After weeks of speculation and anticipation, "the memo" has been released. A memo compiled from classified information by the House Intelligence Committee lays out missteps by the FBI and Department of Justice in targeting a former Trump campaign advisor.

In October of 2016, the FBI and DOJ sought and obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the activities and communications of then Trump advisor Carter Page. Page had been part of then-candidate Trump's foreign policy team and subject to probes by the FBI over alleged ties to Russia.

Yet the FBI and DOJ never had enough material to get a FISA warrant to monitor Page until they presented an application that relied heavily on the now-discredited "Trump Dossier" drawn up by former FBI informant and one-time British intelligence office Christopher Steele. Steele, who had a clear and known anti-Trump bias, had drawn up the dossier with funds from Democratic Party donors and the Clinton campaign.

Yet despite all these red flags, the application to monitor Carter Page relied on information from the dossier without revealing where it came from or who paid for it, according to the memo:

The memo goes on to say that neither in the initial October 2016 application nor in the subsequent renewals did the FBI or DOJ disclose that they were relying on information paid for and supplied by Trump's political rivals in the Democratic Party.

What the memo did do was rely heavily on a September 23, 2016 report from Yahoo News that was based off of information leaked to Yahoo by Christopher Steele, thus using a media report based off his dossier to support claims in the dossier, all while not revealing that the information and investigation were being paid for by the Democratic Party at the time it was used.

The memo also discusses the actions of then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who met with Steele to discuss the dossier and Steele's dislike of Trump as well as the relationship that Ohr's wife Nellie had with Fusion GPS, the firm the Democrats used to fund the dossier.

Nellie Ohr was hired by Fusion GPS to work on opposition research against Trump which, according to the memo, was later all turned over to Bruce Ohr who then shared it with the FBI. The memo states that the relationships between the Ohrs, Steele and Fusion GPS were never revealed to the court as the FBI and DOJ sought permission to surveil Page.

Each FISA warrant application must be signed off on by top officials at the FBI and DOJ; the applications in question were signed by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente, and Rod Rosenstein, showing that they knew where the questionable information was coming from and who paid for it, but still went ahead with their application to spy on an American citizen.

Further proving that Steele's DNC-paid-for Trump Dossier was key to the warrants, the memo points to testimony on December 2017 by then-deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe stating that, "no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information."

Democrats have sought to downplay and even discredit the memo which could show that the impetus for the Trump-Russia investigation began with faulty intelligence, paid for by the president's political opponents.

Read the full memo below.

House Intelligence Committee Memo by brian_jameslilley on Scribd