Chief of staff John Kelly said the White House is reviewing a Democratic memo on the investigation into a Trump campaign associate and he has ordered authorities to give their recommendations on how to handle it by Thursday, after which the President will make his final decision on whether to release the memo and whether to redact it.
Kelly said the memo came in late Monday night and on Tuesday, he and White House counsel Donald McGahn met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for a “great conversation.”
He said the White House was not leaning any way on the memo.
“This is a different memo than the first one, it’s lengthier, well it’s different, so not leaning towards it,” Kelly said. “It will be done in a responsible way. But again, where the first one was very clean relative to sources and methods, my initial cut is this one is a lot less clean. But at the end of it all, it’ll be guys like Rod Rosenstein, Chris Wray from FBI, certainly the national security attorneys at the White House giving the President a recommendation on that.”
“We essentially got it today, the teams are doing exactly the same thing on this one that we did on the first one. This one’s more lengthy, but anyway, drop-dead date, they need to get back to me by close of business Thursday, then OK we’ve done it, we’ll go in, could be done earlier, but we’ll go in and brief the President on it, and just like we did the first time, give him a recommendation as to what he should do going forward. So yeah, great conversation with Rod, and Don McGahn was there, and great kind of initial comparison between the first one and the second one, so I guess I would say we’re executing the exact same process that we did on the first one.”