WASHINGTON—Even before he’d read the memo, U.S. President Donald Trump seized on what it could mean.The president first learned of the House Intelligence Committee document last month from some Republican allies in Congress and he watched it take hold in the conservative media, including on some of his favourite Fox News programs, according to seven White House officials and outside advisers.The classified memo sent to the Oval Office by the committee’s majority Republicans asserted that the FBI and Justice Department abused their surveillance powers to monitor the communications of a one-time Trump campaign associate. Trump told confidants in recent days that he believed the memo would validate his concerns that the “deep state” — an alleged shadowy network of powerful entrenched federal and military interests — had conspired to undermine the legitimacy of his presidency, according to one outside adviser.That adviser and the others weren’t authorized to publicly discuss private conversation and spoke on condition of anonymity.Trump’s decision to authorize the memo’s public disclosure was extraordinary, yet part of a recent pattern. Like few of his predecessors, Trump has delivered repeated broadsides against intelligence and law enforcement agencies, working in tandem with some conservatives to lay the groundwork to either dismiss or discredit special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Russia investigation.“This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” the president tweeted Saturday from Florida, where he was spending the weekend. “But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their (sic) was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!”Trump had dismissed forceful pleas from the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the second-rank ...
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