The Russian Connection 3: Mueller is Coming

[GreyhoundFan]

A good summary: "Here’s what you need to know about the Nunes memo"

Spoiler

If you've caught even a few minutes of cable news in the past week, you've probably heard about the “Nunes memo,” and the controversy it has stirred. The document, which could be released as soon as Thursday, has created a massive fissure between Democrats and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, and even pitted President Trump against his own FBI director, who has publicly expressed concerns about the memo being made public.

But what exactly is the Nunes memo, and how did it come to roil Washington so intensely? Here are the answers to some basic questions you might have about the document and how it came to be.

What is the Nunes memo, and how did it come to be?

The Nunes memo is a four-page document, created by the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), that alleges the FBI abused its surveillance authority, particularly when it sought a secret court order to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser. It is the work product of Nunes's months-long effort to investigate the FBI and Justice Department and their ongoing probe into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia.

The memo has yet to be released, so it is impossible to say with certainty and specificity what it says. But Republicans who have seen the document say it will describe how a research effort funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee ended up playing a role in the FBI's obtaining a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The research effort was that of former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who produced a now infamous dossier of lurid allegations against Trump. Steele had been hired for his work by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm who had themselves been hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Republicans will probably attempt to use that information to portray the monitoring of Page as a political ploy by Clinton and the Democrats, which they will say casts doubt on the integrity of the Russia investigation. It must be noted, though, that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court process is generally a robust one, and it is virtually impossible that the bureau would have relied solely on unverified information in Steele's dossier to obtain the warrant.

Why are the Democrats so upset about the memo's release?

The House Intelligence Committee has long done bipartisan work conducting oversight of U.S. intelligence services. As a part of that, the committee had been doing its own investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Nunes memo has essentially upended the probe, and the work has devolved into partisan bickering over whether the document should be released.

Democrats are upset for two primary reasons. First, Nunes's staff created the document after reviewing classified and highly sensitive Justice Department files related to the Russia investigation. Democrats fear the memo could expose some of that material and harm national security. That is problematic in its own right, Democrats say, but also for the precedent it might set. In the future, the Justice Department and the FBI might be reluctant to turn over materials to the House Intelligence Committee out of fear the committee will make them public. Foreign intelligence partners watching from afar, too, might be more reluctant to cooperate the Americans out of worry that Congress might get access to their work and expose it to the world.

Second, Democrats are angry that the memo, in their view, cherry picks facts to paint the FBI in an unfairly negative light. They say Republicans are essentially using the document to discredit the probe into the Trump campaign and ignoring information that is unhelpful to them. To that point, when Republicans voted to authorize the release of their memo — triggering an up-to-five-days review by the White House which, as of 11 a.m. Thursday, was ongoing — they voted against releasing a Democrat rebuttal memo. Democrats have charged that that is an attempt to control the political narrative.

What is the FBI and Justice Department's stance on all of this?

Initially, officials at the Justice Department had not even seen the memo, and the department wrote Nunes last week warning him against releasing the document until it could conduct its own review. On Sunday, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray looked at it, and he asked to brief Republican lawmakers on his concerns with making it public. They did not let him do so. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein also privately lobbied the White House against the memo's release.

On Wednesday, Wray's FBI issued a remarkable statement saying the bureau has “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” That puts the agency at odds with not just Republicans in Congress, but also Trump, who sees the document as helpful to himself and wants it released.

Notable about the FBI's statement is that the bureau is not publicly expressing any concerns that releasing the memo could jeopardize national security, but rather, they are saying the document is wrong. Nunes fired back that the FBI was welcome to make public information that could clear up the record, though law enforcement officials have said the bureau is in a bit of a bind. That is because the information they might make public in their defense, according to the officials, is sensitive, and its release could be damaging to national security.

Why has this become such a big issue?

This is a big deal because it could have real implications for the Justice Department and the Russia investigation. Trump is said to believe the memo could help him convince people the FBI and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III are biased against him. It's possible, even likely, he will use it in an effort to discredit that probe.

It's also possible that the memo's release could trigger leadership changes at the Justice Department. Trump has told associates he hopes new questions facing the Russia investigation could allow him to make changes at the department, and the memo could give him the questions he needs. Trump's FBI director also is now publicly at odds with the president over whether the document should be released. It is an open question as to what he will do if it is made public, or how Trump — who fired his last FBI director — will react to his defiance.

 

[onekidanddone]

I'm paralyzed with fear right now. Can't breathe thinking about the end of the investigation. I have no idea what to do right now. Here I sit watching Gray's Anatomy with my kid and all I want to do is cry. 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good op-ed from the NYT: "What if Clinton Had Done All This?"

Spoiler

Late last year, Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College and a NeverTrump conservative, proposed a little thought experiment for Republicans skeptical of Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s Russia ties.

“Let’s play Alternate Universe,” he wrote on Twitter. “It’s 2017, and President Hillary Clinton is facing charges that Chelsea met with Russians who offered oppo on Trump. Chelsea didn’t call the FBI; and Clinton nat sec adviser Jake Sullivan lied to the FBI about talking to the Russians.”

Nichols laid out the unfolding drama over a series of tweets. President Clinton fires the F.B.I. director after he declines her request to “let it go” on Sullivan. “Then, at least three other Clinton campaign officials end up indicted. All of them are tied in some way to a hostile foreign power.” Later, she threatens to “yank FOX’s license” because she didn’t like its critical coverage.

“I’m sure … totally sure …” Nichols added with no little irony, “that stalwarts of the G.O.P. would say: Look, this is a nothingburger, you can’t define ‘collusion,’ it’s just ‘the coffee boy,’ and on and on.”

I’m reminded of Nichols’ astute tweets as the Republican campaign against the Russia investigation kicked into higher gear this week.

At the State of the Union on Tuesday night, Trump was overheard telling Representative Jeff Duncan, Republican of South Carolina, that he was “100 percent” committed to releasing House Committee Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s secret memo on the Russia investigation, over fierce F.B.I. objections regarding “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

Next there was the ahead-of-schedule departure of Deputy F.B.I. Director Andrew McCabe after relentless public criticism from Trump. McCabe was politically suspect because his wife, a Democrat, made a failed bid in 2015 for the Virginia State Senate and had received money from then-Gov. (and Clinton ally) Terry McAuliffe’s political-action committee.

And finally there was House Speaker Paul Ryan, who on Tuesday supported the release of the Nunes memo to “clean up” the F.B.I. If the administration and its supporters get their way, the “cleaning” would also claim Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller and apparently approved the continued surveillance of the former Trump campaign adviser and Vladimir Putin fan Carter Page.

Altogether, this is supposed to tell the tale of deep state collusion against our elected leader. So let’s play Alternate Universe again, and bring Nichols’ scenarios up-to-date.

Imagine that President Hillary Clinton had agreed to release a partisan Democratic intelligence memo over the objections of Republicans in Congress and her own top F.B.I. officials that disclosure could harm national security.

Would conservative pundits and politicians:

(a) Praise President Clinton for abandoning her old habits of secrecy and standing strong on the side of transparency in government?

(b) Call for her impeachment on grounds that she had compromised national security for shamelessly self-serving political reasons?

Imagine, next, that the Clinton campaign had named as a foreign policy adviser a little known figure with scanty business or academic credentials but with strongly pro-Putin views and curious links to senior Russian officials. Imagine that this same adviser later testified to Congress that the Clinton campaign had asked him to sign a nondisclosure agreement after a trip he took to Russia during the height of the campaign. Imagine also that senior Clinton campaign officials at first denied and later had their memories “refreshed” about knowing him.

Would conservative pundits and politicians:

(a) Agree with Clinton administration spokespersons that, while the campaign had named him as an adviser, he had no role in anything and that his links to Russia were purely incidental?

(b) Agree with Democrats in Congress that the F.B.I. had no business whatsoever in surveilling him because a political dossier might have served as one basis of suspicion, and that his civil liberties had been seriously traduced?

(c) Note that his presence on the campaign was of a piece with Clinton’s disastrous “reset” of relations with Russia under the Obama administration, and that it suggested a policy of appeasing the Kremlin at America’s expense?

Imagine, finally, that after firing James Comey for insufficient loyalty, President Clinton had asked the deputy director of the F.B.I. how he had voted in the election in an Oval Office meeting. Imagine that after learning that he hadn’t voted, she unleashed a campaign of public invective and belittlement aimed at his wife for having once run for state office as a Republican. Imagine, in this same connection, that the effort to oust the deputy director was only a warm-up to getting rid of the deputy attorney general, a well-regarded, straight-shooting Democrat who had appointed the special counsel looking into Clinton’s Russia ties.

Would conservative pundits and politicians:

(a) Applaud President Clinton for taking a belated but necessary step to clean up a “politicized” Justice Department that had interfered against her at the end of the campaign, while also agreeing that the party affiliation of an F.B.I. official’s spouse is a legitimate basis to suspect the official of disloyalty and partisan motives?

(b) Cast aspersions on the deputy attorney general for defending the work of the special counsel against the wishes of the president?

(c) Accuse the president of obstructing justice by smearing and effectively ousting upstanding public servants whose only sin was to do their jobs to the best of their abilities while, in one case, being married to a woman with political ambitions?

In this same alternative universe, I’d be writing columns calling for further investigations of a manifestly corrupt Clinton administration, and even raising the subject of impeachment. I know because I was there for the prequel, back in 1998. At least some of the conservatives who railed against Bill Clinton then could claim they were acting on principles that went beyond pure partisanship.

These days, not so much.

 

[fraurosena]

Welp! They’re going to release the memo tomorrow. All hell is going to break loose this weekend. Expect the Dems to release theirs too, and maybe even more info from them besides. Expect action from Chris Wray. This is going to be a raring roller coaster of a weekend, so hold on tight!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Well, it's only one of the zillions of thing he doesn't know or understand: "Messing with the FBI? Trump doesn’t know history."

Spoiler

Presidents don’t win fights with the FBI. Donald Trump apparently wants to learn this lesson the hard way.

Most presidents have had the sense not to bully the FBI by defaming its leaders and — ridiculously — painting its agents as leftist political hacks. Most members of Congress have also understood how unwise it would be to pull such stunts. But Trump and his hapless henchmen on Capitol Hill, led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), have chosen the wrong enemy. History strongly suggests they will be sorry.

The far-right echo chamber resounds with wailing and braying about something called the “deep state” — a purported fifth column of entrenched federal bureaucrats whose only goal in life, apparently, is to deny America the greatness that Dear Leader Trump has come to bestow. It is unclear who is supposed to be directing this vast conspiracy. Could it be Dr. Evil? Supreme Leader Snoke? Hillary Clinton? This whole paranoid fantasy, as any sane person realizes, is utter rubbish.*

The asterisk is for the FBI.

The bureau has no political ax to grind, and the attempt by Nunes and others to portray it as some kind of liberal cabal is comical. But it does have great institutional cohesion, a proud sense of mission, and a culture that inculcates the “us vs. the world” attitude that is so common among law enforcement agencies.

I’m old enough to remember the days when J. Edgar Hoover ran the place like his own private Stasi — wiretapping civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., infiltrating anti-Vietnam War groups with informers and provocateurs, seeking or manufacturing damaging “evidence” against those he targeted, keeping copious files on the peccadilloes of the politicians who were theoretically his masters. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Richard Nixon coexisted warily with Hoover, afraid to fire him for fear of all the beans he might spill.

Harry S. Truman was an especially bitter opponent. “We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction,” he said. “They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. . . . J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”

But when Truman left office, Hoover was still FBI director. He held on to the job from the FBI’s founding in 1935 until his death in 1972 — six weeks before the Watergate break-in.

The day after what Nixon’s spokesman would call “a third-rate burglary attempt” took place, the FBI’s major-crimes duty officer, a supervisor named Daniel Bledsoe, opened a federal wiretapping investigation. According to Bledsoe, he received a phone call from Nixon aide John Ehrlichman ordering him to shut down the probe. His simple reply: “No.”

It was another FBI man — Mark Felt, then an assistant director — who became the famous source Deep Throat, secretly meeting Post reporter Bob Woodward in a parking garage to guide the paper’s illumination of the president’s crimes.

In 2004, according to journalist Tim Weiner’s book “Enemies: A History of the FBI,” President George W. Bush was confronted by the man he had appointed to lead the bureau: Robert S. Mueller III. In Weiner’s telling, Mueller threatened to resign unless Bush curtailed some aspects of the domestic electronic surveillance that was taking place in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Bush reportedly agreed to put the program on a more legal footing.

Now comes Trump. His oafish attempts to neutralize the FBI director he inherited, James B. Comey — trying to extract a Godfather-style loyalty pledge, asking him to drop the investigation of Michael Flynn, ultimately firing him — are potential fodder for what may be an obstruction-of-justice case against Trump being assembled by Mueller.

Comey wrote everything down. The FBI always writes everything down.

Do you see a pattern here? The idea that the likes of Trump and Nunes are going to put a scratch on the FBI with ludicrous innuendo — we’re supposed to believe the bureau is a nest of Bolsheviks? — and selectively edited memos would be laughable, if Mueller and his team were the laughing kind. Which they’re not.

The Trumpists were so proud of themselves when they found evidence that Peter Strzok, an FBI agent originally on Mueller’s team, thought Trump would be a bad president. Now, however, someone has leaked to CNN that Strzok drafted the “October surprise” Comey letter that reopened the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s emails — without which Trump probably would have lost the election.

Trump and his minions seem to think they can out-leak the FBI. Obviously they haven’t been paying attention.

 

[fraurosena]

This piece of explosive news is in jeopardy of being buried by the memo release, but it’s another example of the devious disregard for national security and the intelligence agencies in particular.

 

 

[GrumpyGran]

I say the FBI at this point should release all info, then make sure that all of America understands that they HAD to expose Republican lies and because of this we are now at risk of terrorist attacks in this country. Everyone who dies because of terrorist attacks can blame the Republicans who were protecting their criminal President. Let's turn the tables now. Expose all their lies and use the proof that exists against them. Two thirds of this country don't trust them anyway.

Highlight government servants, in the FBI, who put their lives on the line being denigrated by the Republican party. Use Kelly's whine about Frederica Wilson and her appearance at a dedication ceremony of an FBI facility and ask if he's ever been to one. Use it to suggest that Dump has been trying to discredit our law enforcement since the investigation against him began.

Oh, and let's make sure we highlight that bit about Dump revealing that information about Israeli intelligence to the Russians. Make sure they understand that their "friend" Donald Trump gave the Russians the info. Mossad won't like that and it will blow little Jared out of the water. Take the gloves off.

 

[Gobsmacked]

On 29/01/2018 at 11:15 AM, fraurosena said:

Oh dear... 

German Bank Surrenders Access To Trump Family's International Financials

 

How is it legal to be President if he owes millions to a bank? Foreign or not? 

[fraurosena]

4 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

I say the FBI at this point should release all info, then make sure that all of America understands that they HAD to expose Republican lies and because of this we are now at risk of terrorist attacks in this country. Everyone who dies because of terrorist attacks can blame the Republicans who were protecting their criminal President. Let's turn the tables now. Expose all their lies and use the proof that exists against them. Two thirds of this country don't trust them anyway.

Highlight government servants, in the FBI, who put their lives on the line being denigrated by the Republican party. Use Kelly's whine about Frederica Wilson and her appearance at a dedication ceremony of an FBI facility and ask if he's ever been to one. Use it to suggest that Dump has been trying to discredit our law enforcement since the investigation against him began.

Oh, and let's make sure we highlight that bit about Dump revealing that information about Israeli intelligence to the Russians. Make sure they understand that their "friend" Donald Trump gave the Russians the info. Mossad won't like that and it will blow little Jared out of the water. Take the gloves off.

 

I’ve been seeing quite a few tweets from Democrats on the Hill. The tone and verbiage has decidedly changed in the last two days and they are openly attacking the administration and the Republicans. The gloves have most definitely come off. They are done with polite inferences and delicate implications and are baldly stating exactly what they think. The MSM is also becoming more frank and less oblique, but not as much as the politicians yet, as far as can tell.

I believe things are gearing up to do precisely what you suggest. Prepare your eyes, for they are sure to get an extreme popping workout with all the revelations over the weekend.

[GrumpyGran]

3 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I’ve been seeing quite a few tweets from Democrats on the Hill. The tone and verbiage has decidedly changed in the last two days and they are openly attacking the administration and the Republicans. The gloves have most definitely come off. They are done with polite inferences and delicate implications and are baldly stating exactly what they think. The MSM is also becoming more frank and less oblique, but not as much as the politicians yet, as far as can tell.

I believe things are gearing up to do precisely what you suggest. Prepare your eyes, for they are sure to get an extreme popping workout with all the revelations over the weekend.

Bring it.

[fraurosena]

Good question!

 

[formergothardite]

I feel like we are watching our country being taken over by a dictator. The checks and balances are failing. I hope that we will make it through this dark time and learn how to prevent things like this. We need to pass laws that will help prevent this from happening again. A simple, "candidates must release tax forms and show that they understand the constitution" would have prevented Trump from becoming president. 

 

[onekidanddone]

45 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

I feel like we are watching our country being taken over by a dictator. The checks and balances are failing. I hope that we will make it through this dark time and learn how to prevent things like this. We need to pass laws that will help prevent this from happening again. A simple, "candidates must release tax forms and show that they understand the constitution" would have prevented Trump from becoming president. 

 

He may very well understand the Constitution, but he simply doesn't care or think it applies to him. This whole 'running the country like a busies' is exactly what he is doing. Expecting peole to be completely loyal my work great in his line of work as a mob boss real estate developer, but  now he has laws to follow and he won't.

[Howl]

14 hours ago, LeftCoastLurker said:

Does anybody else feel like we're playing out a Tom Clancy novel in real life?

I know, right? The element of suspense is certainly there!  I can't wait for the memo to be released. It is no surprise that it is being released on a Friday and not by the White House.  If it's a dud, the WH can blame it on Nunes and any other warm bodies they can find to throw under the bus. 

 

Quote

 

On 1/29/2018 at 5:15 AM, fraurosena said:  Oh dear... 

German Bank Surrenders Access To Trump Family's International Financials

 

I wasn't clear on this.  Deutsche Bank surrendered the records to BaFin (the German banking regulatory agency) but nothing about the records being sent along to Mueller.  

Quote

Duetsche Bank is only slightly concerned about any condemnation by BaFin.  Their bigger concern is the likelihood that special Counsel Robert Mueller will request the transaction records as part of his investigation into Russian tampering during the 2016 Presidential Election, and what that would do to the bank’s reputation.  Given their very valid concern, and their history with Trump, Deutsche Bank’s best bet is to hand all the evidence over to Mueller and his team now.

Considering the litigious history of Trump and Deutsche Bank, it's pretty amazing that they continued to deal with Trump money, unless so much Trump-related dirty money is laundered through the bank that they can write off a few hundred million here or there as the cost of doing business. 

[onekidanddone]

11 minutes ago, Howl said:

I know, right? The element of suspense is certainly there!  I can't wait for the memo to be released. It is no surprise that it is being released on a Friday and not by the White House.  If it's a dud, the WH can blame it on Nunes and any other warm bodies they can find to throw under the bus. 

Is it a dud? Would they risk all the backlash if thing was obviously worthless scrap paper? 

[fraurosena]

6 minutes ago, Howl said:

I know, right? The element of suspense is certainly there!  I can't wait for the memo to be released. It is no surprise that it is being released on a Friday and not by the White House.  If it's a dud, the WH can blame it on Nunes and any other warm bodies they can find to throw under the bus. 

Dud or not, he's going to use it as a pretext to start firing people in the DOJ and FBI, if his latest tweets are anything to go by. I've posted copies of them in the main thread.

1 hour ago, formergothardite said:

I feel like we are watching our country being taken over by a dictator. The checks and balances are failing. I hope that we will make it through this dark time and learn how to prevent things like this. We need to pass laws that will help prevent this from happening again. A simple, "candidates must release tax forms and show that they understand the constitution" would have prevented Trump from becoming president. 

 

He can only become a dictator because others are enabling him. If the checks and balances were enacted, then this could never happen. But the corrupt and power-hungry GOP-top is most to blame for what is going on in the US at the moment. They are not doing their job. If they were, a president could never, ever become an authoritarian/dictator. But from the beginning, blatant disregard and even breaking of the rules of the Constitution have been ignored by the very institutions that were put in place to hold the presidency up to democratic standards. That's why America is in the state that it's in at the moment.

Just now, onekidanddone said:

Is it a dud? Would they risk all the backlash if thing was obviously worthless scrap paper? 

In a word: yes.

Whatever the cost, they want that Mueller investigation shut down.

[apple1]

6 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Dud or not, he's going to use it as a pretext to start firing people in the DOJ and FBI, if his latest tweets are anything to go by. I've posted copies of them in the main thread.

He can only become a dictator because others are enabling him. If the checks and balances were enacted, then this could never happen. But the corrupt and power-hungry GOP-top is most to blame for what is going on in the US at the moment. They are not doing their job. If they were, a president could never, ever become an authoritarian/dictator. But from the beginning, blatant disregard and even breaking of the rules of the Constitution have been ignored by the very institutions that were put in place to hold the presidency up to democratic standards. That's why America is in the state that it's in at the moment.

In a word: yes.

Whatever the cost, they want that Mueller investigation shut down.

I agree with all of this.

I do have two additions.

It's also facilitated by Trump's support from the ordinary population. I know his approval rating sucks overall, but there are still enough supporters to allow it all to continue. Hoping a fair portion of these people will come to their senses. Admit to themselves that they were bamboozled and move on.

The other facilitator: "State media" - i.e. Faux News - feeding the line that keeps the supporters going.

 

I really want to just cry for my nation.

[onekidanddone]

I'm not to sure how I'm going to make it through the day.  I'm in fight or flight mode right now. Can't focus on work at all

[Howl]

1 hour ago, apple1 said:

It's also facilitated by Trump's support from the ordinary population. I know his approval rating sucks overall, but there are still enough supporters to allow it all to continue.

I was blown away a moment ago by the brilliantly evil genius of Trump's latest tweet that plays directly into the theme of corrupt, educated elites vs. ordinary people that was the key to his campaign success:  

Quote

The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans - something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

An interesting perspective from the WaPo: "The memo, the dossier and the political weaponization of misinformation"

Spoiler

There are few things that warm the cockles of President Trump’s most ardent opponents like the Steele dossier. Right there on paper is the alleged Russia conspiracy they had convinced themselves existed, complete with salacious scenes from Russian hotel rooms and shadowy meetings between Trump allies and Russian officials.

But as we’re finding out this week, while spreading unverified information that conforms to your preexisting beliefs may be cathartic, it can also be weaponized against you. And that is exactly what’s happening with the impending release of the Nunes memo.

At Politico, Marcy Wheeler makes the case that Democrats have embraced “a flawed dossier” that allowed Republicans to argue that the Russia investigation is a witch hunt. She points to Rachel Maddow devoting an entire show to it and to some prominent Democrats emphasizing that information contained within the dossier has proved to be accurate.

I think that misses the point somewhat; the official Democratic Party hasn’t pushed the dossier terribly hard. But it didn’t really need to, either. The mere publishing of the document — a controversial decision by BuzzFeed News in January 2017 — caused a feeding frenzy among liberals anxious to prove the worst about Trump. It was the equivalent of tossing a porterhouse in the direction of some starving wolves. There was just no stopping its spread, regardless of how much Maddow or Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) talked about it or how many context-rich explainers were written.

BuzzFeed has stood by its decision and reasserted the justification behind it — that people deserve to decide for themselves and that more transparency is better than less. This was a memo floating around behind closed doors for a long time, the logic went, so why not let it be vetted publicly?

The problem is that people are not nearly as judicious in their consumption of news as we’d all like them to be, as evidenced by the spread of the birther movement on the right about a decade ago. If the dossier contained information that confirmed people’s preexisting beliefs about Trump, they would sure find a way to believe it — or at least feel good enough to pass it along.

And pass it along they have. The huge public interest in the dossier understandably led to news organizations digging into its origins. We soon found out that the man behind it, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, was funded by Democrats during the 2016 campaign. Then we found out those Democrats happened to be the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Further digging revealed that it was used as part of the justification for surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, and that the FBI reached a later-aborted agreement to work with Steele.

It didn't take long for Republicans to lodge conspiracy theories alleging that law enforcement was effectively working with Democrats to monitor the Trump campaign — a theory Trump had seeded by baselessly accusing former president Barack Obama of wiretapping him during the 2016 campaign. And not even Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly pooh-poohing that idea was going to stop it.

Which brings us to today. Republicans are preparing to release a memo Friday that points to alleged abuses by law enforcement in the surveillance of Page. The memo, crafted by aides to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), seems likely to suggest or imply that the Steele dossier was a major justification for the warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as a FISA warrant.

It’s unclear how close to the whole truth the memo will be. The FBI has raised “grave concerns” about it. And as The Washington Post’s Matt Zapotosky notes, standards for FISA warrants are rigorous and almost certainly required lots of evidence beyond the Steele dossier. But Zapotosky also notes that combating misinformation or key omissions in the memo could be difficult for the FBI and even Democrats on the Intelligence Committee, because although the Steele dossier is known publicly, other justifications offered in the FISA application may be too sensitive to disclose. (In other words: Law enforcement has to protect its information and methods in a way news organizations don’t.)

It seems pretty likely, even before seeing the memo, that no matter how hard news organizations try to apply justifiable skepticism to it, Republicans will surely gobble it up just like Democrats gobbled up the Steele dossier. And we probably never would have gotten here if the unproved information contained within the dossier hadn’t been released and gone viral in the first place.

I’m not necessarily arguing that the dossier shouldn't have been released — perhaps it will eventually result in the whole truth coming out — but it gave Republicans something to latch on to and believe that the president they voted for and supported was being unfairly persecuted. It gave Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) the tools to argue, in what probably will be a compelling way for his fellow partisans, that the basis for law enforcement’s handling of the Russia investigation was faulty. And that’s the opposite of what Democrats would have hoped would result.

It seems a process that began with dubious, incomplete and unverified information that cheered Democrats may end with dubious, incomplete and unverifiable information that cheers Republicans. And we’ll be as divided as ever over it with no real attainable resolution in sight.

I'm not sure I agree with the author, but it's an interesting perspective.

[fraurosena]

Like I said in an earlier post, the Dems are really not mincing their words anymore. 

 

[onekidanddone]

25 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Like I said in an earlier post, the Dems are really not mincing their words anymore. 

 

Like the rest of us they are straight out of gives a fucks. Mr. One Kid asked me yesterday how work was going. Without going into detail, my job security and moral have been decimated since Jan 20. Straight of gives a fuck. Yea that was all I could say.  Mortgage, 529, health insurance and the dim hope that our country still needs us to not give up. That is what is keeping me going.

 

[Cartmann99]

Different Fox News personalities are tweeting that the White House didn't redact anything from the memo, but I'm not seeing that from any other sources. 

[AmazonGrace]

I

[fraurosena]

Since when is it a reporter's job to figure that out? That's your job, presidunce!

What a coward. All he has is bluster and bluff when he's safely tucked up under the covers of his bed tweeting away on his phone, but as soon as he has to deal with real people, he can't even give a straight answer.