On the surface, the memo doesn’t seem all that bad. But, when you search across the progressive outlets, including the NY Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBC, and so forth, (and blatant lies from MSNBC and blatant lies from CNN) and see the attempts to minimize the impact, you realize that it is worse than you think. Byron York explains it
The House Intelligence Committee has released its controversial memo outlining alleged abuses of secret surveillance by the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation. Here are some key points:
* The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page.
* Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.
* The four FISA surveillance applications were signed by, in various combinations, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente, and Rod Rosenstein.
* The FBI authorized payments to Steele for work on the dossier. The FBI terminated its agreement with Steele in late October when it learned, by reading an article in Mother Jones, that Steele was talking to the media.
* The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications.
* DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele’s bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.
Essentially, the FBI and DOJ relied upon an un-sourced political hitjob document, then used a news media article about the memo to back the document. Michael Isikoff, who wrote that article, was shocked to learn that it was used to get that surveillance warrant.
Here it is. The FBI took an unverified political dossier and used it to get a secret warrant to spy on an American citizen and political opponents.
And they *didn't* tell the FISA judge that the DNC and Clinton campaign had paid for that dossier. https://t.co/qgOKd8lJd5
— Mark Meadows (@MarkMeadows) February 2, 2018
However, a lot of this is inside baseball, major league level, which allows for Leftist to spin the weaponization of the DOJ/FBI for political purposes.
(Politico) Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said on Friday that the House intelligence memo on alleged FBI malfeasance showed “clear and convincing evidence of treason” by law enforcement officials, despite lingering concerns in the intelligence community over its credibility. (snip)
“The full-throated adoption of this illegal misconduct and abuse of FISA by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein is not just criminal but constitutes treason,” Gosar wrote in a statement.
Gosar said he would urge Attorney General Jeff Sessions to seek “criminal prosecution against these traitors to our nation.” Treason under the Constitution is punishable by death.
Perhaps that’s too much, but, it was clearly a 4th Amendment violation, and is just one example of the political weaponization of what should be two neutral agencies, and just adds to the list of what Obama/Holder/Lynch did to turn the DOJ and FBI into political organizations acting on the behalf of the Democratic Party.
(Weekly Standard) Friday’s FISA memo may not be the last.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes says that the panel plans on releasing more memos in the future. His remarks came hours after the committee released a GOP-drafted document alleging politically-motivated surveillance abuses against the Trump team, amid objections from the FBI and Department of Justice.
“This completes just the FISA abuse portion of our investigation,†Nunes told Fox News’ Bret Baier, using an acronym for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “We are in the middle of what I call ‘Phase Two’ of our investigation, which involves other departments, specifically the State Department and some of the involvement that they had in this.â€
He does explain later that it would be done via normal methods, rather than in the unusual (but lawful) method of the FISA warrant memo. In fact, there should be lots of releases. We should get to see the Democrats one, when they’ve removed the sources and methods that it contained. We should see as much of the underlying documents that go to the Nunes memo. We should see a ton of documents on what government was doing. We are supposed to have transparency in government. There was too much secrecy during the Obama years. News outlets used to be all for transparency.
The real crime here is not treason (for obvious Constitutional reasons) but a fraud upon the FISA court. Officials at the FBI and DOJ did that four times. Those ARE felonies, and they are punishable by imprisonment.
Unfortunately, the Nunes memo doesn’t tell us — probably couldn’t tell us — if this is evidence of mala fides by the officials who signed the FISA warrant applications, or laziness and incompetence in reviewing the requests by lower ranking officials. From the memo, the only person that I can see as having a deliberate intent to use Clinton campaign opposition research was Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr; all of the others could have simply been negligent.
Heck of a defense, though: deliberate criminal action or criminal negligence.
https://darktriadman.com/2018/02/02/the-fbi-memo-in-plain-and-simple-english/
“If that f..king bastard gets elected, … we all hang from nooses.”
–Hillary Clinton
You misspelled lying.
[…] Journal’s take on it, and American Greatness, and our friends over at Maggie’s Farm. Pirate’s Cove has weighed in, as has The Other McCain. Over at PJMedia, Roger Simon also has some sharp words […]
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/269210/5-most-devastating-revelations-memo-daniel-greenfield
The problem is that the GOP act as if tRump et al are above the law.
Wow. Pot calling the Tupperware black. Again.
The GOP is not intentionally working for the Russians/Putin, but are just trying to protect their president instead of protecting the nation.
The darker side is that the Nu GOP (TeaPatRiot Edition) is autocratic by nature.
LOL. Sure, sure, THIS memo is not so conclusive, but just you wait!
tRump’s buttboy, Nunes, can type memos all day (as long as tRump tells him what to type). LOL.
LOL. Smells like Frank Luntz.
Shouldn’t the US government be interested in a campaign operative being recruited by the Russian intelligence?
Try to keep your timelines straight, little dumbass.
If the United States government should be “interested in a campaign operative being recruited by the Russian intelligence,” the government should still have to get a warrant to spy on an American citizen. Should the FBI be able to get a FISA warrant using information from a biased campaign site?
If a FISA warrant uncovered any espionage by Mr Page, or any other American, by the use of a warrant that should not have been granted, it would fall under the ‘fruit of a poisonous tree’ doctrine, and the information could not be used to prosecute the offender.
Are you suggesting that laws were broken in the surveillnce of Comrade Page? Or that a judge didn’t sign multiple warrants? Did Secretary Clinton or President Obama somehow get around the process?
Even Nunes’ cherrypicked memo made clear that Steele’s dossier was only part of the reason.
Is it your position that all political operatives should be exempt or just GOP operatives?
Or do you think our FISA court system should apply only to Muslims?
Yes, my Missouri moron friend, laws were broken. The FISA legislation holds that information which may be to the advantage of the target of a potential FISA warrant target must also be presented by the FISA warrant application, because the warrant target has no knowledge that he is a target, and cannot, therefore, have a lawyer present to fight to deny the warrant. The FBI and DoJ failed, whether deliberately or negligently, to inform the FISC of the origin of the Steele dossier and the fact that it was paid for, through an intermediary law firm named Perkins Coie, by the Clinton campaign. Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe stated that the warrant would not have been approved without the Steele dossier.
If the Steele dossier were not needed, why would the FBI/DoJ include it in the warrant application?
Even if this was the result of negligence, one would think it would bother you that top officials were so blithely indifferent to their duties that they approved FISA warrant applications against American citizens without any concern as to whether citizens’ rights were being violated. And if they were doing this deliberately as an attack against Donald Trump, they one would think that you’d be somewhat upset that the power of the federal government was being used against one side in an election.
Actually, only American citizens have rights under the FISA system; had Mr Page been a foreigner, none of this would have mattered.
You said that I am the “KintucKKKee kook.” Sad thing is, it’s you, and not me, who is advocating allowing a fraudulent warrant application to be submitted and approved for action against an American citizen. Just who is the Klansman here, who is the fascist?
Proud KKK,
Do you believe the FBI and DOJ bias against tRump was the reason they started investigating Carter Page in 2013?
Proud KKK,
Then it’s all easily resolved. tRump’s DOJ can prosecute the law breakers.
I suppose I should ask you directly: do you believe it is appropriate or lawful for the government of the United States to use its police power — and police power is what the FBI and DoJ wield — in support of one candidate and opposition to another in an election?
No.
Why didn’t the FBI and the DOJ, “intent on supporting Clinton”, leak that they were also investigating the tRump campaign? They only admitted they were still investigating candidate tRump, likely hurting her campaign. That was sure a lapse in the “deep state”s support of the Clinton.
The FBI and the DOJ sat on evidence until after the election that the members of the tRump campaign were in contact with Russian operatives. That was quite conservative on their part, don’t you think? But EMAILS!! LOL.
Nunes typed a memo containing outright errors and half truths. Nunes is in collusion with tRump.
Our Missouri moron asked:
There was nothing new, that’s why.
The theme that Russia was the source behind the WikiLeaks exposés was already public knowledge, and had been since the summer. They had nothing new, and even now, there’s little new which would in any way lead to a criminal charge against the President.
Of course, it could also be that they weren’t very hood at their jobs; I have already said that incompetence was a major part of their defenses.
Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice to become President of the United States, but, in the end, he was better than the alternative.
Proud KKK,
We understand why you defend this “president” at all costs to country and home.
What a silly answer you gave.
If the “Deep State”, including the FBI and DOJ, was obsessed with stopping tRump, why didn’t the “Deep State” do something to stop tRump? Your answer is they were too professional to do that, LOL? How can you support two 180 degree opposite conclusions in one sentence? Oh, you’re a Nu Con.
Mr. Mueller IS a professional, and you can be assured that if those “biased” agents bring him “biased” information he will reject it.
You and tRump and his minions do not fear “bias”, you fear the truth.
How, I have to ask, did the muddled moron from Missouri read this, “Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice to become President of the United States, but, in the end, he was better than the alternative,” and somehow see it as, “We understand why you defend this “president†at all costs to country and home?”
Oh, wait, I understand now: he has Democratic dyslexia, which rearranges letters and words to have others say what he believes that they think, rather than what was actually written.
President Obama and his minions couldn’t simply arrest candidate Trump; there was no evidence to support that, and the country would have rebelled. So, they — at the very least — were negligent enough to allow opposition research, paid for by Hillary Clinton, to become the basis for a FISA warrant, hoping against hope that they’d find something, anything, to discredit Mr Trump.
The problem is that there just wasn’t anything there. The reports that the evil Roooshuns had been the ones who hacked the DNC and Clinton campaign e-mails were already out there, in the public domain, stories being spread, albeit somewhat cautiously, by the credentialed media — the “Democrats with bylines,” as Robert
StaceyStacy McCain calls them — and there was nothing new out there.Just how bad a candidate was Hillary Clinton?
And Hillary Clinton still lost!
I’ll admit it: I had said, several times, that the Republicans had sixteen fine candidates who could have beaten Mrs Clinton, and we went ahead and nominated the one who couldn’t. Even I misunderestimated just how poor Mrs Clinton’s image was in the public. I had ignored all of the internet stories telling us how Mr Trump was making appearances to overflowing audiences in huge venues, while the dowdy Democrat was talking in small venues that were, themselves, half-empty. Donald Trump was such a buffoon that there was no way, I thought, that he could be elected. I even cast my own ballot for the Libertarian Party candidate, knowing that Pennsylvania hadn’t been carried by the Republican candidate since 1988, knowing that all of the pols had Mrs Clinton solidly ahead in the Keystone State, and knowing that my vote simply wouldn’t matter.
I was wrong. Heck, almost everybody was wrong. It turned out that Mrs Clinton’s support was a mile wide, and an inch deep, and a lot of supposed Clinton voters simply didn’t bother to vote, her inevitableness making their votes superfluous, while the Trump partisans were simply far more motivated to get out and vote.
My best friend, who has, alas! gone to his eternal reward, told me that there was just no way Mr Trump could win, since women made up a majority of the electorate. The lovely Mrs Clinton, supposedly so strong and sober [Hah!] and reliable, was simply supposed to get all of those quiet women voters out to the polls, to smash Teh Patriarchyâ„¢, yet, when the dust settled, 53% of white women votes cast their ballots for the pussy-grabbing Mr Trump.
I guess that they realized that Mrs Clinton wasn’t all she was purported to be, and that they ought to vote their real interests rather than their genitals.
tl; dnr
That said… Is it your position that Republican squishes (Comey, McCabe, Wray etc) in the FBI, at the behest of Hillary Clinton, concocted a plot to elect Clinton, but were so incompetent that they helped the Russians elect tRump instead? Once elected, tRump fired some of them, but appointed squishes (Sessions, Rosenstein etc) now conducting a coup? OK…
In a nutshell, there was a deep state conspiracy against tRump, but they were too incompetent to pull it off (nice save, LOL). And the proof is that Devin Nunes (a tRump lackey) concocted a biased memo alleging that the FISA court/FBI/DOJ surveilled a Russian/tRump operative who they had been investigating since 2013.
That the FBI (“intent on electing Clinton”) had nothing new to report is countered by the fact that FISA renewed a warrant on Page in Oct 2016. What Comey DID report was that the FBI had re-opened an investigation of Clinton/Weiner EMAILS! Incompetent indeed!
The bottom line is that tRump and his minions want to halt a legal investigation by a well-regarded conservative, Mr. Mueller. Why? Ask tRump and his minions what they have to hide. tRumps hysterical fear may not be related to his campaign’s obvious contacts with the Russians, but may go deeper into his (and his family’s) obvious relationships with Russian oligarchs and criminals.
tRump and his minions are interested in shaping public opinion, not in finding the truth.
Apparently little guy’s had a bad week as have the rest of the dems and mfm..
Apparently nothing since the WH has cooperated fully with Mueller since the beginning.
Make up some more lies, little guy, that’s the only thing that you’re good at.