RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Schiff memo, principally authored by Democratic staff on the House Intelligence Committee under the direction of ranking member Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), is the response to the Nunes memo, which was composed by the committee’s Republican staff under the direction of Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.). Substantively, the Schiff memo is unlikely to do Democrats much good, since the Nunes memo’s principal allegations have been corroborated — namely: The Obama administration (a) used the unverified Steele dossier to get a FISA warrant on former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page and (b) did not tell the FISA court that the dossier was a Clinton-campaign product.

Democrats nevertheless appear to have laid a trap to try to goad Republicans into objecting to their memo. The trick would enable Congressman Schiff to claim Republicans are hiding critical facts. Committee Republicans were shrewd enough to avoid the trap, but the Trump White House has been taken in.

This is an easy one: The president should release the memo with his own redactions. It would then be up to Schiff to make the next move: Either prove Republicans are concealing facts that damage the president or expose himself as a charlatan.

In my column over the weekend, I explained that the Nunes memo’s account had been verified by the Grassley-Graham memo. The latter is the document that accompanied the criminal referral by which two senior Senate Judiciary Committee members, Chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), recommended that dossier author Michael Steele be investigated for making false statements to the FBI.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes next plans to investigate the role former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump — including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it.

In his May 2017 testimony before the intelligence panel, Brennan emphatically denied the dossier factored into the intelligence community’s publicly released conclusion last year that Russia meddled in the 2016 election “to help Trump’s chances of victory.”

Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document (excerpt here), even though senior national security and counterintelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Last week, Nunes (R-Calif.) released a declassified memo exposing surveillance “abuses” by the Obama DOJ and FBI in their investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. It said the agencies relied heavily on the uncorroborated dossier to take out a warrant to secretly surveil a Trump adviser in the heat of the 2016 presidential election, even though they were aware the underlying “intelligence” supporting the wiretap order was political opposition research funded by Clinton allies — a material fact they concealed from FISA court judges in four separate applications.
Rep. Devin Nunes.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File

Nunes plans to soon release a separate report detailing the Obama State Department’s role in creating and disseminating the dossier — which has emerged as the foundation of the Obama administration’s Russia “collusion” investigation. Among other things, the report will identify Obama-appointed diplomats who worked with partisan operatives close to Hillary Clinton to help ex-British spy Christopher Steele compile the dossier, sources say.

Vanessa Trump, wife of Donald Trump, Jr. was taken to the hospital earlier today after opening an envelope filled with a suspicious powder, according to ABC News. She was examined at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center as a precaution, where she was tested and released. She and two others were also decontaminated at her apartment before being taken to the hospital.

The envelope was sent from Boston and addressed to Mrs. Trump’s husband, Donald Trump Jr. It included what sources describe as a threatening letter describing Trump Jr. as a terrible person and indicating that the sender was angry.

NYPD spokesman J. Peter Donald said:

“The substance was deemed to be nonhazardous and is being transported to a lab in New York City for further analysis.”

More specifically, the substance was identified as cornstarch.

The Secret Service also weighed in:

“The Secret Service and our law enforcement partners in New York City are investigating a suspicious package addressed to one of our protectees received today in New York, New York. This is an active investigation and we cannot comment any further.”

The Left, of course, found the targeting of Donald Trump, Jr.’s wife to be nothing more than a setup for jokes or even a right-wing conspiracy. Witness a few of the reactions on Twitter, courtesy of Paul Joseph Watson at InfoWars:

President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, said: “How disturbed must a person be to do what they did to a mother of five young children? This dangerous and reckless act goes beyond political differences.”

Before the Nunes memo was released, Democrats, the media and its intelligence sources insisted that it would undermine national security, reveal tradecraft secrets and even get agents killed.

Senator Cory Booker warned that it might be treasonously “endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community.” It was, but not in the way that he meant. The memo didn’t have anything resembling classified information it. Neither did the Grassley-Graham criminal referral which was heavily redacted to screen out all the “classified information.” What did the classified information consist of?

The Grassley-Graham criminal referral went through two FBI redactions. Julie Kelly at American Greatness compared the two versions to see what was hidden.

Most of the redactions in the first version, that were exposed in the second version, involved the problems with the FISA warrant application’s reliance on Christopher Steele. The references to the FISA warrant, which is classified, allowed figures in the FBI to redact it. But none of the references reveal anything damaging to our national security. They do raise serious questions about the FBI’s actions.

The FBI redacted the fact that the FISA warrant was thoroughly based on the Clinton-Steele dossier. Even if the FISA application is classified, Clinton opposition research isn’t. The FBI redacted the accusation that the FISA warrant had failed to state that Steele had been working for the Clinton campaign. That certainly isn’t classified information though it took a lot of work to expose.