"The New York Times is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to unseal secret documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page..."

Great!

Normally, even the existence of such material is a closely guarded secret.... But President Trump lowered the shield of secrecy surrounding such materials on Friday by declassifying the Republican memo about Mr. Page, after finding that the public interest in disclosing its contents outweighed any need to protect the information. Because Mr. Trump did so, the Times argues, there is no longer a justification “for the Page warrant orders and application materials to be withheld in their entirety,” and “disclosure would serve the public interest.”

This is basically what I was saying I wanted in "How to resolve the discrepancy of opinion over the Nunes memo" (February 3):

So, it seems, the question is whether it was significantly deceptive to give the FISA court enough information to make it possible for the court to infer that the information came from people who were biased against Trump but to withhold the known and specific information that it was paid for by the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign....

[E]xactly how was this general information phrased? The unnamed official in the WaPo article says there was "ample disclosure" — but how much disclosure was there?... I want to know exactly what the language was and how deceptive it may have been....

AND: Andrew McCarthy (at National Review) develops another angle: The question isn't so much whether Christopher Steele was trustworthy (given who paid him) but whether his sources were corroborated. It's not enough for the FBI and the Justice Department to trust the sources because Steele is trustworthy. Steele is another investigator, not the source of the information.

From everything we have heard thus far, the FBI did not corroborate Steele’s informants. Their inflammatory allegations about Trump are acknowledged to be “salacious and unverified.” According to the Nunes memo, FBI corroboration efforts were only in their “infancy” at the time the first warrant was sought, and they never yielded anything but “minimal” verification (which may be a charitable way of putting it)....

To justify a finding of probable cause, the government must satisfy the court as to the credibility of the informant who, it is claimed, witnessed the factual transactions described in the warrant. There is no vicarious credibility: The informant’s reliability cannot be shored up by the impeccable credentials of the investigative agent. The agent is not the witness; the informant is.