US President Donald Trump said that a disputed Republican memo alleging surveillance abuses against his 2016 campaign exonerates him in the federal investigation of Russian election meddling.
"This memo totally vindicates 'Trump' in probe," the president wrote Saturday on Twitter. "But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on."
Trump authorized Friday's release of the memo, prepared by the Republican-led House intelligence committee.
Trump's own Justice Department and the FBI opposed the release, with the latter voicing "grave concerns" about "material omissions of fact."
Trump repeated his claim that there was "no collusion" between his campaign and Russia.
"There was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead)."
Tweeting from Florida, where the real estate tycoon was was spending the weekend at his palatial resort and visiting a golf course he owns, Trump called the investigation "an American disgrace!"
Commissioned by Republican Devin Nunes, head of the House intelligence committee, the four-page memo alleges that senior officials involved in the early stages of the investigation favoured Democrats over Republicans in 2016 election.
The memo accuses the FBI and the Justice Department of misleading a judge to extend a surveillance warrant against Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
But the Washington Post quoted an anonymous source Saturday as saying that the Justice Department made "ample disclosure of relevant, material facts" to the court.
These revealed that "the research was being paid for by a political entity," said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity.
"No thinking person who read any of these applications would come to any other conclusion but that the work was being undertaken at the behest of people with a partisan aim and that it was being done in opposition to Trump," the official said.
Matthew G. Olsen, former deputy assistant attorney general for national security, said the memo "is unconvincing and one-sided."
"It raises more questions than it answers," Olsen told the Washington Post.
Trump fired FBI chief James Comey, who who had been in charge of the Russia investigation, in May.
The ouster of Comey - less than four years into his 10-year term as director of the law enforcement and counter-intelligence agency - led to the Justice Department's appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to head the outside probe of election meddling.
Mueller's office has since indicted former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on charges including money laundering, and obtained a guilty plea to obstruction of justice by former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is cooperating with the investigation.
Investigators are believed to examining whether Trump's firing of Comey and other actions constitute obstruction of justice.
Trump began criticising the FBI even before taking office in January 2017. He has described the bureau as being in disarray and accused some agents of "treason."
Trump's appointee to replace Comey, Christopher Wray, issued a memo to FBI employees on Friday, urging them to ignore "talk on cable TV and social media" and focus on the agency's work of "keeping communities safe and our nation secure."
"Talk is cheap; the work you do is what will endure," he said, according to NBC and other US media.
