What the media doesn't want us to know

John Nolte writes at Breitbart,

Here are 16 things the media do not want you to know about the Nunes memo:

The so-called Russian Dossier, the creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document — namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Using what it knew was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, in October of 2016, the FBI and DOJ obtained a FISA warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to install a wiretap to spy on Hillary Clinton’s opponent — the Trump campaign, specifically Carter Page. This spying would last for a year.

It should be noted that the FISA court was set up to stop foreign terrorists. The fact that the FBI and DOJ would use this court to not only wiretap an American but to wiretap a presidential campaign belies belief. Why Obama’s FBI and DOJ used this court as opposed to a normal court is obvious. As you will see below, a normal court probably would have denied the wiretap.

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.'”

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

Although the FBI and DOJ were willing participants in pushing a “salacious and unverified” narrative against a presidential candidate (primarily through media leaks), this was all hidden from congressional investigators. To begin with, for months, while under oath, Comey said he did not know where the dossier came from — meaning from the Clinton campaign. The Wall Street Journal explains:
We also know the FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.

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.
And finally…

16. 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.

Yes, there was collusion with the Russians, and those in our government currently investigating Trump in the hopes of overturning a presidential election are the colluders.

Read more here.

Sunshine and open debate

Mark Penn writes in The Hill,

I have no idea what is in this memo, but it’s a memo. It’s speech. It’s from the very staff and people our Constitution assigns to oversee the Justice Department and the FBI. And the elected officials who wrote it think I should see it. The people who don’t want me to see it are the elected officials and leaders of the Democratic Party, the institutions and individuals whose actions are being reviewed, and several of the same newspapers that went to court to publish the “Pentagon Papers.”

For about a year, anyone who wanted to could read the secret “dossier” prepared by GPS Fusion and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. I urge people to read it. It’s obvious nonsense. It’s not “unverified.” It’s been discredited. Its major allegations, aside from being preposterous, have no basis in fact. The idea that something, anything, could be found in it that is true — such as that Trump adviser Carter Page went to Moscow — does not rehabilitate it.

And, despite crystal-clear federal election rulings that campaigns must identify the ultimate recipient of the funds for opposition research, the fact that Democrats paid for the dossier was stonewalled for a year — and we found out about the source of funds only after the very same House Intelligence Committee went to court and pried it out.

A fired FBI director, James Comey, leaked memos he wrote on his own with no oversight, supervision or review, and the New York Times gladly printed reports of them. The Washington Post even editorialized that the people should “see the memos.” We heard no argument from either newspaper then that publishing these Comey memos would damage the presidency or be misleading.

I believe in the First Amendment, and I thought that mainstream media did too. I did not see it as a doctrine of convenience that applied only to documents that buttress one side but then not applied if it might conceivably help the other side.

Let’s remember what has been found and disclosed about what was going on at the FBI. Andrew McCabe made crucial decisions related to these investigations and, yet, his wife received more than $500,000 in contributions for a state senate race from Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton confidante. McCabe stepped down from the FBI this week.

FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page traded 50,000 texts detailing unprecedented bias for and against the subjects of investigations and discussed an “insurance policy” should Trump get elected. They were removed from the investigation and are under investigation by the inspector general of the Justice Department.

James Baker, who it is believed leaked the dossier to Mother Jones during the campaign, and who was general counsel of the FBI, has been “reassigned.” James Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff, who was also under criticism, left the government. And Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr was separated from the government, apparently because he had undisclosed contacts with Fusion GPS and, it turns out, his wife was even working for that company.

So it’s a fact that six senior leaders of the FBI or Justice Department have been either reassigned or fired based on facts that have come out largely from the work of this committee and of the inspector general of the Justice Department. Yet, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is being branded almost as a lunatic. The hypocrisy here is not confined to newspaper editorial pages. We have seen a veritable news blockade on information coming out of these investigations on the front pages.

In the last Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, we read people a list of recent facts that have come out and almost all of them were unknown to the public, even when prompted. A majority did know that Comey had drafted the memo on the Clinton investigation long before the investigation was over. But most people did not know who paid for the dossier, and most had not heard about the text messages and their reference to an “insurance policy” in case Trump was elected. After hearing this information, 75 percent said it was significant and 63 percent said the FBI needs to be investigated.

Whether the Nunes memo is a smoking gun or a pop gun, it deserves to see the light of day — and the editorial writers should think about how they came to support prior restraint over sunshine and open debate. Perhaps more importantly, the news pages need to stop covering a story that has brought down six senior officials as just partisan sniping and recognize that the actions of the FBI and the Justice Department in relation to both these investigations need to come out of the darkness and be fully revealed to the American public.

Read more here.

The Nunes memo and the Steele dossier

Here are some excerpts from points made at Bookworm Room about the Nunes memo.

One, several of the top people at the FBI and the DOJ, using both lies of omission and commission, falsified applications for FISA warrants to use on Carter Page, a member of Trump’s campaign team.

Two, a person can infer from the memo that those warrants did not result in any useful information.

...Three, the fact that the Steele Dossier, rather than independently developed or corroborated facts, was the basis for a finding of probable cause to get a FISA warrant calls throws into stark relief the question of whether Rod Rosenstein acted lawfully when he appointed Robert Mueller to conduct an intelligence, not a criminal investigation.

...Four...The memo’s central point is that various people in the FBI and DOJ leadership knowingly applied for and received four FISA warrants under false pretenses. ...Further, FBI and DOJ officials knew, but did not include in the request for the warrant, that the Steele Dossier on which they relied was opposition research for which the DNC paid. Nor did the FBI and DOJ officials include in the warrant that Steele had stated that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being President.”

...Another point made in the House Memo, it seems to me, is the most critical. A separate FBI unit had attempted to validate the information in the Steele Dossier. The unit declared it “minimally validated.” As I read that, it means that there were some innocuous facts that could be validated; e.g., that Carter Page in fact took a trip to Russia and while there, spoke at the Higher Economics School.

She goes on to take a look at the dossier allegations here.

US government interference in the 2016 election

Mark Steyn writes about the release of the Nunes Memo.

The DoJ/FBI did not "inform the tribunal of all material facts" but misled the judge, seriously, on fundamental matters necessary to "enable the tribunal to make an informed decision". They misled him/her as to the nature of the document, its provenance, its credibility, the motivations of its author, and his financial ties to the Clinton camp.

They did, however, argue that the dossier had been independently "corroborated" by a September 2016 story in Yahoo News - even though that Yahoo story came from the same guy who authored the dossier: in effect, the Government got its surveillance warrant by arguing that its fake-news dossier from Christopher Steele had been independently corroborated by a fake-news story from Christopher Steele. Either the FBI is exceedingly stupid, which would be disturbing, given their lavish budget. Or the same tight group of FBI/DoJ officials knew very well what they were doing in presenting such drivel to the FISA court.

They're really the two choices here: either "the world's premier law enforcement agency" was manipulated by one freaky Brit spook, or "the world's premier law enforcement agency" conspired with the freaky Brit spook to manipulate the judge.

...there's no evidence of Russian government interference with the 2016 election, but there's plenty of evidence of US government interference with the 2016 election. The latter ought to be far more disturbing. All foreign governments can be expected to pursue their national interests as they see fit. That the most powerful forces within your own government decide to subvert the election result is far more bizarre, and far graver.

The surveillance of Carter Page was a cover for the surveillance of Trump. The creation of the Steele dossier was a cover for the "Full Investigation" of the Trump campaign. The rumors of Kremlin "kompromat" are a cover for the widespread dissemination of Democrat "kompromat". And "foreign interference" in the US election is cover for domestic interference in the US election.

I have only excerpted a few paragraphs in this post. Please go here to read every word by this brilliant writer.

Confirmed

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse writes,

Like you, I’m going through the HPSCI Memo release FISA and mining some of the more nuanced facts the media will overlook. This one is quite explosive (memo page 3 pdf-pg 4):
Like you, I’m going through the HPSCI Memo release FISA and mining some of the more nuanced facts the media will overlook. This one is quite explosive (memo page 3 pdf-pg 4):


That is a stunning aspect. Nellie Ohr was hired by Fusion GPS in/around the end of April, beginning of May, 2017. According to the memo, while employed by the Clinton Campaign (via Fusion) to do opposition research on Donald Trump, Nellie Ohr’s findings were delivered directly to the FBI by her husband Bruce Ohr.Mrs. Nellie Ohr’s findings were not only delivered to the FBI (likely to Peter Strzok) by her husband, DOJ Offical Bruce Ohr, but her findings were used in the FISA Court application and never revealed to the FISA Court.

As such, the Hillary Clinton campaign was funneling opposition research to the FBI through contracted agents of the campaign (Fusion) and their employees (Nellie Ohr).

The FBI then used the Clinton Opposition Research to supplement their ongoing FISA surveillance of Donald Trump campaign officials.

We suspected that was what was happening. We outlined the strong likelihood that was happening. However, yeah, that’s a big deal to see confirmed.

"Crack in the door"

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance explains,

...today it is worthwhile remembering this is the beginning of exposing the corruption within the DOJ not the end.

For several years the U.S. justice department has maintained an attitude of non-accountability within its ranks. The Obama years elevated that attitude and provided multiple examples of a DOJ gone rogue.

A complicit media enables that attitude by engineering a false narrative the U.S. Justice Department was/is an independent fourth branch of government; unaccountable to congress and entirely separate from the executive branch.

The House Intelligence Memo is simply using the example of currently known FISA abuse to open the door and show the U.S. electorate how corrupt this unaccountable institution has become. Behind that door are very uncomfortable realities for all of those who constructed the weaponized agency; and also those who have benefited from it.



...The House Intelligence Committee, Chairman Devin Nunes, has oversight over the entire intelligence apparatus, including DOJ/FBI counterintelligence and the FISA Courts. The House Judiciary Committee, Chairman Bob Goodlatte, has statutory oversight over the entire Department of Justice. The Senate Judiciary Committee, Chairman Chuck Grassley, has oversight over the federal court processes used by the U.S. Department of Justice. The Office of Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, is the internal DOJ watchdog.

...So the bottom line is this: if, in 2016, the DOJ and FBI used an unverified, Clinton/DNC paid-for dossier to spy on American citizens (and political opponents) in the Trump campaign, that is as wrong as it gets. If that happened, Americans deserve to know about it. Period.

The release of the House Intelligence Memo is only the tip of the iceberg; the crack in the door to see just how corrupt the unaccountable Justice System became.

There are going to be many more revelations as the investigations into the FBI and DOJ continue. Combine that understanding with the pending OIG Horowitz report, and we have only just begun to see how bad this is…

The key aspect to begin restoring a system when it has fallen into the clutches of corruption, is to remove their internal image of unaccountability. The DOJ and FBI are part of the Executive Branch and they are accountable to congressional oversight. We need to constantly remind people of that, and push back against this insufferable media-generated narrative of the DOJ being an independent fourth branch of government.

Read more here.

READ THE MEMO

Ace says, READ THE MEMO. The Federalist has it.

Another huge point: The FISA Application cited a Michael Isikoff article as "corroborating information" for the Steele Memo, despite the fact that it was Steele who had leaked that information to Isikoff.

So, Steele "corroborated himself" by leaking to Isikoff and then saying "Look, Isikoff says so too."

More: Steele was fired by the FBI for breaking rules of confidentiality when he went on his Media Tour, trying to interest Mother Jones and other outlets in his claims. The Memo notes he should have been fired for speaking to Yahoo News/Isikoff much earlier, before the first FISA application, because he gave Isikioff his bullshit too.

So yes, the FISA application was fatally defective from the outset. And yet Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, and Sally Yates (!!!) just kept re-signing the renewal applications.

The FBI and DOJ do not seem to have alerted the court to Steele's firing or unreliability (or partisan bias) in any application, even after they themselves fired him.

When Comey "briefed" Trump about the memo, he also withheld from Trump the dossier's partisan origins as well as the unreliablity (and firability) of its alleged author.

Note I always put "briefed" in quotes when I speak of this "briefing," because this briefing was not for the President's information, but for CNN's: The plan was to make the dossier "reportable" by giving it a newsworthy angle (It's so explosive the president was briefed on it!).

CNN was almost immediately leaked the news of this "briefing." It should be pointed out that one of the four reporters pushing this leak to the public was Evan Perez, who is a best friend of Fusion GPS' Glenn Simpson.

Note those last two paragraphs are not in this memo; that's already known. I'm just re-stating that because it's important.

Unfortunately this is even shorter than I thought - it's three pages and one extra paragraph on the fourth page, not four whole pages.

Some good stuff here, but... just 3.14 pages.