Chris Swecker, former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, urged Congress and President Donald Trump on Wednesday to make public a controversial four-page memo detailing surveillance abuses the “right way.” He made his remarks on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”

“There’s a right way to do this, and I’d just like to see it done by the rules. You get in trouble when you start making up your own rules,” Swecker said. As an American citizen, he said, he “would love to see the memo” and “would love to know if the FISA court was misled.”

“I’d love to know if the FISA judge was aware that if the [Trump-Russia] dossier information was included, that it was paid for by a political opponent,” Swecker said. “But the … former FBI executive in me says let’s play by the rules, not like this.”

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence voted Monday to release the document that summarizes classified information detailing anti-Trump bias among senior FBI leaders and efforts to mislead the FISA Court, which approves intelligence surveillance warrant requests. The president has five days to decide whether to allow release of the memo to the public.

But FBI Director Christopher Wray urged Trump to withhold the memo’s release, saying the bureau “was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo” and harbored “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

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Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, who vehemently opposed the release of the memo for weeks, tweeted Wednesday evening that the intelligence panel’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, (R-Calif.), “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.”

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But a committee spokesman dismissed Schiff’s complaint, saying, “In its increasingly strange attempt to thwart publication of the memo, the committee minority is now complaining about minor edits to the memo, including grammatical fixes and two edits requested by the FBI and by the minority themselves.

“The vote to release the memo was absolutely procedurally sound, and in accordance with House and committee rules. To suggest otherwise is a bizarre distraction from the abuses detailed in the memo, which the public will hopefully soon be able to read for themselves.”

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Swecker, who formerly worked for special counsel Robert Mueller and with Wray, told host Laura Ingraham that he has “confidence in the outcome” of Mueller’s probe into allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia. He also urged the nation to give Wray “the benefit of the doubt” for expressing his concerns about the release of the memo at this time.

“I know Chris Wray. I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt under these circumstances,” Swecker said. “Look — I’m all for disclosure. The FBI is not a bunch of snowflakes. They can take criticism. They can take oversight. They should be transparent.”

“But in this case, Chris has come forward and he was approved with an overwhelming vote of the Senate,” Swecker added. “Let’s give him the confidence, let’s give him the credibility, and let’s go with his recommendation at this point. And let’s do it right.”

Swecker said that if FBI officials and agents were guilty of “misconduct” while investigating both Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) would uncover it and deal with it accordingly.

The OIG currently is investigating the series of anti-Trump text messages exchanged between two FBI employees, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Both worked on the Trump and Clinton investigations.

Related: Trey Gowdy Calls Release of Nunes’ Memo ‘Embarrassing’ to Adam Schiff

Liberal Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz offered a different take from Swecker on the issue.

“In general, I’m in favor of disclosure and full transparency. And sure — you follow the rules. But the rules ought to err on the side of disclosure rather than suppression,” Dershowitz said. “Constitutionally the president has the authority to declassify anything. He is the ultimate authority on what can be declassified. And if he wants to see the memo out, nobody can really overrule that decision.”

Dershowitz said it is time to “let the public decide” and let the people “see the memo” for themselves.

“If people in the FBI think [the memo is] out of context, let them release the rest of the material in context and let the public decide,” Dershowitz said. “Look, everybody should be in favor of accountability by the FBI. And in my experience at least, 99 percent of the time when people claim [a] national security need for censorship, when it ultimately gets released it wasn’t really so important. It was overstated.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.