RUTHFULLY YOURS

The memo from House Intelligence Committee Republicans outlining how the FBI and Department of Justice secured a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign official alleges the agencies scrubbed highly relevant political context when presenting it to the secret court as a basis for the warrant.

Anonymous sources previously claimed the agencies used the unverified dossier produced by Christopher Steele on behalf of Hillary Clinton as a basis for the warrant, and confirmation of that is deeply troubling. But the revelation that the FBI and DOJ deliberately withheld information about the dossier that would have undermined their case before the court — that it was opposition research paid for by the target’s rival campaign — is stunning.

Here are five things the FBI and DOJ never told the court when asking for multiple warrants, according to the memo.
1. The dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton and The Democratic National Committee.

Although the false claim that Republicans helped pay for the dossier is still circulating, the dossier was commissioned by Fusion GPS only after Republican funding ceased. The Clinton campaign and the DNC were the sole source of funds to the opposition research firm for the entire duration of Steele’s work on the dossier.

The FBI and DOJ knew this, but didn’t tell the FISA court that Trump’s rival campaign paid for the document they were submitting as a basis for spying on a member of Trump’s campaign. They didn’t mention the DNC, the Clinton campaign, or any political party in the first application for a warrant, or in any of the three applications to renew the warrant, according to the memo.
2. The FBI terminated Steele as a source for “what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations.”

Steele was terminated as a source to the FBI after he disclosed his relationship with the bureau to the press in October 2016. He should have been fired sooner for other unauthorized disclosures to the press, but he lied about them to the FBI, which delayed their discovery of this fact. Yet the FBI never disclosed to the FISA court any issues with Steele’s credibility, the memo says, even after they fired him because he broke their trust. Instead, the bureau used his history of credible reporting in the FISA application to firm up their argument for a warrant.

The FBI also had reason to believe Steele might be politically biased. They learned shortly after the election he told a senior DOJ official in September 2016 that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” The FBI noted this indication of Steele’s bias at the time and in following official files, but never disclosed it to the FISA court.
3. The dossier had not been independently verified.

The head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division assessed corroboration of the dossier as in its “infancy” when the first surveillance application was submitted to the FISA court in October. After Steele was fired for disclosing his relationship with the FBI to the press, an independent unit inside the FBI reviewed his reporting and assessed the document as “minimally corroborated.” FBI Director James Comey later referred to the dossier as “salacious and unverified” in testimony before Congress.
4. A news story purporting to corroborate the dossier actually came directly from the dossier.

The House Intelligence Committee memo is pretty simple. It should not have been classified and thus far withheld from the public. In fact, far more information now needs to be released.

Despite the outcry, as Chairman Devin Nunes clarified, the memo can easily be in the near future supported or refuted by adducing official documents. In other words, the memo makes a series of transparent statements and leaves it up to the criminal-justice system and the public to ascertain subsequent criminal liability.

It is likely that the basic accuracy of the document will not be questioned, but rather opponents, some of them mentioned in the memo, will either ask why the resulting embarrassing information needed to be aired or insist that there are only minor possible crimes in the events it narrates, or both. Remember, officials from the FBI supposedly read the memo before its release to ensure that there were not factual errors or misrepresentations.

In sum, on four occasions during and after the 2016 campaign, the FBI and DOJ approached a federal FISA court — established to allow monitoring of foreign nationals engaged in efforts to harm the U.S. or American citizens deliberately or inadvertently in their service — to surveil Carter Page, a sometime Trump adviser. These requests also mentioned George Papadopoulos, apparently as a preexisting target of an earlier investigation by FBI official Peter Strzok, but according to the memo mysteriously there was not adduced any direct connection between the two individuals’ activities.

The basis of the requests was an anti-Trump dossier that the FBI and DOJ had purchased from a private concern. At the time of their various requests, FBI director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, apparently knew that the document was the work of an opposition-research team, hired and paid, through a series of intermediaries, by the Clinton campaign. The same knowledge supposedly was known to DOJ officials Sally Yates, Dana Boente, and Rod Rosenstein, who variously joined the FISA requests.

The publication by the House Intelligence Committee, under the leadership of chairman Devin Nunes, of a four-page summary memo regarding FBI surveillance of a Trump campaign advisor in 2016 is the long-awaited opening act of an extended drama about the Obama administration’s abuse of power—which, when all is revealed, might yet outdo that of the Nixon administration.

Obama concealed his sharp-edged, Chicago-style machine politics under the rhetorical cover of progressivism. He was protected by a press corps that first enlisted in his administration and then fought to stop Donald Trump. But now that Obama is out of office, his ability to intimidate is much diminished. This past week, a 2005 picture of a beaming Obama next to a bright-eyed Louis Farrakhan surfaced, after having been held back for more than a decade at the behest of a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who had been tried for corruption by Obama’s Justice Department after he refused to toe the party line about the “peace-loving” mullahs of Iran, has now seen the charges against him dropped. Z Street, a hawkish nonprofit supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, had been tied up with IRS matters since 2009; it has just been released from its legal chains. Democrats are holding to the line that the prophet of hope and change ran a pure administration, virtually free of scandal. But the memo is probably just the beginning; we’re likely to see many more revelations come out.

Obama isn’t directly mentioned in the memo. But he’s nonetheless implicated through his appointees’ apparent efforts to clear Hillary Clinton in her State Department email scandal while undermining her opponent, Trump, through the veneer of legality provided by FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Security Act) warrants, justified solely by the so-called Steele Dossier. The dossier was paid for by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee; it was created by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who despised Trump, and the “research” firm Fusion GPS. The FISA Court, supervised by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, was never told about the unverified dossier’s origins.

As for matters of Russian collusion: Fusion GPS was tied to Vladimir Putin’s associates in the Kremlin, who wanted to undermine the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that sanctions Russian officials believed to be connected with the murder of anti-Kremlin lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The “journalists” at CNN made much of Donald Trump Jr.’s 20-minute meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in 2016, while ignoring her meeting, before and after that one, with Fusion’s cofounder, former Wall Street Journal reporter Glen Simpson, who was working to overturn the Magnitsky Act. Simpson slimed Hermitage Capital’s Willian Browder, who had helped pass the Magnitsky legislation and authored the important book Red Notice.

Now we know why the FBI tried so hard to block release of the House Intelligence Committee memo. And why Democrats and the media want to change the subject to Republican motivations. The four-page memo released Friday reports disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath.

The White House declassified the memo Friday, and you don’t have to be a civil libertarian to be shocked by the details. The memo confirms that the FBI and Justice Department on Oct. 21, 2016 obtained a FISA order to surveil Carter Page, an American citizen who was a relatively minor volunteer adviser to the Trump presidential campaign.

The memo says an “essential” part of the FISA application was the “dossier” assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele and the research firm Fusion GPS that was hired by a law firm attached to the Clinton campaign. The memo adds that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told the committee in December 2017 that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.

This is troubling enough, but the memo also discloses that the FBI failed to inform the FISA court that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier. The memo says the FBI supported its FISA application by “extensively” citing a September 2016 article in Yahoo News that contained allegations against Mr. Page. But the FBI failed to tell the court that Mr. Steele and Fusion were the main sources for that Yahoo article. In essence the FBI was citing Mr. Steele to corroborate Mr. Steele.

Unlike a normal court, FISA doesn’t have competing pleaders. The FBI and Justice appear ex parte as applicants, and thus the judges depend on candor from both. Yet the FBI never informed the court that Mr. Steele was in effect working for the Clinton campaign. The FBI retained Mr. Steele as a source, and in October 2016 he talked to Mother Jones magazine without authorization about the FBI investigation and his dossier alleging collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The FBI then fired Mr. Steele, but it never told the FISA judges about that either. Nor did it tell the court any of this as it sought three subsequent renewals of the order on Mr. Page.

We don’t know the political motives of the FBI and Justice officials, but the facts are damaging enough. The FBI in essence let itself and the FISA court be used to promote a major theme of the Clinton campaign. Mr. Steele and Fusion then leaked the fact of the investigation to friendly reporters to try to defeat Mr. Trump before the election. And afterward they continued to leak all this to the press to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s victory.

No matter its motives, the FBI became a tool of anti-Trump political actors. This is unacceptable in a democracy and ought to alarm anyone who wants the FBI to be a nonpartisan enforcer of the law.