There’s Probably Nothing The Justice Department Can Do To Stop Republicans From Releasing The Disputed FISA Memo

By Zoe Tillman @ BuzzFeed.com,  Updated on January 29, 2018, at 7:29 p.m.

In a recent letter, a Justice Department official told Republican Rep. Devin Nunes it would be "extraordinarily reckless" to release the memo without a national security review. But experts say the department likely lacks any means of stopping it from happening, and Trump reportedly is supportive of its release.

Gergen, who has some experience with sane presidents gone wack, suspects:

finally some clarity:

Mark Warner: ‘We’ve Had New Information That Raises More Questions’

The top Democrat on the Senate's Russia investigation says he's worried about what he's just learned.

[....] Warner, the intel committee’s top Democrat, says “end-of-the-year document dumps” produced “very significant” revelations that “opened a lot of new questions” that Senate investigators are now looking into, meaning the inquiry into Trump and the Russia hacking—already nearly a year old—will not be finished for months longer. “We’ve had new information that raises more questions,” Warner says in the interview, an extensive briefing on the state of the Senate’s Trump-Russia probe for The Global Politico, our weekly podcast on world affairs.

Warner also warns about a “coordinated” attack by the president and “Trump zealots” in the House of Representatives to undermine the legitimacy of the investigations against him, an effort Warner says includes the president’s threats to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and other officials as well as a secret Republican memo alleging “shocking” FBI surveillance abuse against Trump that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is now threatening to release. Warner calls out Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in arguably more explicit terms than any Democrat has yet, saying he has read the underlying classified material used in the memo and that Nunes misrepresented it as part of a McCarthyite “secret Star Chamber” effort to discredit the FBI probe of the president.

“We’re seeing this coordinated effort to try to impede the investigation,” Warner says [....]