House Intelligence Democrats Dispute Republican Report

Among other witnesses, Appendix B includes:

formal and informal campaign foreign policy advisors who have yet to appear before or produce documents to the Committee, including

  • Reince Priebus,
  • Stephen Miller,
  • KT McFarland,
  • Sean Spicer,
  • Keith Kellogg,
  • Joseph E. Schmitz, and
  • Tera Dahl;

individuals with knowledge about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian emissaries, the stated purpose of which was to provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton, including Natalia Veselnitskaya, who offered to cooperate, and Roman Beniaminov, a witness with relevant information who resides in the United States;

.. Appendix C identifies more than 20 entities from which the Committee has yet to request documents, including Deutsche Bank, the Estate of Peter Smith (and associated entities), the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA, and social media companies.

.. Appendix D outlines more than 15 persons and entities for which the Committee believes compulsory process for appearance and/or document production to the Committee is necessary. Included are witnesses who have refused to appear; who have invoked a nonexistent privilege to avoid pertinent testimony or who have simply refused to answer questions because the answers may be adverse to the interests of the President or his campaign; who have not produced any documentation; or whose production was insufficient and for whom we have a reasonable basis to believe that they possess documents responsive to the Committee’s investigation. This list includes, among others:

  • Donald Trump Jr.,
  • Michael Cohen,
  • Jared Kushner,
  • Hope Hicks,
  • Attorney General Sessions,
  • Erik Prince,

and the White House. The Committee must also initiate a contempt process to compel Stephen Bannon to testify to the Committee fully and without constraints.

In consideration of the Special Counsel’s ongoing investigative equities, the Committee also has deferred interviewing

  • Michael Flynn,
  • Paul Manafort,
  • Rick Gates, and
  • George Papadopoulos,

but these interviews will be essential to a complete understanding of the issues of collusion and obstruction of justice. To conduct a legitimate investigation, the Committee would need to interview these individuals, whether or not they have reached plea agreements or are the subject of criminal indictments.

For example, Mr. Flynn specifically informed the Committee via his attorney on June 7, 2017 that he planned to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self incrimination; the Committee did not demand his appearance, as a result. In light of Mr. Flynn’s guilty plea, the Committee should revisit his appearance and seek to negotiate his testimony. The Committee also ought to interview other individuals who may be of investig

The Memo Doesn’t Make Its Case 

The truth requires greater transparency

.. That experience teaches me that the memo simply doesn’t make its case. Indeed, it gets less persuasive — and the material omissions more glaring — with each successive read. It might disclose the existence of troubling FBI misconduct, but the fair-minded reader has no way of knowing whether it does.

.. A good summary always supports assertions with evidence. A good summary provides context. A good summary even includes relevant information that contradicts its thesis so that the reader can evaluate the best counter-arguments. 

.. legal arguments typically depend on lawyers taking thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of pages of depositions and documents, crafting a concise narrative, and communicating that narrative to a judge — with citations referring to the relevant evidence and quotations of it as well.

.. If there is no citation or quotation, a judge will typically ask the lawyer, “Counselor, what record evidence supports that assertion?”

.. One of the first and most vital assertions in the entire memo is the claim that “the ‘dossier’ compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application.” This statement is initially offered without proof. One has to read down to the next page to see any reference to evidence:

Furthermore, Deputy Director [Andrew] McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.

.. When I read this, I had two immediate thoughts. First, what did he actually say? And second, why the subtle change in language from the argument that the “dossier” was an “essential part” of the FISA application to the statement that the warrant wouldn’t have been sought without the dossier “information”? The “dossier” and the “information” are not the same thing.

.. An effective memo would do more to end the debate. How? By quoting the relevant portions of McCabe’s testimony.

Better yet, it could quote the testimony and attach an appropriately redacted copy of the testimony as an appendix.

.. Even the characterization that the dossier was “essential” is a judgment call based on evidence unavailable to the public. Even worse, it was a judgment call based in part on evidence unavailable even to the rest of the committee.

.. memo should have plainly stated the agreement between the DOJ and the committee, along with the reasons for this agreement.

.. good summaries don’t just support conclusions with evidence, they provide vital and necessary context. On this point, the memo fails utterly.

.. it fails to answer the following questions:

  1. How did the FISA application actually describe Steele?

    .. Democrats are arguing that the political nature of his work was appropriately disclosed.  Don’t we need the actual words used to properly evaluate whether the FBI materially misled the court?

  2. In addition to the information from the Steele dossier, what other information did the FISA application include?
  3. To what extent did the multiple renewal applications depend on the information in the dossier? The memo notes that a FISA order must be renewed every 90 days, and each renewal must be supported by an “independent” probable-cause finding. A Trump appointee, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, signed at least one of these FISA applications. He apparently believed that the request was supported by probable cause. Why?
  4.  What is the “information” regarding Papadopoulos that triggered the opening of the investigation in July 2016 — a full three months before the Page FISA application? The memo provides information obviously designed to impair the credibility of that investigation — by referring to FBI agent Peter Strzok’s well-known political leanings — but it provides no information about any facts supporting the opening of the probe, leaving the reader with the impression that it was opened solely because Strzok dislikes Trump.

I also wrote above that a good summary “even includes relevant information that contradicts its thesis.” The memo omits any such information, but a Democratic rebuttal exists.

.. But even if the public reviews the Democratic rebuttal, the process is still flawed. The proper way to resolve explosive claims of political bias at the highest levels of government isn’t by dribbling out short memoranda but by issuing comprehensively researched and comprehensively supported majority and minority committee reports.

..it’s not by itself scandalous to review political opposition research — a politically motivated person is no more suspect than the terrorists and criminals who routinely provide information used to support even the most intrusive warrants.

.. When I was in Iraq, we were constantly aware that our sources had their own axes to grind. They didn’t want to defeat their opponents in an election. They wanted them to die in a hail of gunfire.

.. Biased sources are an inherent part of intelligence-gathering.

 

y Justice Dept. told court of source’s political influence in request to wiretap ex-Trump campaign aide, officials say

A now-declassified Republican memo alleged that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was duped into approving the wiretap request by a politicized FBI and Justice Department.

.. The Justice Department made “ample disclosure of relevant, material facts” to the court that revealed “the research was being paid for by a political entity,” said one official

.. “No thinking person who read any of these applications would come to any other conclusion but that” the work was being undertaken “at the behest of people with a partisan aim and that it was being done in opposition to Trump,” the official said.

.. “We didn’t put in every fact, but we put in enough facts to allow the court to judge bias and motive and credibility of the sourcing,” said Matthew G. Olsen, former deputy assistant attorney general for national security who oversaw the Justice Department’s FISA program from 2006 to 2009.

.. Robert S. Litt, former general counsel to the director of national intelligence and a surveillance law expert, said, “I don’t find any of the allegations hugely problematic, in part because of the lack of context.”

.. Nunes said that the Page wiretap was “outrageous” and that it was based on “salacious information paid for by a political campaign.”

.. At issue was an application for surveillance on Page obtained in October 2016 under the Obama administration and renewed three times

.. To secure the warrant, the government had to persuade a federal judge there was probable cause to believe that Page was acting as an “agent of a foreign power” and engaged in criminal conduct.

.. “Only very select parts of what Christopher Steele reported related to Carter Page were included within the application, and some of those things were already subject to corroboration.”

.. A potentially damaging allegation is that the FISA application, which was based in part on information from Steele about Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow, also cited a September 2016 Yahoo News article by reporter Michael Isikoff. “This article,” the memo states, “is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News.”

In other words, the memo alleges the Yahoo News article amounted to circular reasoning.

.. Schiff said the article was not included in the application to corroborate Steele.

.. Kris said it’s more likely that the Justice Department cited the Yahoo News article “to show that the investigation had become public and that the target [Page] therefore might take steps to destroy evidence or cover his tracks.”

 

16 Bombshells in the Nunes Memo the Media Do Not Want You to Know About

  1. Worse still, in the summer of 2016, Obama’s DOJ had already opened a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. The fact that nothing from that months-old partisan investigation was used to obtain the Page wiretap is revealing.
  2. According to the Nunes memo, an “essential” part of the FISA wiretap application was the Steele dossier, which again is a partisan political document created for the Clinton campaign.
  3. So essential was this partisan dossier, Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former-Deputy Director of the FBI, admitted in December that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.
  4. Not only did the FBI knowingly use a document from a partisan campaign to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the competing campaign, the FBI knew the dossier was mostly “salacious and unverified.” We know this because disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey told us so in June of 2017.
  5. According to the Nunes memo, “Steele told [former FBI official Bruce] Ohr, he ‘was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.’”
  6. Ohr, who was part of the FBI’s anti-Trump Russian investigation, was not only friendly with Steele, Ohr’s own wife worked with Steele at Fusion GPS doing opposition research (the dossier) against Trump for the Clinton campaign.
  7. Despite a) knowing the dossier was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign b) knowing the dossier was “salacious and unverified” c) knowing Steele was desperate to destroy Trump d) the breathtaking conflict of interest in having an investigator’s own wife working on the dossier, the FBI still went to the FISA court to obtain permission to spy on Hillary Clinton’s opponent.
  8. In order to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, all of the conflicts of interest above were withheld from the FISA court — an indefensible (and possibly illegal) lie of omission.
  9. Even worse, in order to legitimize a warrant request based on a piece of partisan opposition research they knew was “salacious and unverified,” the FBI and DOJ used a media report to bolster the findings in the phony dossier. The FBI and DOJ told the court that the media report was independent verification of the dossier. But this was not true, and, according to the Nunes memo, the FBI and DOJ knew this was not true. The truth is that the phony dossier was the source of this media report.
  10. Also hidden from the FISA court was the fact that the FBI obtained Steele as a source but had to fire him in October of 2016 when, in a bid to use his phony dossier to derail the Trump campaign, he leaked his information to the far-left Mother Jones.

The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaig

.. The memo says the bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.

  1. All of this dishonesty occurred under Comey, the man our media now hold up as a living saint, a man so desperate to destroy Trump, he not only oversaw those committing the above abuses, he leaked classified information to the news media in order to see a Special Prosecutor appointed against Trump, which his pal, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, immediately did.
  2. Much of the “salacious and unverified” material in the dossier came from the Russians. In other words, those disgusting dossier lies about Trump’s personal behavior came from Russian operatives. So there is no question that it was the Clinton campaign, Democrats, Steele, the FBI, and DOJ who colluded with the Russians to rig a presidential election.