RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some things still do not add up about the so-called Steele dossier, FISA warrants, the Nunes memo, and the hysterical Democratic reaction to it.

A Big Deal or a Nothing Deal?

1) Progressives and Democrats warned on the eve of the memo’s release that it would cause havoc throughout the intelligence agencies, by exposing classified means and processes.

When no serious intelligence expert claimed that the released memo had done such damage, the official response to the memo was suddenly recalibrated by progressives. It went from being radioactive to a “nothingburger.”

The obvious conclusion is cynical: Cry Armageddon to prevent its release, then, after the release, resort to yawns to downplay its significance. An even more cynical interpretation is that Rod Rosenstein, James Comey, and other officials stridently objected to the release of the memo because they are named in it. Comey incoherently mocked the memo’s purported unimportance even while listing all its deleterious effects and the crises that would ensue.

Congressional, DOJ, and FBI resistance to the release of most documents connected to FISA-gate apparently originates with fears that information will either reveal Obama-administration efforts to surveille Trump officials during a campaign or will suggest that the impetus for the Mueller investigation came as a result of illegal activities and a concocted dossier — or both.

2) Critics scream, “Carter Page is no big deal.” Aside from the easy retort that neither, initially, was a petty break-in at the Watergate complex, or rumors of supplying arms to distant guerillas in Central America, Page is a big deal for a variety of reasons.

Democrats allege that, given Carter Page’s familiarity with Russians, it was logical for the Obama administration to use the dossier’s references to him to substantiate FISA warrants.

But is not the opposite more likely true?

My research had previously suggested that the Steele Dossier may have really been the work of Cody Shearer, one of Bill’s plumbers. The Grassley memo doesn’t name Shearer but indicates that the dossier produced by Christopher Steele had been based on work from the Clinton campaign.

Clinton associates were “feeding” allegations to former British spy Christopher Steele at the same time he was compiling the controversial anti-Trump dossier paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign, according to an unclassified memo from senior Senate Republicans who recently made a criminal referral.

Those Republicans, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had asked the Justice Department in January to investigate Steele based on evidence they say suggests he lied to the FBI about his contacts with the media (a violation of 18 USC 1001) — or the FBI misrepresented Steele’s statements.

Democrats and their apologists in the mainstream media are in a state of pitiful denial. They refuse to accept the fact that certain senior officials at the FBI and Department of Justice with political agendas misled the FISA court in their applications for a warrant to spy on an American citizen, Carter Page. First, the Democrats and their apologists raised the specter of a national security crisis if the House Intelligence Committee memo on the discredited Christopher Steele anti-Trump “dossier,” used in part to justify the surveillance warrant, were made public. Then, when the memo was made public, they claimed, in the words of California Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, that it was a “nothing burger.” There was in fact a lot of beef in the memo, but Democrats and their progressive friends have eliminated truth from their diets.

We shall see what so-called “context” the Democrats put into their rebuttal memo, if and when released. Given their tendency to put their heads in the sand when evidence of malfeasance by partisan higher-ups in the nation’s chief law enforcement agencies stares them in the face, we can expect little more than spin.

From what has been reported so far by the New York Times, the “Democratic memo is said to contend that the F.B.I. was more forthcoming with the surveillance court than Republicans had claimed.” The article quoted Connecticut Democrat Jim Hines, who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, claiming that the FBI did not mislead the FISA court because “the judge had some sense that this information came out of a political context.” However, the article went on to say that, according to people familiar with the Democratic memo, the memo concedes that “the F.B.I. did not name the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign as having funded the Steele research.” Instead, the FBI merely disclosed that the information it had received from Steele was “politically motivated,” which the Democrats believe is sufficient.

Democrats and other left-wingers melted down in unison over the weekend after the release of a congressional memo asserting that Obama-era officials relied on the discredited Trump-Russia dossier to obtain court-ordered foreign-intelligence wiretaps against U.S. citizens in a bid to reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election.

The extended freakout came after the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence publicly unveiled a newly declassified four-page report detailing intelligence surveillance abuses perpetrated by the Obama administration during the past election cycle. As expected, the document confirmed more or less all the terrible things we’ve been hearing about the disgraced Federal Bureau of Investigation and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Justice.

One of the more outrageous examples of hyperbole came from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who absurdly claimed “the release of this memo is really reminiscent of the darkest days of the McCarthy era.”

As left-wingers see things, when governmental transparency exposes Republican wrongdoing, it is noble, patriotic, and just. When it exposes Democrat wrongdoing, it is terrorism and treason.

The memo itself is devastating. It shows how corrupt the swamp-dwellers in the nation’s capital are. No wonder Democrats shrieked so loudly in protest of the memo’s release: it indicts them. (Full memo here.)

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley on Monday released an unclassified version of his recent letter to the Justice Department urging a criminal investigation into Christopher Steele, and it raises more questions about the credibility of the dossier that Mr. Steele generated in 2016.

The unclassified version is heavily redacted, consisting of 14 readable paragraphs. It nonetheless provides new details about the FBI’s application to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order against former Trump official Carter Page in October 2016, a request that relied on the Steele dossier. The referral letter says Mr. Steele may have lied to the FBI and that the FBI provided false information to a FISA judge.

The FBI fired Mr. Steele after the ex-British spy talked about his interaction with the bureau and his dossier for an Oct. 30, 2016 Mother Jones article. Yet the referral notes that in subsequent sworn court filings in Britain, Mr. Steele said he also briefed reporters in “late summer/autumn 2016,” including the New York Times, Washington Post and Yahoo News. Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson, who hired Mr. Steele and was retained by the Hillary Clinton campaign, has confirmed these briefings.

Yet according to the Grassley referral, this conflicts with “classified documents reviewed by” his committee. In other words, the FBI’s application for surveillance, filed October 21, 2016, led the court to believe that Mr. Steele wasn’t talking to the press and working a political angle. Such an admission might have derailed the surveillance order.

WASHINGTON — Three days after the release of the GOP staff memo alleging FISA abuses in the monitoring of Trump campaign adivsor Carter Page, the House Intelligence Committee memo unanimously voted to release a memo from committee Democrats rebutting the GOP document.

The memo now goes to the White House for a five-day review, a national security survey like that for the memo written by staff of Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

It’s not clear if President Trump, who lauded Nunes on Twitter today as “a man of tremendous courage and grit” who “may someday be recognized as a Great American Hero,” will OK the release of the Democratic memo.

“If that memo is voted out and it comes to the White House we will consider it on the same terms we considered the Nunes memo — which is to allow for a legal review, national security review led by the White House Counsel’s Office, and then within five days the president will make a decision about declassifying it,” White House spokesman Raj Shah told reporters.

A spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Friday that “if it is scrubbed to ensure it does not reveal sources and methods of our intelligence gathering, the speaker supports the release of the Democrats’ memo.”

A week ago, House Intel Republicans voted to delay the release of the Democrats’ memo. Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told MSNBC tonight that what he thinks changed between now and then was “a week of shaming, essentially.”

Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:

Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.

Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.

Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.

Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.

“Elite” is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it.

Only a few aging historians still remember Rep. John J. Rooney, but from the 1940s into the 1970s he was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s most powerful enabler. Rooney, a Brooklyn, N.Y., Democrat, led the House appropriations subcommittee that oversaw the Justice Department. He remained Hoover’s steadfast ally as presidents from Truman through Nixon came and went.

John Rooney personified an era in which congressional Democrats eagerly aided and abetted the FBI’s running amok, as the bureau surveilled political activists who attracted Hoover’s ire. Rooney’s retirement in 1974 ushered in a radically different age, featuring rigorous and aggressive congressional oversight. A new generation of Democrats, led by principled progressives like Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike, courageously proved ready and willing to expose and eliminate the abuse of Americans’ constitutional rights that had long been Hoover’s political bread and butter.

The Church Committee, along with decades’ worth of Freedom of Information Act releases, exposed once top-secret documents that FBI executives never imagined would see the light of day. These files detailed the scale of politically motivated misbehavior that had occurred when executive-branch controls and meaningful congressional oversight were absent. As a historian who cut his teeth on that copious record, I found it unimaginable that congressional Democrats, or American progressives generally, would ever return to championing unquestioned acceptance of FBI claims that its surveillance practices must remain hidden from the public.

Treason by any other name is not defined by refusing to applaud Donald Trump during his State of the Union speech last week. Still, at a discursive speech Monday in Cincinnati that was nominally about the strong economy, President Trump decided to drop the T-word on the Democratic hand-sitters. “They were like death, and un-American,” Mr. Trump said to the Ohio factory workers. “Somebody said treasonous. Can we call that treason? Why not? They certainly don’t seem to love our country very much.”

When politicians start accusing opponents of treason, our former Journal colleague Seth Lipsky has made it a practice to recall that “treason” is defined narrowly in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution.
President Donald Trump delivers a speech on tax reform after touring Sheffer Corporation in Blue Ash outside Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 5. Photo: jonathan ernst/Reuters

Perhaps we should be grateful to Mr. Trump for giving us the opportunity to quote the Founding Fathers: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

Watching Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer scowl through the State of the Union speech, several words occurred to us: churlish, grumpy, resentful. But treasonous didn’t spring to mind. Mr. Trump’s mind no doubt is filled with smoldering anger because opponents have called him authoritarian, totalitarian, Hitler and insane.