The Nunes memo is now published
You can find a summary and the text of the memo at Legal Insurrection.
Since a great deal of its contents had already been revealed, there aren’t too many surprises there. Not surprising, but still shocking and disturbing, although we’ve become used to that sort of thing.
THe investigation of Carter Page was triggered by the FISA court’s approval, which in turn rested on the Steele dossier, which in turn was opposition research paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign. What’s more, when the FBI applied to the FISA court on the basis of that dossier, they already knew that its provenance was campaign opp research and they didn’t reveal that rather salient fact to the FISA court.
Have we become so partisan that the vast majority of Democrats don’t care about this? Probably.
Have too many of us become inured to shady government actions, much like that frog that’s boiled slowly by degrees?
Would many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters think it’s okay because of course Trump colluded with the Russians as every intelligent and good person knows, so it doesn’t matter how the warrant was obtained?
There’s more in the memo:
The memo then goes into detail about Steele’s relationships within the DOJ even after his termination as a source. That man is then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who we have blogged about before due to the DOJ demoting him because of contacts at Fusion GPS. That contact was his wife and she worked at the firm during the election.
You can study the tone and tenor of the coverage here. The spin is much as one would expect. Examples of some headlines indicate that Nunes is a partisan hack, the process “tarnishes the House”, it’s a “Republican plot against the FBI”, Sean Hannity advised Trump on the memo (“because of course he has”).
[ADDENDUM: Ace points out the following: “The FBI and DOJ do not seem to have alerted the court to Steele’s firing or unreliability (or partisan bias) in any application, even after they themselves fired him.”]
TL;DR. Does the memo expose the names of the news organizations and reporters who were given the information by Steele and the FBI? Seems like that’s important too since they were acting as an arm of the government in this.
My question is, what is in here that the Democrats could possibly refute in a memo of Their Own?
That’s it??
Hillary is the one who colluded with the Russians. She paid Steele for oppo research and the Russians gave Steele a pack of lies. Steele then gives the FBI his dossier and the FBI and DOJ get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
Someone needs to go back and figure how much of this Russia stuff was leaked to the press before the election. I recall much chatter about Trump and Russia. Check the date of the BuzzFeed publication.
Hillary should have won the election and the Russia slander against Trump might have worked.
I’m sure Putin wanted Hillary to win as she never would have allowed oil drilling in ANWR, approve Keystone XL and reject the Paris deal.
The above is obvious.
To quote Sarah Hoyt – here’s my shocked face.
Neo – a side note do you ever hear from your former Pod mates? I miss Dr. Sanity at times!
can anyone explain to me why to liberals Hillary contacting Kremlin to dig up dirt on Trump is perfect fine while Don Jr meeting a Russian Lawyer to try to dig up dirt on Hillary is treason. I just don’t understand the verdicts the liberals have given to two different persons doing the exact same thing can be so different.
Probably, the Steele Dossier wasn’t essential.
Manju
But McCabe testified, under oath, that the DOJ would not have sought a warrant without Steele’s oppo research. It was essential.
Because the Russian Government sought to influence the election in order to hurt Clinton. Therefore, what exactly would the Clinton campaign be colluding with…an effort to hurt themselves?
s1c::
I’m intermittently in touch with Dr. Sanity.
I was going to suggest that you ask your friends.
But you already have an answer. Neither Hillary nor Lois Lerner are in prison and ….
Es ist klar?
No, the organisms of the left, don’t care. Your life belongs to them, the progressive collective, and they will have it or else. That is all that is important. It is to be advanced “By any means necessary” It’s a “war by other means” as far as the appetite-things are concerned. They colonize populations that believe in honor and truth because it is easier for them to make their way in a world where the principled naivete of their prey makes that prey vulnerable. But notions of honor and truth and impartiality are for them mere fictions of a kind developed for the benefit of a kind of society which they cannot, without subversive means, flourish in: A society developed and lived by the sort of person they are not.
Why pretend otherwise?
Manju:
Who told you Russian Government sought to influence the election in order to hurt Clinton, the media who has been proven to favor Clinton?
Cornhead…cite please.
The Trump Administration.
Manju must be a Russian Agent trying to frame Trump colluding with Russia so he can be removed and have Hillary who is the real Russian agent be placed back in the white house.
Yeah Dave. Probably the same person who can tell you why Ted Kennedy’s letter to Andopov was not a problem. The same person who could explain why David Bonior should not have gone to jail, or Joschka Fischer [in Germany] shoud not have been hunted down and executed.
No, nothing so dramatic. LOL More like a special type of troll fishing for a reaction.
The only piece of evidence that has ever been able to slightly link Trump to Russia is the Dossier, and the Dossier has been proven to be a document sponsored by the Clinton with the intention to frame Trump, and Manju is using that document as evidence to prove that Clinton didn’t collude with Russia because the Dossier the Clinton paid for said Russia hacked the election against Clinton in favor of Trump, This is the type of people who voted for Obama and Hillary, someone lack the most basic logical analysis ability.
It is as ridiculous as saying OJ Simpson was innocent because OJ Simpson’s lawyer said OJ was innocent, give me a break,
I keep thinking about Judge Rudolph Contreras (who sits on the DC Circuit Court as well as the FISA Court), who recused himself in the Flynn case back on 12/7/2017 (only after General Flynn made his plea deal). I’m wondering whether he was the same FISA Court Judge who approved the FISA warrant (and the several renewals of that warrant) on Carter Page. Does anyone know?
I ran a Google search, “Who is the FISA Court judge who issued the FISA warrants on Carter Page?” and got no helpful results (try it for yourself). The reason I ask is this: I’ve seen a lot of judges over the past 35+ years and have never yet known of (or even heard of) one who tolerates being lied to or misled. If the FISA Court was in fact lied to (either actively or by omission), why hasn’t someone been held in contempt? What’s actually going on at the FISA Court? What facts or circumstances led to Judge Contreras’ decision to recuse himself in the Flynn case? I guess we’ll never know, but damn, this whole thing is giving off a bad Star Chamber-y odor, no?
@Cornhead
“Hillary is the one who colluded with the Russians.”
Respectfully disagree. Clinton, Fusion GPS, and our FBI and DoJ colluded with the BRiTISH. The only foreign interference we have proof of is by the BRITISH.
It’s also hard to believe that British Intelligence didn’t know what Steele, as former head of the UK’s Russia House, was up to. (Don’t forget about the very abrupt retirement of the head of GHCQ….)
Irene
Steele got the dope from Russian sources. It was all a set up by the Russians to get Hillary into the WH. Think oil and natgas.
Cornhead,
I fail to see how Russian sources by themselves would have been able to pass on their disinformation to our FBI and DoJ without the “laundering” done by the former head of Russia House.
Steele is the one that gave any of this credibility.
Irene
The Russians knew Steele. They knew he hated Trump. They used him like a tool.
Hillary expected the press to publish the Steele lies in the heat of the campaign. A bookend to the Billy Bush tape.
The biggest dirty trick of all time.
Again, Vlad wanted Hillary because she would have crippled our oil industry.
The memo point that caught my attention is where FISA petitioners sighted a YahooNews article written by Mike Isikoff as independent corroboration of the Steele dossier.
Except, the Isikoff source was leaked info from Steele. So I presume that if the info was leaked, then Steele was an anonymous source. And THIS is the type of trash that causes a FISA court to take action??
Imagine a scene in a conventional court: “Please judge, I wish to enter into evidence a claim from an anonymous source, written in a YahooNews article.”
Cornhead,
I’ve no doubt the Russians would have preferred Clinton for all the reasons, and more, that you mention. However, Clinton’s people, Fusion GPS, the FBI and DoJ never dealt with any Russians. They dealt with the former British spy who was the head of Russia House.
In some ways it’s a difference in POV. While you look at it from, “The Russians knew Steele,” I’m looking at it from, “Steele knew the Russians.”
It’s equally likely that if Steele had been head of British Intelligence in China, he would have used Chinese agents and Chinese disinformation in the dossier. So the necessary part of the dossier is Steele, not Russia. And China would have wanted Clinton to win as much as Russia.
So here is the overall story AFAIK:
1. The deep state apparatchiks in the DOJ: Lynch, Yates and Rosenstein, and in the FBI:Comey, McCabe, Ohr, Sroczk, etc use the fake “dossier” to get the FISA court to approve surveillance of former Trump advisor Carter Page.
2. This surveillance picks up information about other people in the Trump Campaign.
3. Susan Rice and others in Obama’s inner circle get this information about other US citizen Trump people “unmasked” i.e. names, details of wiretapped or otherwise acquired conversations and actions.
4. Rice and others pass the information onto Hillary’s campaign and/or leak it to Democrat media.
5. Rosenstein uses all the hub-bub about the Russians in the dossier to justify his appointment of his and Comey’s pal Robert Mueller as special prosecutor after fool/deep state tool Jeff Sessions recuses himself.
I am sure there are a lot more layers of deceit and conniving but this is really bad stuff.
Steele was a cutout. Hillary couldn’t use direct information from the Russians. Too obviously tainted.
Dave,
You asked me “Who told you Russian Government sought to influence the election in order to hurt Clinton” and I answered “the Trump Administration.”
That’s because you can find Trump’s handpicked directors of the CIA, FBI, and DOD saying that they agree with the conclusions of the Intelligence Community.
The Comey you trusted under oath said he believed Putin influenced the election to create chaos to destabilise America politics, whoever wins was not his concern. Trump was under heavy surveillance for three months by all the agencies you listed, they found nothing.
If trump had a secret communication channel to reach Putin, why did don jr need to meet that bogus Russian lawyer to try to obtain dirt on Hillary, why didn’t he just ask Putin directly
If manafort was assisting trump in colluding with Russia, why did trump fire him before the election was over, why wasn’t trump afraid that manafort would rat him out?
If Putin wanted trump to win because a trump victory benefits him, he would help trump win in secret anyway without contacting trump, there is no need for collusion, if Putin wants to voluntarily help trump, there is nothing trump could do to stop his help, just like if China wanted Hillary to win there Is nothing Hillary could do to stop China from helping her. Every country in the world was meddling with our election in someway to hopefully get the candidate they think would benefit them elected, Israel did it, China did it, Saudi did it, stop acting like Russia was the only country doing it.
Those agencies are so incompetent that they needed the help of some bogus James Bond wannabe contacting kgb just to find something to apply for a warrant to spy on trump, and you trusted their findings, how much of their conclusion was also based on intel from other trump hating bogus James Bond wannabes? How much intel from other more honest and competent agents saying Putin was favouring Hillary was omitted suppressed because the agencies were trying create a certain narrative? The trump hating couple was still there
For those of you who have not familiarized themselves with how the FISA court protects your constitutional and civil rights, you should read the FISA Wikipedia section “Judicial and public oversight” where there is a lengthy Guardian, Glen Greenwald quote.
The pithy bottom line is “that this entire process is a fig leaf, ‘oversight’ in name only.”
I forgot, FISA has granted 99.97% of warrant requests in its history, though 1.5% of those granted were “modified.”
Dave,
Just a couple of months ago, the CIA put out this statement concerning it’s Director, Mike Pompeo, who was handpicked by Donald Trump:
If you go to the underlying referenced document, you will see, among other similar points, this:
Highlight mine. If the notion that Putin preferred Trump was just a figment of Liberal Media bias and a discredited dossier, then it would be awfully stupid for the Trump administration to come out and back said notion.
Just how stupid do you think Mike Pompeo is?
Here’s an interesting timeline and summary of all the players going back to Benghazi. Many of the players caught up in the scandal were already involved back in 2012.
https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/nunesmemo.pdf
We don’t worry to much about Mike Pompeo’s smarts, and already have a already pretty accurate assessment of Manju’s chops.
Why there was no investigation when obama was obviously putin’s preferred candidate in 2008. Evidently Putin did everything he could to help obama defeat McCain. If wiki leaks is putin’s propaganda arm as the democrats like to claim now then you can’t deny that Putin’s meddling was a reason obama won as exposing republicans’ wrong doings during the war did swing the public support to the democrats side in 2008. The Russia reset was Obama’s way to return his favour.
Nothing in the report has hinted that Putin preferred trump based on any personal relationship or any secret agreement between the two, instead the report clearly stated that Putin’s strategy to destabilise America was to even up the chances between the two candidates as much as possible as a dead heat election is the best way to divide a country. You can’t quantify how much did putin’s help swung either ways because hillary did use trump being Putin’s puppet as a way to attack trump in the election, trump potentially being Putin puppet like the bush tape has already been factored in the result of the election, and trump still won despite all these negativities.
If all it takes to remove a legitimately elected president is to prove he/she was putin’s preferred candidate, it would make Putin meddling with our elections even easier next time. all Putin’s needs to do to assist his preferred candidate is to plant all kinds of evidences where they can easily found, leaving behind all the trace intentionally to misdirect the agencies into believing that he is favouring the other candidate. Even if his preferred candidate doesn’t get elected he would have given his preferred candidate enough ammunition to stage an impeachment to destabilise American politics.
Democrats think they can overturn the election just to prove that Putin preferred trump, things are not that easy, you can’t get rewarded for picking the worst candidate in the history, someone so bad that even an dinosaur clown reality show star with a tape saying the p word who potentially was Putin’s
Manchurian candidate can defeat her.
If Putin’s goal was to destabilise America, then democrats should call off the mueller investigation, as the investigation is the most destabilising factor in America, having the investigation lingering on gives Putin exactly what he wants, a destabilising america.
Paul in Boston Says:
February 2nd, 2018 at 9:47 pm
Here’s an interesting timeline and summary of all the players going back to Benghazi. Many of the players caught up in the scandal were already involved back in 2012.
https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/nunesmemo.pdf
* * *
Excellent document, highly recommended.
Very little in it we don’t already know, but laid out very well, with lots of documentation.
(This doc in particular is useful if you really want to get down in the weeds:_
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3039030/Hillary-Clinton-FBI-Investigation.pdf
One thing I have not seen before is this:
“In late 2016, an NSA compliance officer noticed the rapid growth of About query activity and investigated it, concluding that the program was being extensive abused, with many prohibited queries being routinely undertaken. Also, the review found that the FBI was allowing two outside contractors access to their database for the purpose of conducting unauthorized About queries on US citizens. The government notified the FISA court of this activity in October 2016 and NSA Director Mike Rogers moved quickly to terminate the program. The FISA court rebuked the NSA and ordered it to undertake more stringent measures to control access to query systems in the future. The court order redacts the names of the contractors, but it has been surmised that they were Crowdstrike and Fusion GPS.”
We may not ever find out if this is correct, but I hadn’t seen the idea floated before.
Documentation of that last comment is here (I don’t read conservativetreehouse regularly, only when someone cites it on a blog that I do read, but I mosey around while I’m there).
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/02/nellie-ohr-research-was-provided-to-fbi-for-fisa-application-source-material/
Three other interesting articles from the Treehouse connecting some more dots, and bringing some of them into greater focus:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/02/tip-of-the-iceberg-the-pending-intelligence-memo-is-the-beginning-not-the-end/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/02/inside-the-hpsci-memo-a-key-distinction-being-conflated-title-i-vs-title-vii/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/01/curiouser-and-curiouser-rick-gates-attorneys-withdraw-from-case-initiated-by-robert-mueller/
Dave,
I was only answering your question: “can anyone explain to me why to liberals Hillary contacting Kremlin to dig up dirt on Trump is perfect fine while Don Jr meeting a Russian Lawyer to try to dig up dirt on Hillary is treason.”
The former is “perfect fine” while the latter is “treason” because only the latter aligns with the Russian Govt’s attempt to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.
Your first response was to doubt the premise (that Putin favored Trump over Hillary) and that’s fine…since that’s the only logical recourse.
But now you appear to accept it. So I think we’re done here. I understand you want to argue about other things, but for now I’m glad you we’re in agreement.
Neo says:
…when the FBI applied to the FISA court on the basis of that dossier, they already knew that its provenance was campaign opp research and they didn’t reveal that rather salient fact to the FISA court.
They didn’t? Unless the application for the warrant and transcript of the hearing is released we won’t know how much information the FISA judge had. Did the judge ask questions or rubber stamp the warrant? We will probably never know any of this because releasing documents from secret court hearings to the public would undermine the need for such secrecy.
Putin’s purpose was not to influence whether Clinton or Trump was elected, his purpose was more sinister and achievable: to establish greater political polarization and chaos in the United States.
Mission accomplished.
“Putin’s purpose was not to influence whether Clinton or Trump was elected, his purpose was more sinister and achievable: to establish greater political polarization and chaos in the United States.”
Even as a secondary objective, that is quite a goal.
Manju:
Whatever you wrote was bullsh*t
when two actions are equivalent in nature, seeking dirt on an political opponent, the seriousness of the actions does not differ just because the actions out of the control of the performers happen to unintentionally benefit an outside party that just happened to be an adversary of America.
I do not agree with the assessment of agencies, because the origins of the whole investigation has been corrupted. The conclusion came without having ever exterminated the DNC server. I was only playing the devil’s advocate with you that even everything on the reports were true and Putin was favoring trump, it doesn’t constitute collusion because a collusion requires an agreement to collaborate between the two parties, that is why it is called COLLUSION. proofs that Putin helped trump means nothing unless you have proof that Putin had dirt on Trump, Trump knows that and intentionally do things to hurt america to prevent Putin from leaking those black mail material to the press or Trump had a verbal agreement that he would do anything for putin when elected in exchange of Putin hacking the DNC server for him, there is no collusion. Its like coming to the conclusion that Johnson colluded with Oswald to assassinate JFK’s murder just because he is the sole beneficiary of the assassination.
BTW, did Putin hacked Weiner’s brain to sexting with some teen girls with his son beside him that cause the whole email investigation to reopened?
why wasn’t Weiner charged with treason then, his action also aligned with Putin’s goal according to you and anyone perform any otherwise legal action that align with Putin’s goals is treason according to you. Should all Trump’s voters be charged with treason too because their actions also aligned with Putin’s goal according to you.
Manju:
I will simplify it a little further, If an action is perfectly legal, in this case opposition research, you can’t just make it illegal just because it happens to benefit an adversary assisted someone in a crime. You can’t charge a gun shop owner for legally selling a gun to a mass murder just because his legally sold guns were used to kill people, doesn’t matter what his actions lead to as far as everything he did was legal. Hillary also committed treason according to your standards, her actions of creating a dossier also benefit Putin to destabilize America. Manju, just stop your nonsense, your slippery slope justice makes no sense, butterfly effect is not an argument in court.
Manju
Besides, the lawyer don jr met, has no tie with Putin, she was a gps agent assisting Hillary in creating the dossier and getting the warrant, and obama granted her the visa to enter america to try to setup don jr., another false flag proving nothing but the Russian collusion was a setup manufactured by the treacherous democrats obama and Hillary to frame trump.
Don jr was so guilty he kept all his emails and logged all his communication with the lawyer. According to liberals people who destroy emails are those with nothing to hide and innocent while those who disclose all their emails are guilty and liars, let that sink in.
Bet you Manju must be a supporter of the war too since this person trusts the intelligence so much that they were never wrong, I guess Manju also lives in a fantasy where saddam has mass weapons of destruction and Isis was a jv league team as well. Pompeo‘s assessment means nothing, just because he was hand picked by trump doesn’t make whatever report that could negatively impact trump that he approved is more credible. he is the head of department, he is not going to throw the whole apartment under the bus, since he knows trump is in a bind and can’t fire anyone without being heavily attacked by the media and his job is safe, like sessions, he chose to throw trump under the bus instead.
Totally agree Ed, but successfully pushing the election to one candidate is much, much more difficult.
My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Russian disinformation is meant to create turmoil, not about taking a ‘side.’
It does not take ‘collusion’ to see our societal rifts or how neatly they fit on the political spectrum and how to play us like a piano.
The problem, and our strength, is that we are open and free but obviously naive.
America’s very public conversations can be read by all, including Russians, who historically enjoy sowing discord as foreign policy– it’s probably their domestic policy too.
Not hard to essentially troll us– just throw crap in all directions in the hopes that it will stick. Heads they win, tails we lose.
Russian culture interprets smiling to mean you are an idiot, and Americans smile a lot. The cartoon ‘reset button’ mistranslated as ‘overcharged’ may have reinforced that interpretation.
Btw, I stand firmly in the broad grin with dimples category, despite this being a major source of disagreement with my Eastern European born mother.
You can interpret it this way. Putin thought Hillary was 100% going to win so he launched a reputation assassinating campaign against her before the end of the election because a delegitimised and weaken hillary admin could be easier to manipulate in the future. amid the chaos during an election is the best time to launch such an attack, he can stay behind the scene, blame all the attacks on trump and remains her friend once she is sworn in. Trump winning is the bi product of the attacks and helping trump win was never putin’s intention because it probably never crossed Putin’s mind that such outcome was ever possible, especially after the release of the bush tape.
That’s how I see it too. A hyper-partisanly polarized and fractured US citizenry works to Putin’s advantage. Were Hillary elected though I think he could have exploited the advantage better. Trump is not so easily manipulated – he’s not a member of the so-called elite political class, he’s not a lifelong politician, and he will likely go happily back to his private sector life when he’s done being POTUS.
TommyJay Says:
February 2nd, 2018 at 8:26 pm
I forgot, FISA has granted 99.97% of warrant requests in its history, though 1.5% of those granted were “modified.”
* * *
Having read through the Wiki article, it seems to be saying that FISA court applications come in as drafts that are modified until all of the court’s objections are met, so that saying the vast majority were granted is akin to saying that the vast majority of buildings pass inspection, because any deficiencies are fixed so as to get the final approval.
So, in that light, if something keeps getting fixed and is STILL turned down by FISC, that is a big deal.
AesopFan: Great point.
How can Saddam have WMDs when the State Department, Tony Blair, and various generals made sure he had time to ship them to Syria. In fact, how can Saddam have anything when he has his successor Hussein Obola in charge of the US while Saddam is dead. Can a dead person have WMDs? Interesting.
If what manju wrote is BS, then playing with BS is not clean.
To learn how Russian KGB operate, look up Yuri Bezmenov’s videos on youtube and other sites.