On the surface, the memo doesn’t seem all that bad. But, when you search across the progressive outlets, including the NY Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBC, and so forth, (and blatant lies from MSNBC and blatant lies from CNN) and see the attempts to minimize the impact, you realize that it is worse than you think. Byron York explains it
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. Here are some key points:
* 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 four FISA surveillance applications were signed by, in various combinations, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente, and Rod Rosenstein.
* The FBI authorized payments to Steele for work on the dossier. The FBI terminated its agreement with Steele in late October when it learned, by reading an article in Mother Jones, that Steele was talking to the media.
* 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.
Essentially, the FBI and DOJ relied upon an un-sourced political hitjob document, then used a news media article about the memo to back the document. Michael Isikoff, who wrote that article, was shocked to learn that it was used to get that surveillance warrant.
Here it is. The FBI took an unverified political dossier and used it to get a secret warrant to spy on an American citizen and political opponents.
And they *didn't* tell the FISA judge that the DNC and Clinton campaign had paid for that dossier. https://t.co/qgOKd8lJd5
— Mark Meadows (@MarkMeadows) February 2, 2018
However, a lot of this is inside baseball, major league level, which allows for Leftist to spin the weaponization of the DOJ/FBI for political purposes.
(Politico) Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said on Friday that the House intelligence memo on alleged FBI malfeasance showed “clear and convincing evidence of treason” by law enforcement officials, despite lingering concerns in the intelligence community over its credibility. (snip)
“The full-throated adoption of this illegal misconduct and abuse of FISA by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein is not just criminal but constitutes treason,” Gosar wrote in a statement.
Gosar said he would urge Attorney General Jeff Sessions to seek “criminal prosecution against these traitors to our nation.” Treason under the Constitution is punishable by death.
Perhaps that’s too much, but, it was clearly a 4th Amendment violation, and is just one example of the political weaponization of what should be two neutral agencies, and just adds to the list of what Obama/Holder/Lynch did to turn the DOJ and FBI into political organizations acting on the behalf of the Democratic Party.
(Weekly Standard) Friday’s FISA memo may not be the last.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes says that the panel plans on releasing more memos in the future. His remarks came hours after the committee released a GOP-drafted document alleging politically-motivated surveillance abuses against the Trump team, amid objections from the FBI and Department of Justice.
“This completes just the FISA abuse portion of our investigation,†Nunes told Fox News’ Bret Baier, using an acronym for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “We are in the middle of what I call ‘Phase Two’ of our investigation, which involves other departments, specifically the State Department and some of the involvement that they had in this.â€
He does explain later that it would be done via normal methods, rather than in the unusual (but lawful) method of the FISA warrant memo. In fact, there should be lots of releases. We should get to see the Democrats one, when they’ve removed the sources and methods that it contained. We should see as much of the underlying documents that go to the Nunes memo. We should see a ton of documents on what government was doing. We are supposed to have transparency in government. There was too much secrecy during the Obama years. News outlets used to be all for transparency.
