Congressman Says Trump Probably Won’t Declassify Memo From Democrats Because It Won’t Make Him Look Good

After Trump declassified the Republican-written memo meant to discredit the FBI’s Russia investigation on Friday, Democrats quickly moved to get their own memo out to the public.

On Monday, the House Intelligence Committee voted in favor of making the Democratic rebuttal public. Unfortunately, Trump probably won’t agree to declassify it because it won’t serve his agenda of making everything seem like he’s the target of a “witch hunt.”

Rep. Jim Himes said as much during an interview on CNN’s New Day.

“I’ll tell you I’ve never seen this president participate in anything that doesn’t make him look good,” he said when asked if he would bet that the president would agree to releasing the document. “So you’ve got, as you pointed out, Speaker Ryan saying it should be out there, but I guess I would bet against the White House saying what it said with the Republican memo, which was ‘a hundred percent, it’s going out.'”

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Asked if the Democrats’ document makes Trump look bad, Himes said, “Well, he’ll perceive it that way, ’cause this memo of course is a point-by-point refutation of the Republican memo.”

Himes went on to argue that in a way, whether or not the Democrats’ rebuttal is released is irrelevant, because despite “every lawyer out there who’s not four whiskeys into cocktail hour” having looked at the Republican memo and recognized that there was nothing of value in it, it still achieved its purpose of convincing a “meaningful percentage” of the American public that the Russia probe is corrupt.