Nothing in this new memo refutes that. First, there's the Democrat's allegation that, well, the FBI should have "speculated" that Steele's research was politically motivated since it was being funneled through Fusion GPS. Here's Byron York:
In any case, the fact remains that the Republican memo said the FISA application did not "disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele's efforts." And it did not.
Hillary was wise to stack layers of lawyers and intermediates between herself and Steele but that doesn't change the flow of money from the DNC to Perkins to Fusion GPS to Steele to his anonymous Russian sources, the mystery men upon which this fake dossier depended.
Second, there's the argument that the FISA warrant would not have been issued had it not been for the DNC-funded dossier. On this, the Democrats have amnesia about FBI deputy director Andy McCabe:
The Democratic memo ignored Republicans’ contention that former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe testified in December that the FISA warrant would never have been granted without the infamous dossier, which was commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). McCabe’s testimony was a key point in the Republican memo.
Democratic California Rep. Eric Swalwell claimed earlier this month that Republicans had mischaracterized McCabe’s testimony. However, Democrats declined to directly refute that claim in their own memo.
Must have slipped their minds.
8 comments:
#ResuscitateTheMemo!
Lawfareblog:
While the “Demo,” as we’ll call it for short, certainly contains its share of political rhetoric, the facts it alleges are worth serious consideration. If they are true even in substantial measure, let alone in all of their particulars, they rather lay waste to the original Nunes document.
...The [Democratic memo] is devastating because the core claim of ranking Democrat Adam Schiff and his colleagues is that the House intelligence committee majority left out key facts from its analysis in such fashion as to effectively lie about the FBI’s FISA application against former Trump adviser Carter Page in the fall of 2016. The supposedly left-out facts constitute the body of the Demo. And if the Democrats are being even generally accurate as to the material that the majority omitted from the original memo, then there is little left of the original document.
...The first important—and, we should add, hilarious—aspect of the Demo is its claim that the guy who brought us the “unmasking scandal” [Nunes] is now upset, at least in this instance, about the absence of unmasking. ...In the earlier controversy, Nunes fretted that Obama administration officials had allegedly sought the unmasking of U.S. persons whose identities had been “minimized”—masked by generic words like “U.S. Person #1” in intelligence reporting—for supposedly political reasons. Leave aside for the time being that there appears to be no evidence that anyone behaved inappropriately in whatever unmaskings took place during that episode. Here Nunes’s complaint appears to be exactly the opposite: that the FBI was not unmasking the identities of U.S. persons and entities in its interactions with the FISA court.
...Should we believe the Demo? There’s one very good reason to believe that it is, broadly speaking, factually accurate. That’s that the Republican members of the House intelligence committee aren’t contesting its factual claims.
...The Republican talking points seem to be what Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee famously termed a “non-denial denial.” ...[They] largely don’t contest the factual statements made in the Demo. That is a damning omission about a document that itself alleges a set of damning omissions.
https://lawfareblog.com/takeaways-house-intelligence-democrats-memo
I like the part where Lawfare wrote that Hillary's funding of the Steele dossier was "reasonably communicated" in that vague footnote where the FBI could speculate that "Source #1" was likely looking for politically-motivated dirt.
I haven't seen this many qualifiers since American Idol tryouts.
I haven't seen this many qualifiers since American Idol tryouts.
"They won't tell you, Devin, so it falls to me. Honestly, this memo was one of the single worst efforts we've ever seen. Ghastly, atrocious performance. Simply hopeless."
It seems that some Republican Dreamers are still trying to salvage something, anything, from the Nunes wreckage. Apparently these folks haven't, ahem, gotten the memo.
Yes this Democrat memo was devastating in the way it confirmed that the FISA court wasn't told about the DNC involvement and it was the main factor in obtaining a warrant.
The East German judge gave the memo a "10".
The Democratic memo was worse than devastating to Republicans. It was unnecessary. There was nothing to fend off; the Nunes memo was already a complete bust, legally and politically. And the investigation rolls on, without a hiccup.
It's over. Obstinate standpats want to pretend otherwise, but it's over. Someone who loves them should take them aside and tell them this about their memo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcZzlPGnKdU
Yes, I wonder how many more drunk Greeks they'll roll up in the investigation.
But it's good to know that it's totally cool for a political party to use the power of incumbency to spy on another political party. It'll come in handy in 2020.
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