February 24, 2018

"The House Intelligence Committee released a redacted Democratic memorandum on Saturday countering Republican claims that top F.B.I. and Justice Department officials had abused their powers in spying on a former Trump campaign aide."

The NYT reports.

Here's the whole memo.

Trump's tweets in response:

1. "The Democrat memo response on government surveillance abuses is a total political and legal BUST. Just confirms all of the terrible things that were done. SO ILLEGAL!"

2. "Dem Memo: FBI did not disclose who the clients were - the Clinton Campaign and the DNC. Wow!

3. “'Russians had no compromising information on Donald Trump' @FoxNews Of course not, because there is none, and never was. This whole Witch Hunt is an illegal disgrace...and Obama did nothing about Russia!"

4. "'Congressman Schiff omitted and distorted key facts' @FoxNews So, what else is new. He is a total phony!"

He's on the Judge Jeanine show right now, phoning it in. He's going from one topic to another, seemingly in full campaign mode.

63 comments:

Fabi said...

Who's on Judge Jeanine's show now -- Trump, Schiff, Nunes?

Michael The Magnificent said...

Haven't read the minority report yet, but have read the majority reply to the minority report. Will have to see what wasn't rebutted.

Luke Lea said...

My eyes are too tired to read it this late in the day. What does it say and not say?

Comanche Voter said...

"Here's the whole memo." Not--nothing showed up on link.

Ken B said...

BUST? That's a dog-whistle. Bust => marble => white.

Narayanan said...

BUST >>> sexi(e)st dog whistle

Ann Althouse said...

Link works for me.

Wince said...

As John Solomon pointed out on Pirro's show, Carter Page's previous cooperation with the FBI in a 2013 Russian prosecution raises questions about the good faith basis for the FISA warrant unanswered by the redacted Schiff memo.

DOJ Documents Show Carter Page Helped FBI Catch Russian Spies

So, if Carter Page was acting as a foreign intelligence agent for Russia as far back as 2013, as has been repeatedly implied by mainstream reports, why did FBI agents at the time not see him as such? Based on the information provided above, it seems perfectly plausible that Page thought he was developing a relationship with someone who was a legitimate business contact. If Page had illegally or unethically shared sensitive information with Podobnyy, why would Monaghan have omitted this given that such an action by Page would have strengthened the FBI’s case against Sporyshev and Podobnyy?

Another question raised by these documents concerns why Comey’s FBI would have considered Page to unquestionably be a Russian agent: If Page cooperated with the FBI in 2013 and provided them information that ultimately aided the DOJ’s successful prosecution of a third Russian spy who had worked with Sporyshev and Podobnyy (Evgeny Buryakov), why would Russian intelligence have trusted Page enough to hire him as an asset in a major intel operation directed against the U.S. government and one of its major political parties? Wouldn't Russian intelligence have put out a notice to avoid Page as an unreliable and potentially dangerous contact?

In order to answer these questions, the public needs to see more of the classified materials that first sparked the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. If there is concrete evidence that Page was in the employ of the Kremlin while he was an advisor to the Trump campaign in 2016, the American people deserve to know. If not, then that spells a great deal more trouble for anyone who authorized the FISA warrants against Page.

Ann Althouse said...

I haven’t read the memo but from what I read and heard about it, there’s nothing I didn’t already know form the Nunes memo.

I am thinking the only difference is the slant.

Clyde said...

Do not trust content from Shifty Schiff.

chickelit said...

And yet, Hillary Rodham Clinton remains the Dem's most likely choice as a candidate in 2020. The Clinton Machine and the Obama Macine need to duke it out the old-fashioned Chicago Way. Wisconsinites love to see FIB's FOAD.

Kathryn51 said...

I wasn't really looking forward to a 10 page Democrat screed against Republicans/Trump and I'm not even up for reading the counter (although I'm sure it is more professional and coherent than the Dem memo).

However, I've been bummed ever since I read Andy McCarthy's opinion earlier this morning - namely, that Mueller knows there was no collusion, he knows he has no case for obstruction but he's going to write a report that protects all of his DOJ and FBI pals. I've had the same sense of doom as well - GPS Fusion, Clinton cabal, FBI partisans, DOJ hacks abused their power to take down a duly elected President but since they weren't caught in bed with a dead woman or live boy, nothing will happen to them.

The final paragraph: Trump fans wedded irrevocably to the conceit that there was no way, no how their man would ever have colluded with Russia would be left cold by this. Others, like myself, who see “collusion with Russia” as primarily a political narrative that the Obama administration, Democrats, and the anti-Trump media settled on to rationalize Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss and to hamstring Trump’s administration, will be underwhelmed. But I’m betting Mueller figures most of the country would agree with him.

Bummer.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/robert-mueller-investigation-trump-collusion-case

bolivar di griz said...

How much cifidence do they have in the memo, the blacked out the name of Australian foreign minister, the officers came in contact with, the name of the case, the bureau liaison in Rome, that's just on perfunctory examination

bolivar di griz said...

Most everything that bison the record they blacked out, to make it look more ominous

Jon Ericson said...

Friend of a friend told me only 20 million know. | | \ \ \ | | / / / | |

Big Mike said...

But I’m betting Mueller figures most of the country would agree with him.

He should think carefully before making that bet. That is not the way to go if he wants his beloved FBI to survive.

bolivar di griz said...

Is on the record, carter page had nothing to with the rosneft deal, that involved members of Alfa capital like gherman khan, fatherin of young swan, the junior atty at skaddens London officer who wasn't connected to senior partners Greg Craig or Tim Sloan at all. Even though skaddens was a founding member of the magnitsky alliance.

bolivar di griz said...

Antimagnitsky alliance along with baker and hostedler who hired akhmetchin and veselnitskava (the Russian gal)

Jon Ericson said...

In before the shitposters!

Gk1 said...

I really don’t think the FBI wants to be in the shape the IRS is now after LoisLerners crew got done with it. The FBI can’t survive with only half of the country believing in its professionalism. I expect many more firings to come.

Mark said...

Mueller knows there was no collusion, he knows he has no case for obstruction but he's going to write a report that protects all of his DOJ and FBI pals

Well, once he's out of the way, Mueller is subject to being investigated himself for obstruction of justice and cover-up.

Jason said...

Releasing the doc today tells me the dems don't have much confidence in it, and also tells me they don't like the way the gun control debate is looking in their internals.

FIDO said...

Exactly what shape IS the IRS in? I haven't been watching. I have far less trust in them myself, but I figure Inga and Chuck will feel wonderful about their actions.

bagoh20 said...

Shithole politics

Sebastian said...

The fact that Mueller indicted Flynn, Gates, and Manafort for crumbs of peanuts tells us he had nothing, least of all integrity.

The real problem for the Dems was and remains that the narrative they spun to spy on Trump, cover Hill's loss, and undermine the new admin was that more evidence pointed to collusion by them than by Trump.

Mark said...

in the shape the IRS is

Do you mean a loss of confidence in the IRS by the American people? That people distrust and even despise the IRS? That IRS workers might be discouraged by all this?

Let me tell you -- the IRS doesn't care what people think. I remember sitting for an oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court where the IRS was a party. And the attitude of the attorney toward the justices was basically one of contempt, "Fuck you. We're the IRS bitches." And their attitude toward the rest of the country is GFY.

They are utterly and irredeemably corrupt in their authoritarianism.

bagoh20 said...

It's not even interesting anymore. The Housewives of New Jersey do essentially the same thing with better writing.

bagoh20 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bagoh20 said...

Why is the Democrat ranking member of the intelligence committee so dedicated to leaking intelligence? Is that part of the job?

langford peel said...

Who cares about this report?

We already know that the Deep State conspired with Obama using information provided by Hillary who got it from the Ripussians.

Carter Page is a Lee Harvey Oswald level patsy.

langford peel said...

Page was an FBI informant who was used as a cutout to justify surveillance of the Trump campaign, transititioning up to and including his ausumption of the Presidency. It is part of a slow motion coup engineered by the Deep State And the duopoly that controls the establishment of both parties.

Luckily as usual they are incompetent and failed to cover their tracks.

The report of the FBI Inspector general will be very interesting.

Mark said...

Page was an FBI informant

The question is whether he was also a plant.

Gk1 said...

Well I can think of a few things about the shape the IRS is in. It’s had its budget cut 3 years in a row. There were active efforts to impeach Koskinen the IRS Commissioner. Even under “new management” their budget requests are still turned down. They recently admitted they no longer want to be in the business of determining who is eligible for tax exempt status of political groups. So yeah, I would think the FBI would like to avoid the fall out when half the country is out for their blood.

eddie willers said...

In before the shitposters!

OK....that made me laugh.

Yancey Ward said...

I read the memo and Nunes' point by point reply. The Democrat memo really did nothing to contradict the main points of the Republican memo. They tried to paint a narrative that the first Page warrant really didn't depend on the Steele Memo because Page had long term contacts in Russia, so him coming up on the radar again made a FISA warrant a slam dunk with or without the Steele Dossier. However, the question you have to ask in that scenario is why was the warrant application filed just 3 weeks after the FBI got the Steele Dossier? I see nothing in the Democrat Memo that addresses this, and indeed nothing that contradicts the assertion that the bulk of the first application was off the Steele Dossier.

The other main attack of the memo is on the disclosure of the funding source- the Democrat Memo tries to assert that the court was given enough information to infer the Clinton Campaign funded it, but it does admit that the DoJ did not make this point explicit, though they knew this fact at the time. Nunes points out that the limited disclosure was in a footnote, and was very oblique in that it only discloses back to FusionGPS, and not even them by name, either.

Yancey Ward said...

Additionally, the Democrat Memo refers to the "intelligence gathered" by the Page warrants. However, this intelligence gathered and referred to has to come from additions to the 3 warrant renewals. It does look like the FBI tried to assert in the renewals that they had gotten confirmation that Page had met with the two Russians named in the Steele Dossier. What isn't clear is where this "confirmation" comes from- was it from Page surveillance, or did the FBI dig up another unnamed source with the same allegations. This is the most important point in the Democrat Memo, and Nunes addressed it stating that the original Steele Dossier allegation about those meetings in Russia is still unconfirmed. I took that to mean that the "confirmation" isn't from the surveillance on Page, but comes from another unidentified source. One immediately thinks of the Sid Blumenthal story and the "new, second dossier" that was revealed a few weeks back. I will take a stab here, given that Page is apparently in the clear as of today and that the warrants were allowed to lapse in September of last year and state bluntly that the new confirmation that the Schiff refers to is, in fact, this second dossier that is probably just a derivative of the Steele Dossier- either a descendant or, more likely, the sourced from the same people somewhere in the Clinton Campaign or in its periphery- in other words, it is no confirmation at all.

The rest of the points are mostly rebutting things the Nunes Memo never claimed. The only other thing I noted was this- the Democrats make the assertion that the Page warrants were never used to spy on the Trump Campaign using the point that Page was no longer associated with the Trump Campaign in October of 2016, but this overlooks (I am giving Schiff the benefit of the doubt here for just being ignorant rather than mendacious) the fact that with a warrant of the kind used on Page, the government could look backwards and forwards to people Page had contact with from the date of October of 2016. This means one of three things- either the FBI really didn't use FISA 702 searches on Trump Campaign members who showed up in Pages e-mails and phone logs, the FBI has lied to the committee about how the surveillance warrant on Page was used, or Schiff is lying. I ask you- you are the FBI and you have this warrant on Page, but requested based on the Steele Dossier which all but asserts Trump is a Russian agent- do you really not use the NSA queries to learn about the people in the Trump Campaign who had been in contact at any point with Carter Page? I find that so implausible as to be impossible. In any case, I don't see how the Democrats could have known this anyway- I have seen no reason to believe the FBI and DoJ have yet shared with the Intelligence Committee the results of the Page warrant, though I think the committee should subpoena all of it tomorrow.

My bottom line is this- we now have a fully supported argument for public disclosure of all the warrants and the material gathered and requested by the FBI/DoJ. This is going to be the next move by Nunes, and I think Schiff can't fight against it any longer.

Breezy said...

It’s striking how complex this whole story is.... Aside from hiding their fingerprints on this, the dems depth of deception likely guarantees people will not bother to make the hike required to understand all of the wrongdoing. Nunes should come up 2-3 clear summary statements that are used repeatedly.

David Begley said...

I’m reading my Russia spy novel. Obama could have ordered the CIA to run active measures on Russia as punishment. I’m sure Trump is.

David Begley said...

The FBI should have put spy dust on Page to track him and confirm his meetings with Russians.

David Begley said...

Expect the Dem shills on the Sunday shows to go crazy over Schiff’s shit.

David Begley said...

Byron York,

“Page's Moscow trip, of course, was widely known at the time; it was covered in the press as it happened. But the Sechin and Divyekin meetings, and the money-for-sanctions offer — truly explosive allegations, the kind that, if true, would certainly warrant surveillance — remain unconfirmed to this day.”

What?! The CIA didn’t bug that meeting? What the hell are we paining them for?

bolivar di griz said...




The other squirrel circus:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/exposing_the_deep_rot_in_the_deep_state.html

Matt Sablan said...

Wait... wait... wait.

Russia's "aggressive covert operation" involved... a few million dollars and tricking other people to support the candidates they already preferred... but louder?

I'm getting the feeling the more I read of this memo, the less impressed I'll be.

stevew said...

Yes you are. No I'm not. Yes you are. No I'm not. ad infinitum.

-sw

Matt Sablan said...

... why does the memo make it sound like Page was being recruited by Russians and not acting as an agent for the FBI, which is what he was doing?

Matt Sablan said...

... So, all that sound and fury, and the memo admits the main thrust of Nunes's memo: The court was never properly advised that Hillary Clinton was illegally paying through her lawyer for opposition research from a foreign agent, specifically in an attempt to give money to Russian spies to influence our election (bottom of page 5 to top of page 6)?

So... what was the point of the rest of the pages?

Matt Sablan said...

... Wow. Even with all the redacting, they still manage to let slip that Steele was being used as a U.S. intelligence source.

So... Hillary Clinton's campaign managed to corrupt a U.S. intelligence asset. Great.

Matt Sablan said...

Also, they never paid Steele for "dossier related information" just, you know, all the OTHER stuff he was doing for them at the time.

Matt Sablan said...

Wait -- it took Ohr weeks after the election to talk to the FBI about the investigation that had been going on since October... which was BEFORE the election, I'll note... so... Wow.

Why was he not immediately fired for potentially compromising an on-going National Security investigation?

Matt Sablan said...

Ah. Of course. Because McCabe says he doesn't know what Stzork and Page were talking about, he clearly doesn't.

Crack investigative work there. So, which Andy, who was a high-level person in the FBI, did they meet with to discuss it?

Matt Sablan said...

Also: I've seen "heavily redacted" memos. This... is not heavily redacted.

Bay Area Guy said...

The Democrats are so fucking sleazy. They've already targeted Trump with either indictment or impeachment. Mueller likely won't impeach (because there's no crime) but, as McCarthy notes, will give enough fodder to the House for potential impeachment.

So, all roads (what a surprise) lead back to politics - if the GOP keeps the House, then no impeachment; if they lose the House, then Yes impeachment.

As for the Senate, it takes 67 votes to remove, so likely Trump survives. But still - the damage to country prestige and collateral damage to who knows where will be depressing.

Matt Sablan said...

I want the Democrats to prove that Steele's dossier did not inform the Page warrant by indicting for perjury the people who said it did.

Matt Sablan said...

"The rest of the points are mostly rebutting things the Nunes Memo never claimed. The only other thing I noted was this- the Democrats make the assertion that the Page warrants were never used to spy on the Trump Campaign."

-- This is a stupid assumption to believe the Schiff memo means in good faith, since the entire point of the memo is to justify that it was imperative to know whether the Trump campaign was working with Russia. If that's what they wanted to know, then... of course they spied on Trump's campaign.

Rusty said...

The usual suspects will be along once they get their stories assigned to them.
This is getting slapstick.

Fredrick said...

I really liked footnote #28 showing how much Christopher Steele was paid - directly - by the governmnet. That's even better than the "In fact, the FBI would have been remiss in thier duty ...." so they warned both campaigns, right? Like they were when they ignored they warned the police in Broward County about a potential school shooter?

http://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2018/02/23/fbi-transcripts/assets/fbi-transcript.pdf

Matt Sablan said...

I do find it is also pretty great that the memo tries to say: "Masking citizens is perfectly legitimate thing!" all while studiously ignoring the fact that there were hundreds of unmasking requests sent by someone using a high ranking government official's credentials without that official knowing.

Isn't it strange how Schiff cares about unmasking in one case, but not in the other?

Murph said...

About the IRS -- it's getting some attention. How far/deep that will go re: any reform in its scope of rule/policy making remains to be seen.
A friend copied this WSJ article into an email for me -- incognito didn't work when I tried to find it online. Perhaps a subscriber can extract relevant paragraphs. Headline:

The Story Behind the IRS’s Exemption From Oversight

Murph said...

Drat, I forgot to add: that IRS article was from Feb. 22.

Michael K said...

we now have a fully supported argument for public disclosure of all the warrants and the material gathered and requested by the FBI/DoJ.

Yup.

Gk1 said...

I don't think the IRS got nearly the treatment it should have gotten post Lois Lerner but my point still stands that it represents an example other federal branches want to avoid. To this day there is a persistent taint that it's main mission has been poisoned by partisan politics.

Here is one from last year. http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-trump-budget-to-slash-irs-funding-1489665882-htmlstory.html

MacMacConnell said...

Only a moron would believe anything coming out of Adam Schiff's mouth. He's one of ex Nazi revenue officer George Soros' chief anal pores in Congress. Not only did Soros finance his original campaign for the office, it was all about family as Schiff is George Soros' son's ex brother-in-law.

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