RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ever watch one of those games in which it looks like the road team is inadvertently doing everything it can to give the game away but the home team is too inept to capitalize?

Welcome to the “Trump-Russia” investigation and the pro-Trump media’s coverage of the latest “stunning” revelation: a text in which two top FBI counterintelligence officials discuss the fact that the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

This has much of the conservative media crowing: The text, commentators exclaim, shows that Obama lied four months earlier when he claimed — hilariously, to be sure — that he never interfered in law-enforcement matters.

Uh, guys, counterintelligence is not law enforcement. If Obama demanded an intelligence briefing, that indicates he was doing what he was supposed to be doing as president.

Your play here is not that Obama is a liar. It is that the president is supposed to “interfere” in intelligence investigations. That makes the Trump-Russia obstruction narrative patently absurd.

If I sound a bit snarky, please cut me some slack. Since a time well before Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, I have been harping on the critical distinction between counterintelligence investigations and criminal investigations. It is often missed, even by lawyers if they are unacquainted with national-security law. You can’t blame people for being confused: Both kinds of inquiries are called “investigations,” just as apples and oranges are both “fruits,” but they are very different things.

Criminal investigations are about prosecuting people who violate the penal law. Political officials are generally supposed to stay out of them because we are a rule-of-law society — we want individual cases to be decided strictly by the law, not by political considerations.

There is not, nor should there be, complete independence between politics and this law-enforcement mission: Law enforcement is an executive political responsibility; the president is accountable for it; he sets the government’s law-enforcement priorities; prosecutors and investigators exercise the president’s power, not their own; and the president has undeniable constitutional authority to wade into investigations — even to the point of pardoning law-breakers. Still, by and large, the president should not interfere in criminal cases. If the president does interfere, he should do so transparently: Issue a pardon or order the investigation closed, and take the political heat for it; don’t stage-manage a farce to make it look like your crony is being exonerated by a real investigation when everyone knows you will not permit charges to be filed (see, e.g., the Clinton emails case).

The most bitter dispute over the Nunes memo involves Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. This might seem odd since the memo, published last week by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Devin Nunes (R. Calif.), does not address the Mueller investigation. Rather, it homes in on potential abuses of foreign-intelligence-collection authorities by Obama-era Justice Department and FBI officials, said to have occurred many months before Mueller was appointed.

Nevertheless, it is simply a fact that many ardent supporters of President Trump claim the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation is destroyed by revelations in the Nunes memo — particularly, the improper use of the unverified Steele dossier to obtain a FISA-court warrant to spy on Carter Page, who had been a Trump campaign adviser. The idea is that without the Steele dossier, there would be no Trump-Russia narrative, and thus no collusion investigation — which is how Trump supporters perceive the Mueller probe.

Naturally, this has prompted a vitriolic response. Trump critics see the Mueller investigation as the path to impeachment, and thus anathematize Chairman Nunes as a Trumpist hack bent on razing the FBI — longtime bête noire of the Left, which, through the alchemy of Trump derangement, has suddenly become great a pillar of Our Values.

But the Trump-deranged have only themselves to blame.

The Watergate scandal of 1972–74 was uncovered largely because of outraged Democratic politicians and a bulldog media. They both claimed that they had saved American democracy from the Nixon administration’s attempt to warp the CIA and FBI to cover up an otherwise minor, though illegal, political break-in.

In the Iran-Contra affair of 1985–87, the media and liberal activists uncovered wrongdoing by some rogue members of the Reagan government. They warned of government overreach and of using the “Deep State” to subvert the law for political purposes.

We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.

But none of these government officials told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the warrant requests were based on an unverified dossier that had originated as a hit piece funded in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump during the current 2016 campaign.

Nor did these officials reveal that the author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, had already been dropped as a reliable source by the FBI for leaking to the press.

When the question of who cooked up the gross, repulsive contents of the Steele Dossier is asked, is anyone surprised the name of Hillary Clinton’s consigliere, Sid Blumenthal, comes up?

Blumenthal has that kind of mind, and sure enough we read of him again. This time, there’s a new memo, created by Senate Republicans Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham about the creation of the Steele dossier, and apparently one of the contributors was Sid Blumenthal. According to Fox News:

Last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., made a criminal referral regarding Steele to the FBI. The referral, parts of which were declassified Monday, included a reference to “a foreign source [who] gave information to an unnamed associate of Hillary and Bill Clinton, who then gave information to an unnamed official in the Obama State Department, who then gave the information to Steele.”

In another section, the referral stated that Steele received information from “a foreign sub-source who is in touch with (redacted), a contact of (redacted), a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to (redacted).'”

Rep. Trey Gowdy, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, strongly hinted to Fox News that the “friend of Hillary Clinton” was Blumenthal:

When host Martha MacCallum asked if he was referring to Blumenthal, Gowdy answered, “That’d be really warm. You’re warm, yeah.”

We now have a side-by-side comparison of two FBI-redacted versions of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s criminal referral of Christopher Steele for lying to the FBI. After releasing a heavy-redacted memo on Monday, committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) put out an updated version late Tuesday after the FBI removed several of its earlier redactions. It offers a glimpse into what the Bureau initially considered to be classified information, and seems to justify what Grassley called his “loss of faith in the ability of the Justice Department and the FBI to do their job free of partisan, political bias.” (You can read my initial take on the memo here.)

The memo also supports many of the key findings by the House Intelligence committee, including Steele’s secret dealings with the press and the failure of the Justice Department and the FBI to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the political funding and source of the so-called dossier.

Written by Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on January 4, the memo presents disturbing evidence about how the FBI, DOJ, Steele, and Fusion GPS, with the help from one well-known reporter, colluded to convince the FISA court to surveil Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. The original redactions were not made to protect national security or safeguard a valuable source: They were made to cover-up the way the FBI manipulated the FISA warrant process and relied mostly—if not solely—on a dishonest, politically-funded foreign operative to gain approval to spy on a U.S. citizen.