The Nunes memo

"That's it?
"

LOL

A year attacking the Steele dossier.

A month hyping that the dossier started the whole FBI investigation.

Weeks hyping that they have a memo (a memo!) that will finally prove it!

So... is there some other memo?

Because this one says it was Papadopoulos, not the dossier. - Rachel Maddow


WOW the Nunes Memo was delivered with the same laser-like precision of the 8 Benghazi investigations. Republicans are inept, pure and simple.


Donald Trump is a symptom of a much larger problem: namely, that our government is populated by painfully stupid incompetents like Devin Nunes. - Andy Borowitz


Devin Nunes Says He Held Russia Hearings Alone In His Apartment and They Went Great - Andy Borowitz

I'll tell ya what I think this is all about.   Trump's modus operandi is, and always has been to beat down anyone who refuses to knuckle under and do whatever they have to do to do his will and not displease him, even if they have to do it by hook or by crook, within the bounds of the law or without no matter.  

Current refusers he's trying to beat down are the intelligence community and the FBI.  (I think he's got Homeland Security and the military in his pocket already.)

That's what he wants.   I used to have boss just like him, we finally had to form a union local which eventually drove him to a heart attack and retirement.

It is too funny how they picked and chose the "facts". As Comey said....IS THAT ALL? Yep, as a former prosecutor he understands the low threshold for a fisa warrant is, and he also knows that the FBI was focusing on Carter as early as 2014. This is for stupid people. Trump can try all his Roy Cohn chit but Comey got it right....what streets are named after Joe McCarthy?

Totally agree this has been much ado about absolutely nothing, but of course the Faux News followers will hear none of that calm logic, only a continuation of the unreasonable ranting, pounding in the hype. The fact that the supposed "Intelligence" Committee Republicans' own touted memo disproves the very notion that the dossier was the original basis for the Russia probe will fly right over their followers' poor empty heads. Pitiful.

Am looking forward to the Democratic response sooner rather than later, and hope it lives up to the standards of even-handed truthfulness that Ranking Member Adam Schiff has so far demonstrated.

I agree with so many that the very saddest aspect of all this is watching the total disintegration of the long-standing House Intelligence Committee and all it has stood for over the decades. I also agree that the Russian higher-ups who've been salivating to see the destruction of democratic ideals and the American Way are triumphantly singing in their Stoly today.

The irony shouldn't be lost on any thinking individual that Republican Congresspeople and conservative talking heads have been acting so terribly offended that anyone wouldn't strongly decry the perceived FISA violations by our own intelligence community, calling as they are for immediate changes to the FISA regulations to prevent the "illegal" surveillance of "our own citizens" by our own intel agencies, yet I can't recall even one of them having urged the Republican Congress to take any steps whatsoever to prevent Russian and other foreign interference in our upcoming elections. That kind of insidious foreign intrusion is, apparently, perfectly OK with them. What else are we supposed to think??

The leftists used opposition "research" to obtain warrants from the fisa court... PERIOD.

If that's ok with y'all... then the Trump admin should begin acting in the same manner immediately.

Game on.

PkrBum wrote:The leftists used opposition "research" to obtain warrants from the fisa court... PERIOD.

If that's ok with y'all... then the Trump admin should begin acting in the same manner immediately.

Game on.

Nunes Rules of Evidence: If the FBI obtains evidence from anyone who is biased against the subject of an investigation (for example a snitch or a rival), that evidence cannot be used to obtain a warrant. Only evidence from people who like the subject can be used for the warrant.

Intel 101
When the FBI learns that a man is contacting Russian agents, the issue isn’t who told the FBI. It could be a mob boss or it could be Stormy Daniels. What we care about is that the FBI get a warrant and do it’s job of finding out why the man is contacting Russian agents.

It may have passed the smell test if the origin and veracity were made known to the fisa court.

It wasn't... in fact the court was deliberately mislead... for what could only be nefarious means.

From that to leaks and unmasking and assorted dirty political tricks to affect an election.

This is the new political norm I guess. Good luck comrades.

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

https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-dept-told-court-of-sources-political-bias-in-request-to-wiretap-ex-trump-campaign-aide-officials-say/2018/02/02/caecfa86-0852-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html

PkrBum wrote:The leftists used opposition "research" to obtain warrants from the fisa court... PERIOD.

If that's ok with y'all... then the Trump admin should begin acting in the same manner immediately.

Game on.

The Nunes Memo Undermines the Right’s Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory

The memo that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released to Fox News and the Washington Examiner on Friday morning—everyone else had to wait until noon—is four pages long. Its authors should have stopped at three pages, though, because the fourth serves only to undermine the entire theory of the case that Donald Trump and his supporters have been peddling for weeks now, which is that the Russia investigation is a partisan hit job engineered by the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Obama Administration, and anti-Trump elements inside the F.B.I.

To believe this conspiracy theory, which emanated from the likes of Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, and Tom Fitton, the head of the right-wing research group Judicial Watch, you have to believe that the investigation began with the infamous “Steele dossier,” the document compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British spy, which claims that the Russian government had been trying to cultivate Donald Trump for years and had obtained kompromat on him in the form of a sex tape. The right-wing argument goes that Clinton operatives cooked up a scandalous piece of fiction, got Steele to pass it along to some Trump-haters in the F.B.I., who then persuaded their bosses at the Justice Department to open an investigation, and here we are, eighteen months later, with Robert Mueller and his investigators hounding an innocent President.

The memo that was made public on Friday, whose release was pushed for by Representative Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, directly contradicts this story. Its first three pages are largely devoted to analyzing the context of the F.B.I.’s electronic surveillance of Carter Page, a former foreign-policy adviser to Trump. When, on October 21, 2016, the F.B.I. asked a secret intelligence court for permission to surveil Page, the memo alleges, the agency omitted “material and relevant information” from its request—for instance, the fact that the Steele dossier, which the government submitted in support of the application, had been commissioned and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

“Neither the initial application . . . nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials,” the memo says.
This is an interesting allegation, to be sure, and, as soon as the memo was released, Trump’s supporters were making much of it on Fox News and elsewhere. It should be noted, though, that some legal experts have already pointed out that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department weren’t under any legal obligation to inform the court about who paid for the dossier. On top of this, most of the information that the government did give to the court is still classified. fisa applications usually run to more than sixty pages. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have written a counter-memo, which they claim lays out what else the F.B.I. knew about Page when it applied to surveil him, but so far Republicans have refused to allow the minority party to release that document to the public. The F.B.I. seems likely to have pointed out to the court that Page, a frequent visitor to Russia, had been on the radar of its counterintelligence division for several years, and that two suspected Russian intelligence agents, one of whom the Justice Department subsequently charged, had tried to recruit him as a spy, in 2013.

But, even after reading only the Republicans’ memo, we can say two things. First, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department didn’t base their application to monitor Page entirely on Steele’s work. And, second, and more important, the Trump-Russia investigation didn’t begin with the Steele dossier. These two facts are there in that lonely paragraph on the fourth page of the Nunes memo. This is how it begins: “The Page fisa application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Peter Strzok.” In other words, the Trump-Russia probe began with an investigation of Papadopoulos, a young foreign-policy aide to the Trump campaign, who last year pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. A Times story in December provided basically the same account, but this isn’t a newspaper report: it is an official memo written by congressional staff members quoting a secret F.B.I. court filing. Far from confirming the conspiracy theory promoted by Trump, Hannity, and Fitton, the Nunes memo contradicts a central element of it. No wonder that some people in the White House, including the chief of staff, John Kelly, were reportedly less enthusiastic about releasing it than Trump was. (“Rising White House fear: Nunes Memo is a dud,” a headline at Axios read on Thursday.)

Yet, for the conspiracy theorists, the contents of the memo matter less than the support they’ve received recently from at least some elements of the Republican Party leadership, including Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, who earlier this week said the memo should be made public and talked about the need to “cleanse” the F.B.I. Trump is capable of anything. We know this from his firing of James Comey, last May, and his attempted firing of Mueller, last June, which was reportedly only thwarted when the White House counsel, Don McGahn, threatened to quit. If Trump uses the memo as a pretext to fire Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, who oversees Mueller’s investigation, Ryan and other senior Republicans will be wholly complicit in causing a constitutional crisis.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-nunes-memo-undermines-the-rights-trump-russia-conspiracy-theory?mbid=nl_Daily%20020318%20Experimental&CNDID=14244234&spMailingID=12871084&spUserID=MTMzMTc5NTk4NDA0S0&spJobID=1340251398&spReportId=MTM0MDI1MTM5OAS2

How do we know Steele's strong feelings about Trump as reported by Associated AG Ohr weren't formulated after learning everything he learned from the people he talked to? That would really put the alleged comment in perspective, now wouldn't it?

As to Steele's supposed bias against Trump .... had I interviewed the people he did and I believed half of what I was told by them, you might hear me say I desperately didn't want Trump elected POTUS either.

That the "dossier" was used at all to justify govt spying on the opposition is malfeasance.

PkrBum wrote: It may have passed the smell test if the origin and veracity were made known to the fisa court.

It wasn't... in fact the court was deliberately mislead...

FAKE NEWS!!!!

You don't know that. You haven't seen the affidavits or the returns to the court and neither have I.

PkrBum wrote:That the "dossier" was used at all to justify govt spying on the opposition is malfeasance.

The so-called dossier was not what started the investigation against Trump or anybody else.  Carter Page was being looked at by the FBI long before the Steele came along asking questions around Europe about Trump and his associates ... and long before Trump even announced his candidacy.

Further, you nor I have no idea what actions were taken by the FBI to corroborate or disprove the information these various persons provided to Chris Steele. I can assure you they would have made the attempt. I guess Trump will have to declassify that information to for us to know the details .... but he probably wonuldn't want that particular information set made public!

Have you even read the so-called dossier?

I do have an alternate theory you might want to ponder ... how about this? Page, Papadopolous, Manafort and/or maybe others were "unwittings" in a Russian attempt to infiltrate the Trump campaign, get Trump elected, and thus have close contacts with persons in the administration who might be close to Trump and could influence him toward Russia-friendly policies. And those persons in-turn attempted to hook up Kushner & Donald Jr with their Russian contacts? Perhaps Trump was not even aware of the full extent of conversations going on between persons on his campaign and Russian operatives. That could be why the whole thing seems like some kind of fake news conspiracy to him. The whole thing with persons in the Trump campaign could have been part of the overall Russian operation to meddle in our elections and the Trump campaign was essentially, well .... duped!

Comey himself called it "salacious and unverified"... while McCabe said that there was no warrant without it.

How about we open things up and let the chips fall where they may? There's no legitimate reason to let our employees hide things inside the bureaucracy that doesn't put field agents at risk. Round em up.

PkrBum wrote:Comey himself called it "salacious and unverified"

Well, salacious ... yeah.   But Steele didn't write it.  He wrote down what people told him.    If any of the allegations are "salacious" and happens to be true, that's the fault of pee-pee boy.   (Personally, I can't see anybody just making up the pee-pee story, it just has a certain ring of truth about it, if they were gonna make up a salacious story about Trump it would have been a different one.   Trump's not being investigated for that anyway ... and neither is Carter Page.  That particular allegation has nothing to do with Carter Page.
Anyways ... as to the pee-pee tale, well, I wouldn't take that particular salacious allegation the bank just yet without further corroboration ... but I'm not discounting it entirely either.   Especially knowing Trump's history with women.)

As to unverified ... well, yeah.   And we don't know what steps the FBI has taken to attempt to verify or discredit the allegations.

PkrBum wrote:
... while McCabe said that there was no warrant without it.

There's plenty of doubt McCabe said exactly that .... many lawmakers who were in the room are saying it's not ....  and plenty of doubt what he did say was reported in context by Nunes.  If you followed a wider variety of media outlets than just Trump, er I mean "FOX" News, you would know that.  We can't know exactly what McCabe told the committee until/unless the House Intelligence Committee releases the transcripts of McCabe's testimony.

Apparently the Federal Judge thought the probable cause was sufficient.   They do have just a wee bit more knowledge of whats required to be shown than the average joe off the street.   Are you somehow under the impression that the information gathered by Chris Steele was the only information the FBI used to obtain the surveillance warrant for Carter Page?   Carter Page had been on the FBI's counter-espionage radar for some time before the election ... before Trump had even announced even.   Why are you defending Carter Page anyway?  A man who may very well be a traitor to this country.   You know the old saying about if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck .....

PkrBum wrote:....

How about we open things up and let the chips fall where they may? There's no legitimate reason to let our employees hide things inside the bureaucracy that doesn't put field agents at risk. Round em up.

You're a fine one to be concerned about putting "field agents at risk" when you advocate de-classifying the FBI means and methods in conducting counter-espionage investigations (means and methods, which, by the by are not all that much different than those used in counter-terrorism investigations)

Why do you think these surveillance warrants are obtained from a secret court (FISA) and the supporting affidavits are actually classified higher than just "law enforcement sensitive" as the vast majority of Federal criminal affidavits are?  There's a reason for that.

Well, fine then.  Go ahead and make public to the Russians, the Chinese, ISIS, etc and the whole dang world all the ways and means by which we investigate their intelligence operations in the US and around the world.  I wonder how many sources will disappear?  I wonder how many potential sources will think twice before they talk to and/or work with the US FBI and intelligence  agencies; knowing they could be outed at any time on a whim if it suits the internal political purposes of one certain former teevee reality show star and general all around huckster ... namely, Donald J Trump.

I specifically said that DOESN'T put agents at risk. There must be oversight and accountability.

The only reason that any of this is even known is that trump somehow won the election.

polecat wrote:Intel 101
When the FBI learns that a man is contacting Russian agents, the issue isn’t who told the FBI. It could be a mob boss or it could be Stormy Daniels. What we care about is that the FBI get a warrant and do it’s job of finding out why the man is contacting Russian agents.

In fact I have so many cheers waiting to be waved for you, polecat, as well as for Emerald Ghost and FT, that I can't possibly fit them on the page. All of you have done an outstanding job of bringing truth and logic to the issue here. Excellent points, all. Just excellent.

RealLindaL wrote:

polecat wrote:Intel 101
When the FBI learns that a man is contacting Russian agents, the issue isn’t who told the FBI. It could be a mob boss or it could be Stormy Daniels. What we care about is that the FBI get a warrant and do it’s job of finding out why the man is contacting Russian agents.

In fact I have so many cheers waiting to be waved for you, polecat, as well as for Emerald Ghost and FT, that I can't possibly fit them on the page. All of you have done an outstanding job of bringing truth and logic to the issue here. Excellent points, all.  Just excellent.

Hey Linda I noticed you left out...oh...never mind.

PkrBum wrote:I specifically said that DOESN'T put agents at risk. There must be oversight and accountability.

You won't be able to release the supporting affidavits for the surveillance application or the transcript of the House intel committee interviews without some seriously heavy redaction to not put Agents, sources, or operational activities/means at serious risk.

We do have "oversight & accountability" .... how do you think this all these shenanigans with the Trump team and the Russians.

PkrBum wrote: ....

The only reason that any of this is even known is that trump somehow won the election.

This was all underway long before the election ... some of it before Trump even announced his candidacy.    This isn't just about Trump ..... Page, Papadopoulos, Manafort, etc ..... all these guys have been playing footsie with the Russians for several years now.  It would have all come out eventually regardless of who won the election .... and still will.  (personally, I can't wait to see if Mueller's team runs into money laundering activities during the course of this investigation.  I will not be surprised one bit if they do.   And I rather suspect that's what all these guys really fear)

Telstar wrote:Hey Linda I noticed you left out...oh...never mind.  

Was only speaking of this specific thread, Tel. If I missed a post of yours here (on this thread) I'm sorry.

EmeraldGhost wrote:(personally, I can't wait to see if Mueller's team runs into money laundering activities during the course of this investigation.  I will not be surprised one bit if they do.   And I rather suspect that's what all these guys really fear)

Have had the exact same thought more than once.   And don't forget about Trump's questionable real estate sales to Russian oligarchs or their reps, while we're on the subject. Wouldn't be surprised to see that all blow up as well, and we can add him to the suspected fearful bunch.

EmeraldGhost wrote:  (personally, I can't wait to see if Mueller's team runs into money laundering activities during the course of this investigation.  I will not be surprised one bit if they do.   And I rather suspect that's what all these guys really fear)

I agree completely. I think there's some serious criminal money-laundering behind Trump's financial survival. After he bankrupted four--FOUR!--Atlantic City casinos, he had a hard time getting loans from traditional, legitimate sources. Even Deutsche Bank, as crooked a financial institution as any Mafia loanshark, started keeping him at arm's length. That's when he started going to the Russians.

“I've felt all along in the Russia investigation that the most important issues were those that had the potential of exerting a continuing influence over the administration and over U.S. policy,” Representative Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me Friday. “And if the Russians were laundering money through the Trump Organization, the Russians would know it, the president would know it, and that could be very powerful leverage.”

The theory is that both sides would have something to gain. For Russian oligarchs and mobsters, there’s a need to launder money. “Generally speaking, the patterns of activity that we thought might be suggestive of money laundering were, you know, fast turnover deals and deals where there seemed to have been efforts to disguise the identity of the buyer,” Simpson told the committee in November. Trump, meanwhile, was in need of liquidity, because many banks were unwilling to do business with him after a corporate bankruptcy, and Russian buyers could provide quick infusions of cash. In other cases, the Trump Organization has appeared to have gone out of its way to avoid doing due diligence on business partners.

Of all the questions surrounding Trump and Russia, the question of whether the Kremlin could have laundered money through the Trump Organization in order to blackmail Trump has not often held the spotlight, obscured behind more direct connections, like discussions between Russian officials and Trump campaign officials like Donald Trump Jr. or George Papadapoulos, or more lurid ones from the Trump dossier.

Schiff, however, has long been interested in the idea. “The allegation that concerns me most is ... the issue of money laundering, and not money laundering alone by Mr. Manafort but whether the Russians also laundered money through the Trump Organization,” he told me in October. “I mention that because when most people think of kompromat, they think of the salacious video. But if the Russians were laundering money... that would be a very powerful lever the Russians would have over the president of the United States.”

Schiff noted that Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff in Fire and Fury that he believed money-laundering investigations were a real threat to the Trump administration.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/theres-a-potential-for-russian-leverage-here/551024/

I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that Trump refused to release his tax returns.

He's going to be disgraced but, even with all this, I doubt he will be removed from office.