Nunes memo

When Republican staffers planned to release a classified memo (the "Nunes memo") about FISA warrants during the 2016 election, Boyd wrote a letter denouncing this plan as "extraordinarily reckless". He asked "why the Committee would possibly seek to disclose classified and law enforcement sensitive information without first consulting with the relevant members of the intelligence community" and went on to mention that the Justice Department was "currently unaware of any wrongdoing relating to the FISA process," but that such allegations would be taken seriously, writing "we agree that any abuse of that system cannot be tolerated."^[17] Trump was reportedly furious about Boyd's letter,^[18] viewing it as "another example of the department undermining him and blocking GOP efforts to expose the political motives behind special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe"^[19] It "intensified Trump’s concern that his own department is undercutting him".^[20]

On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of the special counsel's report was released to Congress and the public.^[21] The 448-page report, with its four appendices, contains about 200,000 words and over 1,100 footnotes. About one-eighth of the lines and 11% of the text are redacted. Redactions were made for four reasons: harm to an ongoing matter, personal privacy, investigative techniques, and grand jury information.^[22]

After the Special Counsel's investigation, Boyd engaged in lengthy negotiations with the House Committee on the Judiciary and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence regarding those committees' access to redacted portions of the Special Counsel's report.^[23][24]

Ultimately, in a "rare instance of détente", the department and congressional leaders agreed on a plan to provide certain congressional committees access to a version of the report that protected only grand jury information.^[25] Boyd wrote, "the Department is willing to move forward with efforts to accommodate the Committee’s legitimate interests, adding "to be clear, should the Committee take the precipitous and unnecessary action of recommending a contempt finding or other enforcement action against the attorney general, then the Department will not likely be able to continue to work with the Committee to accommodate its interest in these materials".^[26] House Democrats later filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to gain access to the redacted grand jury materials.^[27] The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case in 2021.^[28]

On December 9, 2019, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a report titled "Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation".^[29] While the Inspector General did not find evidence that "political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI's decision to seek FISA authority on Carter Page", he did find 17 "significant inaccuracies and omissions" in the FBI's four FISA applications made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain warrants for the surveillance of Page.^[30] On February 7, 2020, Boyd informed Congress Attorney General Barr had "determined that it is now in the public interest to release to Congress additional documents and information related to these matters to the extent consistent with national security interests…”^[31] Thereafter, Boyd managed a process to provide Congress with redacted documents from the department and the FBI, some recently declassified, regarding the origins of the Russia Investigation and the FBI's use of FISA authority.^[32]