Chris Cuomo welcomed Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) on New Day to talk about the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes memo.
"There is an apparent double standard going on here. Reading through the notes of the White House counsel about why they were okay releasing the Nunes memo doesn't seem to be the same standard. They don't even cite the same executive guidelines in doing it. Is that how you feel? This is just politics?" Cuomo asked.
"This is very simply the White House saying over the objections of the Department of Justice and FBI, we'll release the Nunes memo. When the counterfactual rebuttal to the Nunes memo comes out and the FBI and the Department of Justice, well, now those concerns are to be taken seriously. This is a charade, Chris, to keep information that would show the Nunes memo for what it is, which was conjecture and ill-founded allegations, they are determined to keep that from the public," Himes said.
Cuomo asked Himes if he's seen the Schiff memo.
"Is there fair criticism that there is stuff in your memo that may need to be redacted and it is a different use of classified information than the Nunes memo?" he said.
"I don't think so. The initial outing of the FISA application, which is a big deal, the government has never done that before. It happened with the Nunes memo. So now the american public knows there was a FISA application made on Carter Page, that's a big deal. Now to say it points to other elements to refute, rebut the contention that, for example, the Steele information, the Steele dossier information was critical to it," Himes said.
"But no, the big deal is making that FISA application public to begin with. It is all a big deal. The point is that the White House didn't care one iota for what the Department of Justice or the FBI thought the first time around. But now that there is a rebuttal, now they have to take classification seriously."
Cuomo asked why Dems don't simply read the memo into the congressional record.
"Well, I think unlike the Nunes memo, which was political, designed in an in artful way against the president's argument that the whole Russia thing is a hoax, as he puts it, we're being careful here," Himes said.
"We don't want to -- we're uncomfortable with the establishment of a precedent where this happened with the Nunes information, for political reasons, it gets out there. We don't want to do that. We want to say, hey, we're not gonna be political, we want the rebuttal to be out there, we do want to listen to the FBI -- something the president did not afford."
