US President Donald Trump is set to approve the release of an explosive memo alleging abuse of power in the FBI's probe of his election campaign, a White House official has said.
"The president is OK with" the memo's publication, the official said, adding that Mr Trump would "probably" give Congress a green light tomorrow to release the document, which purports to show the Justice Department and FBI as politicised, anti-Trump agencies.
"It's in Congress's hands after that," the official added.
It comes after the FBI said it had "grave concerns" about the accuracy of the top-secret House Intelligence Committee memo.
"The FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it," the FBI said in a statement.
"As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy."
The FBI declined to say if Director Christopher Wray, who viewed the memo during the weekend, approved the statement.
Mr Trump named Mr Wray to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation after firing Director James Comey last May.
The memo has become a lightning rod in a partisan fight over investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election and possible collusion by the Trump campaign, which Russia and Mr Trump have both denied.
Democrats say the memo selectively uses highly classified materials in a misleading effort to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Justice Department’s Russia probe, and Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who hired him.
Justice Department officials have also said releasing the memo could jeopardise classified information.
Representative Devin Nunes, the intelligence committee’s Republican chairman who commissioned the document, dismissed the FBI and Justice Department objections to its release as "spurious".
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Although White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said yesterday that Mr Trump had not yet read the document, the president told Republican representatives after his State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night that there was a "100%" chance the memo would be released.
A White House official said the four-page document was delivered to the White House on Monday after the committee voted to release it.
The president's chief of staff John Kelly told Fox radio yesterday that White House national security lawyers were examining the memo.
"They're slicing and dicing it, looking at it so that we know what it means and what it understands," he said.
"It'll be released here pretty quick I think and the whole world can see it."
Last night, Representative Adam Schiff, the intelligence committee's ranking Democrat, said he had discovered Mr Nunes had sent a version of the Republican memo to the White House that was "materially altered" and thus was not what was approved for release by the committee's vote.
A spokesman for Mr Nunes called it an "increasingly strange attempt to thwart publication," and described the changes as minor, including two edits requested by the FBI and committee Democrats.
BREAKING: Discovered late tonight that Chairman Nunes made material changes to the memo he sent to White House – changes not approved by the Committee. White House therefore reviewing a document the Committee has not approved for release. pic.twitter.com/llhQK9L7l6
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) February 1, 2018
Mr Schiff has said the memo was intended to set the stage for Mr Trump to fire Mr Mueller or Mr Rosenstein.
Republicans, who blocked an effort to release a counterpoint memo by the panel's Democrats, say their document exposes anti-Trump bias by the FBI and the Justice Department in seeking a warrant to conduct an eavesdropping operation.
Sources familiar with the memo say it accuses the FBI and Justice Department of misleading a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge in seeking an extension in March 2017 of a warrant for a secret eavesdropping operation against Carter Page, an adviser to Mr Trump's 2016 campaign.
Testifying in November before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Mr Page said he met Russian government officials during a July 2016 trip he took to Moscow while he was a foreign policy adviser to the campaign.
He said he made the "benign" visit as a private citizen, according to the interview transcript.
The memo contends that the FBI and Justice failed to tell the judge that the request was based on a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a research firm partially financed by the Democratic National Committee and Democrat Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, the sources said.
The sources said the memo was misleading because all the dossier excerpts used in the application had been confirmed by US or allied intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Moreover, said the sources, the application was based largely on material collected and verified by US intelligence.
