that judgment, but I do know we’re going through that process. I know that will be part of what’s taking place at the White House today. And we’ll certainly keep you guys posted as I know you’ll continue to ask until you hear the final answer on that.”
“Has the President seen the memo yet?” CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked.
“Not that I’m aware of,” she said.
The memo in question was authored by Republican staffers and supposedly purports to show an anti-Trump bias within the FBI. The memo reportedly claims that FBI officials misled a FISA court when attempting to secure a warrant to surveil former Trump campaign staffer Carter Page, whom they believed was a foreign agent for Russia at the time, according to The New York Times. The House Intelligence Committee voted Monday along party lines to release the contents of the memo, but Trump has five days to decide whether to make the document public.
Both FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have privately urged the White House to not release the memo, according to new reports from the Times and The Washington Post.
