According to the memo, the Page FISA application was initiated approved AFTER he left the Trump campaign...he wasn't even part of the campaign at the time. So how is this targeting Trump or his campaign, again? What is the bias? Nunes left out the fact that Page was under investigation since 2014, and had his FISA warrant renewed 7 consecutive times. Nunes only mentioned one renewal - the one after Page had left Trump's campaign - and omitted the confirmed fact that Page was known by the FBI to be a Russian agent throughout the entirety of Trump's campaign (and years earlier, too). Lying by omission of fact.
The memo doesn't say there was false material in the application to begin surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At most, it says the attempts to verify the material in the dossier by Christopher Steele were in their "infancy." The main point of the memo is that some of the material in the FISA application was produced by people with anti-Trump agendas. But in federal law enforcement, you talk to people with ulterior motives. The idea that you could only put material in a FISA application that is guaranteed not to be tainted by anybody with possibly questionable motives is not an idea that has any currency in law enforcement circles. The main charges of anti-Trump bias: The memo states that Steele said he "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president," and reports that the wife of then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr worked on opposition research against Trump for Fusion GPS, the research firm that assembled the dossier. The fallout of the memo: the fact that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is named in it is a big deal. Couple that with President Trump's comments about whether the memo made him more likely to fire Rosenstein: "You figure that one out." It's a terrible day for Rosenstein. Many in the conservative movement — including the president — want his head. As I reported this morning, the Tea Party Patriots are already launching an ad campaign calling on him to "do his job, or resign." Part of the reason this memo is generating such a broad variety of reaction is that the vast majority of Americans don't know anything about FISA or the authorities the intelligence community have to surveil Americans. Intel geeks are writing this off as underwhelming, but Americans who are uninitiated to FISA may find this troubling. What the memo doesn't say (but we need to know): Whether there was any incorrect information in the FISA affidavit to justify surveillance of Carter Page, and did the FBI know it to be incorrect? Or was the information used to surveil Page all accurate even if it came from sources with anti-Trump motives? https://www.axios.com/between-the-lines-nunes-memo-7c805d27-08bd-4f02-a1a0-e1b9dd060148.html
The memo does not say any of Steele’s information was bad. In fact, it does not say anything about how the FBI was able to corroborate or not corroborate information from the dossier. We’ve asked it before, and we must ask again: Do Republicans Hate The Trump Pee Hooker Dossier Because It’s TOO TRUE? We really, really think so. The memo gets real mad about how the DODGY DOSSIER was unfairly used as a source for a Moscow trip Carter Page took in September 2016, and that a Yahoo news article by Michael Isikoff was unfairly used to corroborate that, since Steele LEAKED THAT TO ISIKOFF. This is weird because the trip was completely public at the time, as in, not a secret. The memo makes hay of how Steele talked to the media at various times in September and October of 2016, and strangely acts as if Steele was an FBI employee bound by the law not to be a BIG LEAKER, instead of an informant who came to the FBI with some information and said “HELLO, YOU FUCKERS, LOOK WHAT I FOUND.” The memo strangely refers to Steele being “terminated” by the FBI after he talked to David Corn of Mother Jones just before the election, which is, again, strange, because Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson testified that it was Steele who backed away from the FBI after James Comey shoved Hillary Clinton’s emails into the campaign 11 DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION, because he was concerned the bureau was being politicized, in a gross, pro-Trump way. The memo alleges that, even after Steele stopped talking to the FBI, he kept talking to a guy named Bruce Ohr at Justice, whose wife Nellie works for Fusion GPS. Taken on their own, these allegations mean … nothing. But if you’ve ever heard an idiot ass GOP congressman like Jim Jordan clapping his hands and waving while yelling the name “Bruce Ohr,” that is why. The memo alleges that Chris Steele has a bias against Trump, which is utterly shocking, because when a former MI6 spy uncovers an international espionage ring where a candidate’s campaign is conspiring with a hostile foreign power to steal American democracy, isn’t he supposed to fall madly in love with that candidate? Finally, the memo confirms that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation didn’t start because of the DODGY DOSSIER, but because of Trump campaign worker George Papadopoulos, who drunk-rubbed himself all over an Australian diplomat and told him about the conspiracies Russia was doing with Trump. So … uh … doesn’t that kind of negate the ENTIRE FUCKING POINT of this memo, which is that the DODGY DOSSIER was fake news used to start an unfair investigation into Trump? https://wonkette.com/629258/thats-it-really-really-devin-nunes-for-real#5JmIpMJYg0tSto6P.99
In 2017 regarding Clinton Emails: "Who cares how they were stolen. What matters is the context" In 2018 regarding Trump Dossier: "All that matters is who found out the info!"
The best thing about Nunes' stunt is that Fox News has to now tell its viewers that Trump had a guy on his campaign who worked with a Russian spy ring in 2013. Fox wouldn't be covering this if Nunes hadn't been dumb enough to draft that memo. The memo was a better talking point when it was un-released Great job!
Amid all the excitement over the Devin Nunes #TheMemo, it is important to remember that it is a partisan summary of FISA warrant applications that we the People have not been allowed to see. And in determining whether you trust Nunes’s summary, it might be relevant that it inaccurately summarizes something that is public record: James Comey’s testimony in 2017 regarding whether the allegations in the memo had been verified. Here is the claim in Nunes’s memo: Got that? Nunes claims that James Comey testified in June 2017 that “the Steele dossier” was “salacious and unverified.” The claim is not that a particular portion of the dossier is salacious and unverified. The claim is that Comey testified that the dossier(“it”) is salacious and unverified. That’s what Nunes says in the memo excerpt above. And it’s not true. That’s not James Comey’s testimony. I already examined this issue exhaustively in a post from January 2, rebutting a similar allegation made by Andrew C. McCarthy. Refer to that post for more detail, which I will summarize here. As I noted, Comey was specifically asked whether the FBI had confirmed any criminal allegations in the dossier, and he refused to answer the question in an open setting. https://www.redstate.com/patterico/...naccuracy-thememo-calls-credibility-question/