California Congressman Devin Nunes’s now-infamous memo contains the details of how the Department of Justice secured a FISA warrant to surveil former Donald Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. Many feel the memo raises questions about bias inside the FBI and the legal and ethical use of a Trump opposition research dossier as justification for a FISA warrant. Others claim it’s irrelevant, a dud.

But when you wave away all the partisan smoke, what’s left is that the Nunes memo confirms that American intelligence services were involved in a presidential campaign and remained so in the aftermath. That’s the real takeaway from the political hysteria of the past week.

The FBI conducted an investigation, the first ever of a major-party candidate in the midst of a presidential contest, that exonerated Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing over her private email server, a government-endorsed “okay” for her expected victory. No real probe was ever conducted into the vast sums of money moving between foreign states and the Clinton Foundation, dead-ending those concerns to partisan media.

A month before the election, the Obama administration accused the Russian government of stealing emails from the Democratic National Committee. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said the leaked emails (which reflected poorly on Clinton) “are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” The FBI swung again and said well maybe there was something to see in Clinton’s emails, buried on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. The CIA and NSA, meanwhile, leaked like cheap diapers throughout the campaign. Trump owes money to Russia. Trump’s computers communicate with Russia. The Russians have sexy kompromat on Trump. That the newly elected president is literally a tool of Russian intelligence became a common stipulation in the national conversation (John McCain on the Nunes memo release: “We are doing Putin’s job for him.”)

Leave aside the question of what in all of the above is actually true. Maybe Clinton’s private email server exposed no secrets. Maybe Trump’s real estate ventures have dirty Russian money in them. It is doubtful any of us will ever know. What is important is each of those actions by the intelligence community affected the course of the election. They may not have always shifted votes in the intended way, and there theoretically may have been no intention per se, but the bare-naked fact is that unlike any previous presidential election, the intelligence community played an ongoing public role in deciding who ended up in the White House, and they’re now continuing that role to determine how long the elected president remains there.

Of course the intelligence community was deep in the Steele dossier, the focal point of the Nunes memo. Christopher Steele is a former British intelligence officer with a long history of close work with his American counterparts. He was first commissioned by a conservative website to develop dirt (“opposition research”) on candidate Trump. Funding swiftly shifted to Clinton surrogates, who saw the thing through to being leaked to the FBI. Steele’s product, the dossier, is a collection of second-hand gossip, dangling suggestions of entanglements between Trump and shadowy Russians, and, of course, the infamous pee tape. Nothing in the dossier has ever been confirmed. It might all be true, or none of it. We will likely never know.

The FBI nonetheless embraced the dossier and morphed it from opposition research into evidence. Per the Nunes memo, the Steele dossier and a “collaborating” article actually derived from the same information leaked by Steele to the author then became part the legal justification for a FISA surveillance warrant issued against Trump associate Carter Page. A product of unclear reliability, created and promoted via an opponent’s campaign and abetted by the Western intelligence community, justified the demand to spy on Page.

Much will be made of how influential, or not, the Steele dossier was in obtaining the original FISA warrant, and whether or not its use was legal at all. The Nunes memo states that recently “retired” FBI number two Andrew McCabe allegedly confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought without the Steele dossier, though he now denies saying that during still-classified and still-unreleased testimony. Senior DOJ officials knew the dossier’s politics, but left that information off their FISA application. Does any of that matter?

We will never know. The Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) court works in secret. The standards are secret; the results and decisions are secret. None of us knows what matters to a FISA judge in rendering a decision to spy on an American campaign associate. Someone could release the so-called “underlying documents” (they’re typically dozens of pages long) that the DOJ used for the FISA application, but without knowledge of FISA standards, those documents won’t be much help. Yet the apparatus of spying in America, including the FISA court, is widely supported and the authority to spy was just extended with backing from both parties.

If you want to assert that the FISA warrant on Page was apolitical, issued only to collect on his possible role as a Russian agent, and that no strategy, financial, or campaign information was collected, or that if it was it was simply discarded, well, that’s a beneficent view of human nature, never mind a bizarrely generous level of trust in government. Yet even if the intent was righteous and the people involved lawful, the information is stored. Which person or agency has control of it today is not necessarily who will control it in the future—information is forever.

Remember, too, the Nunes memo addresses only one FISA warrant on one person from October 2016; investigations into Trump, et al, had been ongoing well before that. We do not know, for example, what information formed the basis of the July 2016 probe into Trump staffer George Papadopoulos that the Nunes memo mentions—it may have been passed from the Australians via U.S. intelligence. Michael Flynn’s conversations with Russian persons were “inadvertently” monitored and later unmasked (and leaked) by Obama administration officials. Jeff Sessions’ conversations with the Russian ambassador were collected and leaked. The Nunes memo tells us then-associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr unofficially funneled additional material from Steele into the DOJ; Ohr’s wife worked for the company that first commissioned the dossier.

If you’re fine with the U.S. government using paid-for opposition research to justify spying on persons connected to presidential campaign staff, then nothing I can say will help you understand how worrisome this disclosure is. Except maybe this: switch the candidate’s name you hate with the one you like. That means President Trump surveilling staff from the Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign after a dossier commissioned by the Republican Party links them to China. You’d trust Trump, and every future president, with that, right?

The involvement of the intelligence community in the 2016 presidential campaign, clumsy and disorganized as it appears to have been, will be part of the next election, and the ones after that. If you’re in search of a constitutional crisis, here it is. After all, when we let George W. Bush create, and Barack Obama greatly expand, the surveillance state, didn’t we think it would eventually come to this?

theamericanconservative.com

However, the Nunes Memo isn’t alleging “that the Russia probe began corruptly.” It is instead arguing that when the FBI’s follow-on investigation reached the point where they would need permission from the FISA (or “FISC”) court in order to obtain evidence that might possibly implicate US President Trump in impeachable offenses, the FBI resorted to an ilegal tactic to win the court’s okay: hiding crucial material information from the FISA court. That’s the case the Nunes Memo is actually summarizing.

The FBI began its investigation into the Steele dossier after it had already begun its investigation — based upon then-credible grounds to investigate — regarding George Papadopoulos (a supporter of Trump and aspirant for a position in his Administration if Trump would win). 

There is no question that the initial FBI investigation began in July 2016 and had nothing to do with the Steele dossier; this is acknowledged even by National Review, a Republican publication that seeks Trump’s impeachment and replacement by Mike Pence. NR notes that, “The investigation isn’t the fruit of the poisonous dossier (though the dossier did play a role); it existed before the dossier.” But the Nunes Memo doesn’t deny this, either.

However, unlike the Washington Post, even NR had the journalistic integrity to make clear that “if the evidence upon which the investigation was opened is sound, then the investigation is appropriate.” The Washington Post, obviously, did not. The Post simply started with the false assumption that the Nunes Memo argues “that the Russia probe began corruptly.” 

Then, NR says, “Ironically enough, the memo in fact confirms the necessity of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller,” and NR then ignores the legal conditions under which a Special Counsel may be appointed to remove a given investigation from the domain of the US Justice Department. These legal reuirements are extremely vague, but they do include "•(b) That under the circumstances, it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.” President Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions yielded to political pressures — both from Democrats and from far-right Republicans (reminiscent of the close bonds that existed in the 1950s between the far-right Republican Joe McCarthy and his strong Democratic supporters Henry ’Scoop’ Jackson and Bobby Kennedy) — to start that anti-Russia and anti-Trump process; and there would likely have been considerable flak from those same political quarters if Sessions had not yielded to them on this matter, but there was no requirement for Sessions to do so. If he had not done so, then their attempt to replace Trump by Pence would have proceeded more slowly. The Nunes Memo alleges that even the possibility of the appointment of a Special Counsel wouldn’t have existed if the FISA court had not (unknowingly) allowed US national-security and intelligence-gathering laws to be broken. 

On 21 October 2016, the Obama Justice Department and its FBI sought from the FISA court a probable-cause to get its approval to obtaining all information that the Obama Administration (including its CIA, NSA, etc.) had acquired regarding contacts between Russia on the one hand and Trump and his team on the other — the court’s permission for the sitting President to gather this information against the man who was then running against that sitting President’s chosen heir-apparent. It was at this time that the Steele dossier became ‘evidence’ for the court — and the court was blocked from seeing the evidence that should have excluded the court from accepting Steele’s document as being evidence in this matter. After all, if even the Steele dossier’s author admitted publicly that his document was somewhere between 10% and 30% false, then to accept it as constituting ‘evidence’, is to accept what even the document’s author admits contains that much falsehood; and, to impeach a President on grounds like that would be an atrocity.

This is what the Nunes Memo is actually about. It’s about legal and illegal process.

Then, the Washington Post says, “Second, the memo indicates that the Justice Department sought its warrant against Mr. Page in October 2016 — after Mr. Page had left the Trump campaign. So the president’s campaign was not the intended target.” That’s a non-sequitor; the possibility exists that both “Mr. Page had left the Trump campaign” and “the president’s campaign was … the intended target.” In order to explore whether or not that was actually so would require the type of investigation that the Nunes Memo purports to be summarizing.

The Post’s third argument is that the FISA court wouldn’t have renewed the approval three times if its initial grant of Obama’s spying against Trump hadn’t been legally and soundly based — including all the information that the Nunes Memo summarizes, and which had been hidden from that court.

The Post’s fourth and final argument (but followed by lots of subordinate and un-numbered points) is:

For the conspiracy narrative to hold any water, one would have to believe that officials appointed by a Republican president, including one confirmed by a Republican Senate, were part of a plot to bring down that same Republican president, and that they successfully hoodwinked FISA judges selected by the Republican-appointed chief justice of the United States. This hoodwinking would have continued after the nature of the dossier had been widely publicized and Mr. Page’s Russian connections publicly scrutinized. This is beyond improbable.

“Beyond Improbable” though the people who hire and fire at the Washington Post are obviously claiming it to be, the Nunes Memo cites and alleges powerful evidence that much of that did, in fact, happen. The Memo's allegations and evidence will be seriously considered by all of America’s journalistic institutions, even if (as at the Washington Post) ignored by a great many of America's propaganda institutions (the ones that prefer a President Pence to President Trump, which include all Democratic Party outlets, and many Republican Party ones as well).

On February 3rd, the brilliant intelligence analyst W. Patrick Lang boldly attempted an analysis of what very possibly might explain all of this, though he presented it under the unfortunately obscure heading of "Habakkuk on ‘longtime’ sources:” and I consider it stunning.

In any case: anyone who believes ‘news’media only because they’re famous (and despite the considerable evidence that they’re not to be trusted) is going to be a happy gull of either Democratic Party billionaires or Republican Party billionaires; and a country with a majority like that won’t be any democracy at all.

To boil this all down: the Nunes Memo summarizes a case that the campaign to replace Trump by Pence has used tactics which are illegal in the United States, and which should be illegal in any democracy.

The best summary that I have seen of the Nunes Memo is this (which also happens to be from Pat Lang), which also links directly to the best online source for the document itself (so, if after seeing that summary, you wish to see the document that’s being summarized, both are right there).

An aspect of the Republican memo that has been scarcely commented upon in the avalanche of news reporting centered on the story is how the mainstream media is continuing to exercise a dangerous obsession with Russia and is insisting that the Russiagate inquiry should continue even more aggressively in spite of the concerns raised by the Republican memo that the entire process has been politicized. There is absolutely nothing in the memo itself that indicates that Moscow actually tried to recruit any Trump associate as an agent or interfere in the US election. The raison d’etre for both the Congressional and Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigations appears to be lacking. It might eventually emerge that Russia did little or even nothing beyond the usual probing and nosing around that intelligence agencies routinely do.

President Donald Trump, who ran for office on a sensible pledge to seek better relations with Moscow, has provided only feeble resistance to the media and political class onslaught. He has recently allowed the Justice Department and Treasury to punish Russia’s two major news outlets operating in the United States, RT America and Sputnik. They both have been forced to register as foreign agents, even though no other non-American news service operating in the United States has been compelled to do the same, while new allegations about perfidious Moscow surface weekly.

Two recent news reports illustrate perfectly just how out-of-control the Russia inquiry has become. At the end of January, the US Treasury Department released the names of 210 alleged Kremlin insiders, including government ministers, who were being included on a list for possible sanctions, though it was also announced that no sanctions would be put in place pending further ongoing review of the behavior of those individuals under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. The so-called “Kremlin List” was clearly designed to put pressure on the inner circle of the Russian government as many of those named have major business dealings with the United States and Western Europe that could be severely damaged through sanctions. The intention may have been to encourage those individuals to lessen their support for President Vladimir Putin in the upcoming Russian national elections, beginning on March 18th.

The Kremlin List is clearly an attempt to interfere in Russian internal politics and should be regarded as such. It comes on top of an obviously coordinated British government claim that Moscow intends to rip British “infrastructure apart, actually cause thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths,” and create “total chaos within the country.”

The second story, which is more bizarre than the first, describes how Congressman Adam Schiff told a University of Pennsylvania audience that Russian-promoted ads during the 2016 election encouraged people to exercise their Second Amendment rights to own guns. Per Schiff, “the Russians would be thrilled if we were doing nothing but killing each other very day, and sadly we are.”

Neither Congressman Adam Schiff’s meanderings nor the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act serve any conceivable United States national interest and the Nunes Memo demonstrates, if anything, that the evidence for Russian interference in the US election is somewhat elusive. If the alleged Russiagate conspiracy is never actually demonstrated, which looks increasingly likely, it would certainly disappoint the many American talking heads and media “experts” who have been making a living off of bashing Moscow 24/7, but it might also provide a window for the White House to fulfill its electoral promise to fix the Russia relationship.