The Secret Nunes Memo Is a Dud (It’s Also Total BS)
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The long-awaited House Intelligence Committee memo has finally cratered its way to earth, nudged along by Trump’s decision Friday morning to okay its release, and can be summed up as follows:
1. Insofar as the FISA surveillance warrant issued by the FBI and DOJ for Trump “volunteer advisor” Carter Page was justified by the Steele dossier, it is fundamentally corrupt because Christopher Steele is himself fundamentally corrupt.
2. Steele’s corruption stems from a few factors. First, he was paid (indirectly, through Fusion GPS) by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to the tune of $160,000. Second, the FBI dumped him as a source in Oct. 2016 because he violated the no-media rules by speaking to Mother Jones, and should have been dumped a month earlier for speaking to Yahoo. Third, Steele kept in touch with DOJ contacts like Bruce Ohr, and expressed anti-Trump sentiments.
3. The FBI and DOJ were obliged to report all of this when they sought the FISA warrant on Oct. 21, 2016, but they didn’t. And last month, Andrew McCabe admitted in closed-door testimony to the intelligence committee that without the Steele dossier, there would have been no FISA application.
4. The FISA application is what started this whole mess, so the entire Russia investigation is compromised. QED, bitches. (PS, two horny FBI agents texted that they didn’t like Trump.)
Okay, so…this is a dud. And it’s also complete and utter bunk, because the foundational premise here, about Steele as the exclusionary impetus behind the FISA warrant, is undercut in the actual memo itself!!
We’ll get back to that. First off, the most important line in the memo isn’t anything that Devin Nunes wrote, but what the White House counsel wrote in its cover letter:
To be clear, the Memorandum reflects the judgements of its congressional authors.
Translation: If this isn’t received as the “biggest scandal since Watergate,” blame Congress, not the White House. If you’re distancing yourself from the contents of the memo before even releasing it, that’s a bad sign. And they knew it ahead of time!