I’m disappointed in the Nunes memo on every level. It’s uninteresting. It is non-revelatory. For something containing classified information, it’s astonishing that it doesn’t advance the story one inch beyond what has already been reported. It’s not even that worthy of mockery because it’s too flavorless.
Of course, it’s simply wrong in some very obvious respects. The FISA warrant against Carter Page was based on the fact that the guy was a known counterintelligence risk who was in the habit of traveling to places like Moscow and Budapest and mixing with Kremlin officials and spies. The Steele Dossier took independent note of this, which speaks to Steele getting real information, but how Steele felt about Trump or who paid Steele has no bearing on Page’s actual activities, which were highly suspect.
Likewise, the idea that the FBI only pursued Page because certain members of management there had Democratic sympathies or connections through their spouses is ridiculous on its face. Bias at the FBI can run in both directions, obviously, but I’d guarantee you that Trump wouldn’t trade how he was treated by the FBI in October 2016 for the way Clinton was treated. The FBI actually gave Trump a clean bill of health to the New York Times and incorrectly assured the public that Trump’s campaign was not being investigated for its ties to the Russians. What’s to complain about there?
The memo also says that Steele was “terminated” as a source after he talked to David Corn in frustration about the FBI dragging its feet on the information he had provided them. But that’s not true. Steele never had a formal contract or a job with the FBI and therefore he couldn’t be “terminated.” In fact, the FBI maintained discussions with Steele past the election.
Finally, if there is anything in the memo of possible real import, it’s the possibility that the FBI improperly characterized the information they got from Steele during one or more of the FISA applications on Page. But the memo doesn’t provide the other information they relied in their application other than to mention that the subject of George Papadapoulos came up. He would be relevant because he held the same position in the campaign as Page and was approached by the Russians and told that they had dirt on Clinton in the form of hacked emails. That’s a rather important point that would make it reasonable to look at all of Trump’s foreign policy advisors, particularly if they were traveling to Russia, badmouthing sanctions in Moscow speeches, and meeting with Kremlin officials and known spies.
Based on what we already know and what Page has testified to in Congress, no FISA judge would have turned down an FBI application to surveil his next trip to Russia or his subsequent activities. This is true completely independently of what Steele reported. But, remember, Steele reported on Carter Page independently of the FBI who never told him in advance that Page had already been under FISA surveillance in 2013 for his contacts with Russian spies in New York City. No matter what the Nunes memo says, Steele’s information corroborated what the FBI already suspected, but it wasn’t crucial to their interest in Page.
Maybe Trump will use this memo to fire Rosenstein, since Rosenstein signed off on one of the FISA renewals, but Trump could also order rockets launched at the moon because the light disturbs his sleep. There need not be any logic involved in what he does. This memo doesn’t justify firing anyone except the staffers who wrote it and the Republicans who voted to release it.
Wile E. Coyote had a better day.
Snakes on a Plane did better at living up to its hype, and it was considered something of a box office dud. Weeks of hype, and the memo is a dud. Surprise, surprise.
I LOVED Snakes on a Plane. It did not disappoint, and Cobra Starship was a really fun band. But point taken.
A redstate blogger mentioned how the whole memo is suspect because Nunes simply lied in the way he quoted Comey describing the dossier and what Comey actually said is in public record.
Incompetence and lying hustle on both sides of this ongoing Game of Thorns.
The federal bureaucracy is immense. Shit rises to the top. No surprises there. On either side. The “dodgy dossier,” the Nunes memo, that hottest thing ever, tell-all book written by someone who wouldn’t pass muster at the National Enquirer and enthusiastically embraced by the NeverTrumps, the DNC, the RNC, the whole Trump gang and all of its associate gangsters? All rotten to the core.
It’s just politics. We sane people…we civilians…want politics to be honorable. It’s not. It’s just war by other means, on other battlefields.
Get used to it.
AG
Not war. Organized crime.
Not that there’s that big a difference.
Or so says someone who clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.
i have a very good idea of “what I’m talking about,” jsrtheta. I won’t win the war of bot-like one liners here, nor do I expect to do so. But there will come a day…soon enough if the country does not WTFU about what is going on…when this whole media-fed Trump/NotTrump farce breaks up into some form of serious chaos.
And by then it will be too late.
I had a very good idea regarding what I was trying to say to y’all in the earliest stages of Trump’s ascension to power, when you were so busy laughing him off as a clown and an easy mark for HRC. You didn’t listen until it was too goddamned late to do anything about it.
Now I’m trying to tell you that…just like the HRC-Trump/Scylla-Charybdis choice where you went all in on HRC and got your asses beaten…you are now being offered an AllTrump/NeverTrump choice, and once again you are taking the NeverTrump bait. it’s like mistaking a soap opera for real life. A sap opera. The world doesn’t work like a soap opera plot; the soap opera itself is just a way to distract people from how the world really works while also selling them flawed goods during the commercials…a win/win for the controllers while your fucking country goes down the tubes. Both Scylla and Charybdis are paper tigers. The real trouble awaits in the waters of the strait between the two.
And… oh yes…
WTFU !!!
Sincerely…
AG
. . . one, with the details of this secret, enlightened ThirdWay path between (or “beyond”! — to not leave you an out) “AllTrump” and “NeverTrump”, which is discernible only to you privileged few (or is it just you?) Illuminati.
. . .
I’m just kidding.
Martin, I figured you’d do an assessment and tell us the whole thing was useless. In our daily newspaper this morning, they used a Washington Post article that mostly explianed the process and history of the memo without really defining the impact. If Joe Citizen reads the article, and most probably won’t, they won’t understand how phony baloney the thing is, and what damage it can do within the department.
Our governor, John Kasich, who is dangerous to our state on many other levels, is at least on the right side of the memo being released.
He denounced it and said he disapproved of the release. Trump was angry about Kasich saying it and called him out for saying so. Of course, Ohio’s Republican Senators were right behind Trump on it.
I wish more people would pay attention to what’s happening. Come November, we need votes and the average voter probably sees the usual partisan fighting and doesn’t know or care what it’s about. If they got a raise last month, they aren’t going to care about an FBI memo. It’s time to turn up the volume on how to take back control.
Ah, the circular firing squad! Right now in Illinois, the three top contenders in the gubernatorial (D) primary are busy accusing each other of lying and corruption. Everyone says Rauner (R) has no chance of re-election. Booman says he’s Dead Man walking. I’m not so sure that all three won’t be irrevocably tarred by the time the primary is over.
Yeah, maybe it’s a really really really bad idea for candidates and their supporters in Democratic Party primaries to lodge wild and factually fishy accusations of lying and corruption against their opponents.
Food for thought!!!
I haven’t actually checked, but I gather this is still a big story, still being hyped within the right-wing media bubble. The lesson here is to be skeptical of the significance of stories right wing media is getting carried away with.
Nunes is in close contact with Trump, and it seems the White House had input into the memo that Nunes staff wrote.
Trump is firmly in that bubble, considering he watches several hours of Fox most days, and frequently yaks on the phone with people like Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Laura Ingraham etc.
Daily Beast re Trump
sean-hannity-has-been-advising-donald-trump-on-the-nunes-memo-because-of-course-he-has
Trump and Hannity are in a feedback loop where they egg each other on, back and forth.
And Hannity is in a loop with Assange. sigh
Heh. In less than 24 hours, the coverage on NECN, the regional cable news station for New England (affiliated with NBC) has gone from a brief uncritical recap of the “Scandal!” GOP take, through “each side says”, to “memo claims … but refuted by”.
It’s a fail.
Here is a good article from and ex fbi agent highlighting the issues.
I know, I know, it’s written by a deep state participant, and democrats have botched everything since forever and daddy never delivered the pony I wanted for my birthday, so both sides are equally bad, but still an interesting read.
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Haha,
Then she posted an oped, and we got this
Both sides is like crack cocaine.
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Just shows that the Deep State has problems it won’t admit like any other institution when its power is threatened. In this instance it is a true “both sides” threatening their power: the left demands reforms (or abolishment) of tools law enforcement and NatSec have abused, whereas the Right threatens their power because of their tribalism and nihilism.
And yet they’re too stupid — like bankers who refuse to reform — to see their both sidesing only marginalizing themselves further.
For Nunes intended purposes, it’s a total fail. Page wasn’t a member of any political campaign at the time the FBI secured a FISA warrant on him. Even if the only unverified information used to secure the warrant had come from Steele’s dossier (and Nunes wasn’t even able to claim that), it would still be a so what? How and why Steele collected information is also irrelevant as (and as far as we and Nunes know) he took it upon himself to pass it along to the FBI and therefore, Steele wasn’t acting on behalf his contract employer, Fusion GPS, or the entities that had contracted with Fusion for oppo research on Trump. The FBI only formally acted on a tiny sliver of what Steele gave them and didn’t pursue anyone on Trump’s campaign team as of mid-October.
However, it’s not non-revelatory. It reveals that the FBI was cautious in approaching the “tips” Steele dumped on them. OTOH, for those not well-informed, it reveals that the standard for FISA warrants isn’t that high.
From the perspective of how both political parties played this on the public stage, it was rank, overblown, freak-out partisanship. Confirming for the 27% of Republicans and disconfirming for the 29% of Democrats. The remaining 44% is further disgusted by both. Reminds me of the Schiavo issue in that Democrats fumbled a win-lose situation and turned it into a lose-lose.
Well done Bothsiderism!
Start with `total fail’, center part both sides bull, then the last paragraph starts with blending democrats into something they did not write, then end with a completely discollected incident where (you say) the democrats failed.
Republicans > bothsiderism > democrats are incompetent!
Well done. Putin is once again content.
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For you (and the same in reverse for Trumpsters) incapable of seeing and acknowledging flubs by Democrats — in this case on the same matter — might explain why the overall opinion ratings by the general public don’t conform to yours.
Why did DC Democrats scream bloody murder about releasing a classified memo that most people (excluding Trumpsters) can now see is a nothingburger? What exactly were they trying to keep secret? What “national security” interest was harmed by the release? Sane people don’t appreciate Chicken Little behavior by either party. And they most of the time they give equal weight to Chicken Little A and Chicken Little B because that’s how they have learned to deal with squabbling children and give them equal punishment.
Because one has to have a competing (and in this case true) narrative. Because prior to release the public had to know this was not at all what Republicans were saying.
I’m surprised you did not add a `A Clinton win = unacceptable nepotism with Chelsea!’ meme in there somewhere. That was your favorite `go to’ for months.
Now with Ivanka actually having an office down the hall….not so much.
But I understand, bothsiderism is much more difficult these days.
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The wise man knows you to be a fool as well, nalbar.
AG
I don’t know why the Dems screamed bloody murder. I don’t know why the FBI did either.
But declassifying the memo has paved the way to accessing the request for Page’s warrant via the FOIA. It’s a fifty page document. It’s not unreasonable to think the evidence that Page was a security risk went beyond the dossier and Papadopolous’s antics.
Maybe some of that evidence is classified. Maybe it would reveal a source or make it easy for the Russians to guess the source. Schiff has clearly implied that Nunes doesn’t know the half of it.
I swear I read somewhere that Dutch intelligence said it would no longer cooperate with US intelligence if the memo was released. I can’t find the article. I don’t usually imagine articles, but maybe I did this time. Still, just because we don’t know a top secret justification for Page’s warrant doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.
Plus, here are a couple of Schiff’s reason for crying bloody murder.
Because …
“What we have witnessed during the first year of the Trump Administration is a determined effort to demolish the separation between politics and the fair administration of justice–an attempt to turn the DOJ’s investigative powers into the personal political tool of the president.”
Because …
“it has become clear that the president views the idea that the DOJ should be anything other than an extension of his political operation as an unacceptable constraint on his authority.”
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16560965/schiff-trump-fbi-instrument/
They seem like excellent reasons to me. We all do know what the memo was striving to do.
You write:
Yes indeed!!!
Except of course for a large part the 44% or so of U.S. citizens who simply do not vote because they have no interest in even wasting an afternoon to go participate in a squabble between two chickens.
AG
The two general elections which took place after the Schiavo fiasco resulted in Democrats regaining control of the Presidency and Congress while gaining greater control of State governments as well.
The claim that Democrats “fumbled” their response to Governor Bush’s abuses is completely unsubstantiated here.
The Nunes memo says little to nothing about the standards required for FISA court judge panels to approve warrants to authorize surveillance on Americans. The claim that this memo “…reveals that the standards for FISA warrants isn’t that high” is a lie.
Let community members beware of this “contribution” by our oddly persistent Trump enabler, marie3.
From that standpoint, there’s something really interesting in the memo: it shows that the FBI’s work corroborates Steele, to some extent, making it more likely that Steele’s very remarkable allegations on Trumpers’ involvement in the Rosneft sale are true.
As people often point out, none of the Steele observations have been disproven. And as time has gone by more and more are being verified.
Can we please stop calling it the “Nunes memo”?
It is the Nunes/White House Memo.
Any other description does not comport with reality.