"The Steele dossier was central to obtaining the Page warrant, and the leaks about the dossier fanned two years of media theories about Russian collusion..."

"... that was one reason Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel. Mr. Mueller owed the public an explanation of how much of the dossier could be confirmed or repudiated. Instead he abdicated, and the mystery is why. Perhaps as a former FBI director, Mr. Mueller wanted to protect the bureau's reputation... A less generous explanation is that Mr. Mueller was more a figurehead as special counsel, and that the investigation was really run by his deputy Andrew Weissmann.... On the evidence in the Horowitz report, the special counsel team had to know the truth about the Steele dossier and false FBI claims to the FISA court, but they chose to look the other way."

From "Robert Mueller's Dossier Dodge," an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

And also in the Wall Street Journal from "FISA Court Owes Some Answers" by Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal:

Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer... blasted the FBI for misleading the court ...  The order depicts a court stunned to discover that the FBI failed in its "duty of candor," and angry it was duped. That's disingenuous. To buy it, you'd have to believe that not one of the court's 11 members -- all federal judges -- caught a whiff of this controversy until now. More importantly, you'd have to ignore that the court was directly informed of the FBI's abuses nearly two years ago....

[The court is] predictably pointing fingers at the FBI, but the court should itself account for its failure to provide more scrutiny, and its refusal to act when [Congressman Devin] Nunes first exposed the problem [in February 2018, when he was chair of the House Intelligence Committee]. The FBI is far from alone in this disgrace.

"John Kerry-Iran deal report sparks chatter about potential Logan Act violation."

Headline at The Washington Examiner.

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted in response to the Boston Globe report: "OMG! Logan Act violations!! Send in the G Men..."

Meanwhile, Tom Fitton, who heads the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, said "Kerry making quiet play to save Iran deal with foreign leaders: report. I'm waiting for the Left to scream treason and for Sally Yates to invoke the Logan Act and demand a criminal investigation."

He was referring to former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who was concerned that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn had violated the Logan Act during the presidential transition period after he discussed policy issues with a Russian envoy....

"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.

How to resolve the discrepancy of opinion over the Nunes memo.

I'm reading "Justice Dept. told court of source’s political influence in request to wiretap ex-Trump campaign aide, officials say" by Ellen Nakashima in The Washington Post:

The court that approved surveillance of a former campaign adviser to President Trump was aware that some of the information underpinning the warrant request was paid for by a political entity, although the application did not specifically name the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter....

The Justice Department made “ample disclosure of relevant, material facts” to the court that revealed “the research was being paid for by a political entity,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

“No thinking person who read any of these applications would come to any other conclusion but that” the work was being undertaken “at the behest of people with a partisan aim and that it was being done in opposition to Trump,” the official said....

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.

Can we say that very clearly and ask fair-minded people if withholding the specific information and including only general information was the the way the Justice Department should interact with the FISA court?

Secondly, exactly how was this general information phrased? The unnamed official in the WaPo article says there was "ample disclosure" — but how much disclosure was there? WaPo is reporting that the application "did not specifically name the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign," which is to say that the application did not name the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. It did something else that's supposedly just as good or almost as good or not good enough at all.

I want to know exactly what the language was and how deceptive it may have been, and I'd like to see the opinion of some named experts who have been expressing themselves over a long period of time about the role of the FISA court. I don't want Trump-specific opinions. I want to hear from experts whose opinion of working with FISA extends back into the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, listen to Glenn Greenwald calling on his fellow lefties to remember their conscience:



IN THE COMMENTS: exhelodrvr1 said:

So is it normal to not give the FISA court the entire picture? If so, that would mean that the FISA court is aware of that, which is really scary.

Great question, because if the argument is what was done is fine because it's normal, we need to talk about the problem with FISA normal.

And it's an old exercise, and I hate to trot out clichés, but imagine if the Bush Justice Department had used the FISA court to get a warrant to surveil people on Barack Obama's presidential campaign by using evidence that came from someone paid by the RNC and the John McCain campaign and the application for the warrant had omitted naming the RNC and the John McCain campaign.

"The House Intelligence Committee has released its controversial memo outlining alleged abuses of secret surveillance by the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation."

Says Byron York (Washington Examiner), summarizing it, without quoting any text or linking to any text.

ADDED: York asserts that the memo (which I haven't seen) says:

* The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page.

* Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.

* The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications.

* DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele's bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.

AND: Now, you can read it for yourself: Here.

ALSO: I'm reading the memo, which is, basically, a list of 5 omissions from what was submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). According to the memo, the court, in order to protect "the rights of Americans" needs to see "information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application" where the government knows this information, as it did for all 5 of these things:

1. The initial application (and the renewal applications) did not disclose the role of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign in paying $160,000 to Christopher Steel to compile "the dossier." Nor did it show that Steele was working for Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson, who was paid by the law firm that represented the DNC, or that "Steele was ultimately working on behalf of — and paid by — the DNC and Clinton campaign."

2. The application made a Yahoo News article (by Michael Isikoff) look like it corroborated the Steele dossier, when it just had material that came from Steele. The application "incorrectly" asserts that the Yahoo News material didn't come from Steele. Steele was later terminated as an FBI source for leaking to Mother Jones in October, but he should have been terminated for these leaks to Yahoo News back in September, which was before the first application to the FISC.

3. Before Steele was terminated as an FBI source, Steele told then-Associate Deputy General Bruce Ohr (who worked closely with Yates and Rosenstein) that he "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president." That's presumably a quote from Ohr, not Steele, given the "was" (as opposed to an "am"). At the time, Ohr's wife worked for Fusion GPS, doing oppo research on Trump, and this info was presented to the FISC without specifying its origin.

4. This point doesn't specify an additional omission. It talks about internal opinion at the FBI about the inadequacy of the Steele dossier.

5. The application refers to Papadopoulos, and the Papadopoulos investigation was opened in July 2016 by Pete Strzok, who had to be reassigned because of his "demonstrated clear bias against Trump."

MORE: Here's the response from the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. It calls the majority's memo "a shameful effort to discredit" the Department of Justice and the FBI and "a transparent effort to suppress the full truth," so what I'm looking for as I read this is something terribly important that's missing from the majority's memo.

"That the FBI has grave concerns should give one pause but should not be dispositive. The important thing is we want the Congress to be able to challenge executive branch determinations that things not be made public."

Said Morton Halperin, who — as the Washington director of the American Civil Liberties Union — helped draft Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). He's quoted in "Nunes memo centers on a 40-year-old law written to prevent surveillance abuses" (WaPo). The abuses of 40 years ago included the FBI's warrantless surveillance of American civil rights activists and Vietnam War protesters.

Halperin, who is no supporter of the House GOP, lauded the effort to use the provision, and said Congress should use it more often.

On Monday, the House panel voted along party lines to release the memo. In another vote, the Republican majority essentially blocked the public release of a Democratic memo that seeks to counter the GOP document.

Essentially blocked.... What does that mean?

I have trouble understanding why the Democrats have staked so much on resisting transparency. If I understand it correctly, the argument they offer us is: 1. There is a political motivation to release the formation, 2. The information might not be that accurate or complete, and 3. We should preserve and rely on the good reputation of the FBI.

There's the unstated argument — implicit in all 3 stated arguments — that Democrats have a political motivation to suppress the information.

As to stated argument #1: There's political motivation on both sides. The entire dispute is political. I don't see why this should make me lean toward getting less information. By the way, why hasn't this memo already leaked to the press? Or has it leaked to the press but the press only publishes leaked information that helps Democrats?

Stated argument #2 isn't a reason not to want to see the memo. If it is inaccurate or missing things, it will create pressure to correct and refine it. One thing is necessarily true: What's in the memo is what's in the memo. And that's a truth we need to look at and think and talk about. When X lies, we don't say, we don't need to know what X said, because it's a lie. We say I want to decide for myself how much of a liar X is. I want the truth about the lie.

Argument #3 is perverse. Trust the FBI? I remember the abuses of 40 years ago. If the FBI is trustworthy, the memo and the follow-on corrections and supplements to the memo will bolster our trust. If the FBI is not trustworthy, we should want to find out. Why isn't the Democratic Party on this side of the analysis as it was 40 years ago?

Whatever is in that "essentially blocked" Democratic Party memo, I assume it will come out in the discussion of the Nunes memo. Surely, the mainstream press will have that information and print it up for us.

"Why an Unreleased 4-Page Memo From Devin Nunes Is Causing a Frenzy on the Right."

New York Magazine:

[H]ere’s what we know up to this point about this latest madness: a) There is an undisclosed four-page memorandum, b) written by Nunes’s staff, c) which was made available in a party-line vote to anyone in the House, d) but remains unreleased to the public at large, e) and for which no one but Nunes and a handful of House Intelligence members and staffers have seen the evidence in support of it.

The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reported that the heart of the memo’s grievances is a secret warrant federal authorities obtained to monitor the activities of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the lead-up to the 2016 election. According to Nunes’s memo, the FBI, in seeking the warrant, all but misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by withholding that the supporting evidence for the warrant came from Republicans’ favorite whipping boy, Steele — the former British spy contracted by research firm Fusion GPS (which in turn was contracted by the Democratic Party) to investigate Trump’s dalliances with Russia. According to Savage’s reporting, those who sought the warrant didn’t disclose that Steele was getting paid by Democratic interests, but merely referred to him in court documents as a trusted FBI source who had already done good work for the bureau in an earlier case....