US President Donald Trump had called for the memo to be declassified. "Today this committee voted to put the president's personal interest, perhaps their own political interest, above the national interest," Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) told reporters after the announcement.
The memo purports to show that the FBI has a clear anti-Trump bias. When the US Justice Department urged lawmakers last week not to release the memo while Trump was in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, the president fumed in anger, Bloomberg reported.
The Justice Department warned that revealing the memo might give away "sources and methods" used by the US to collect classified information. "Usually it's about keeping the American public in the dark, and not about protect the US or the American public from foreign enemies as is the claim… those who don't want it out, don't want it out because it will hurt them politically, not because it has any particular national security significance," professor Dan Kovalik of the University of Pittsburg School of Law told Sputnik Radio's Loud & Clear on Monday.