RUTHFULLY YOURS

The House Democratic surveillance memo is out, and it should worry Americans who care about privacy and due process. The memo defends the conduct of the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation in obtaining a series of warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The Democrats argue that Christopher Steele, the British former spy who compiled the Trump “dossier” on which the government’s initial warrant application was grounded, was credible. They also claim the FISA court had the information it needed about the dossier’s provenance. And they do not dispute former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s acknowledgment that the FBI would not have sought a FISA order without the Steele dossier.

The most troubling issue is that the surveillance orders were obtained by withholding critical information about Mr. Steele from the FISA court. The court was not informed that Mr. Steele was personally opposed to Mr. Trump’s election, that his efforts were funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or that he was the source of media reports that the FBI said corroborated his dossier. These facts are essential to any judicial assessment of Mr. Steele’s veracity and the applications’ merits.

The FBI should have been especially wary of privately produced Russia-related dossiers. As the Washington Post and CNN reported in May 2017, Russian disinformation about Mrs. Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch evidently prompted former FBI Director James Comey to announce publicly the close of the investigation of the Clinton email server, for fear that the disinformation might be released and undermine the bureau’s credibility.

In addition, even assuming the dossier was accurate regarding Mr. Page, its allegations are thin. Mr. Page was said to have met in Moscow with Russian officials, who raised the potential for cooperation if Trump was elected; Mr. Page was noncommittal. The most significant claim—that those officials offered Mr. Page a bribe in the form of Russian business opportunities—suggests he was not a Russian agent. Existing operatives don’t need to be bribed.

There was no good reason to withhold from the FISA court any information regarding Mr. Steele, his anti-Trump biases, or the dossier’s origin as opposition research. The court operates in secret, so there was no danger of revealing intelligence sources and methods. The inescapable conclusion is that the information was withheld because the court would have been unlikely to issue the order if it knew the whole truth.

That’s a problem because following the rules and being absolutely candid with the court is even more essential in the FISA context than in ordinary criminal investigations. Congress enacted FISA in 1978 to create a judicial process through which counterintelligence surveillance could take place within the U.S., even when directed at American citizens, consistent with “this Nation’s commitment to privacy and individual rights.” CONTINUE AT SITE

My son Mark, whose mind is more capacious, objective and generous than mine, nicely formulated the Donald Trump problem for thoughtful conservatives. “I approve of almost everything he has done,” my son remarked, “and I disapprove of almost everything he has said.”

Second the motion. I approve of the Neil Gorsuch appointment, the moving of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the removal of often-strangling regulations from much commerce, the opening of the Keystone pipeline, the tax-reform law, and more.

I disapprove of the bragging tweets, the touchiness, the crude put-downs of anyone who disagrees with him (“Little Marco, ” “insecure Oprah, ” “Sloppy Steve, ” and the rest), the unrestrained vulgarity. America has had ignorant, corrupt, vain, lazy presidents before, but in Donald Trump we have the first president who is a genuine boor.

In many realms of life, a boor’s rude, unmannerly nature can be forgivable. A wise stockbroker, who makes his clients lots of money, might get away with being a boor. A boorish winning football coach— Mike Ditka, take a bow—is livable if not likable. Showbiz has never been without its boors, from George Jessel to Whoopi Goldberg. Even a boorish friend is possible, if he is also loyal, generous and honorable. But a boorish president of the United States presents a problem.

The presidency, like the monarchy in England, has a symbolic along with a practical aspect. The president is meant to represent the nation at its best. What precisely that means can vary greatly in a country as wide and differentiated as ours. Dwight David Eisenhower was a different model of our best than was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry S. Truman was different again, and yet in his own way he represented the country, in its Middle Western, small-business, common-sensical strain.

Democrats scramble to misdirect in defense of their own as the Nunes memo remains unrebutted.

On Saturday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, released his memorandum in an attempt to rebut the Republican memorandum that HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) released on February 2.

As I wrote on February 5, the Nunes memo describes the FBI’s and the Department of Justice’s abuses of their law enforcement powers to spy on the Trump campaign and its advisors during and after the 2016 election.

The Schiff memo is cleverly written, making several assertions by which it attempts to confuse and misinform on the issues. It flails and fails in Schiff’s effort to discredit the principal findings of the Nunes memo.

The key points made by the Nunes memo are:

(1) that the FBI relied on the Steele dossier, a compilation of anti-Trump information that the FBI had not verified, and swore to its truth to obtain surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a one-time Trump campaign advisor; and

(2) that the FBI failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), from which the warrants were sought, that the Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

President Trump not only wiped out any shred of Mr. Obama’s so-called legacy, he effectively destroyed the fantasy of a magical genie that has guided the former community organizer’s lifelong obsessive mission to destroy America.

Imagine a guy in his mid-thirties walking on a beach in Hawaii and seeing an object that actually looked like the genie lamp he read about in his childhood—the kind of lamp he could rub until a genie popped out and granted his most fervent wish.

Being a pretty ordinary guy—you know, the kind who hung out smoking pot, who slacked off in school, who didn’t get the girl and actually hated and was jealous of the guys who did—he asked for power.

Poof—the Genie granted him his wish, power beyond his wildest dreams.

To be sure, the Genie certainly didn’t know that this ordinary guy didn’t want merely to embarrass the guys he was jealous of, he wanted to destroy them. And not through the ordinary methods—knives, guns, poison, et al, although all of them might play a part one day—but through politics!

The most important thing the Genie didn’t know was that all those cool, get-the-girl guys were only symbols for the thing Mr. Ordinary hated most—America!

But too late—the Genie had given him the power to mobilize the entire world against the country he claimed was the place of his birth.