RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

You’ve heard the lie so often it has become a faux truth, one told and broadcast with such spite and frequency its propagators must be relieved they need offer only the headline shorthand ‘Trump is Putin’s stooge’. Yet the target of such enmity keeps winning. Like him or not as a man, we had all better hope that doesn’t change.

Did the FBI and Department of Justice use a dodgy and salacious dossier on Donald Trump, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, to repeatedly obtain a FISA warrant to wiretap the hapless Carter Pagem, for a time a bit player in the Trump election campaign? Did they deliberately omit to tell the judge about the provenance of the dossier? Did this mean that they wiretapped Trump Tower; which, incidentally, would have given them access the communications of Trump himself? Was Trump therefore right in March 2017 in claiming to have been wiretapped by the Dems?

The answer to all of these questions seems to be ‘yes’.

Is the whole Russian investigation a crock? Another ‘yes’. It is amazing really. After over a year of looking not one shred of evidence has been dug up to show collusion between Trump’s campaign and Putin. And yet the baseless slur continues, as it can. If nothing is found today or tomorrow, who knows what next week or month will bring if we keep digging.

Recall this all started with a suggestion that John Podesta (Clinton’s campaign head) had his emails phished (not ingeniously ‘hacked’ so far as we know) by the Russians in cahoots with Trump. The plot thickens. The Russians then passed them on to Wikileaks.

In other words, Trump and the Russians got into a (figurative or real) backroom to devise how to trick Podesta (or his staff) into revealing his email details and hence his dirty secrets. Why they stopped at Podesta, who knows? To this day we have no precise idea how it was done, but have to take it as fact from intelligence agencies that the Russians did it and, moreover, that Putin himself must have been personally complicit.

It is a joke. Where is the evidence? Apparently, you are disloyal if you ask. And, to boot, a Russian spy.

The Democrats and the media spent a week lying to the American people about the “memo.”

The memo was full of “classified information” and releasing” it would expose “our spying methods.” By “our,” they didn’t mean American spying methods. They meant Obama’s spying methods.

A former White House Ethics Lawyer claimed that the Nunes memo would undermine “national security.” On MSNBC, Senator Chris Van Hollen threatened that if the memo is released, the FBI and DOJ “will refuse to share information with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.”

Senator Cory Booker howled that releasing the memo was “treasonous” and might be “revealing sources and methods” and even “endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community.”

The memo isn’t treasonous. It reveals a treasonous effort by the Democrats to use our intelligence agencies to rig an election and overturn the will of the voters.

The only two “sources” 29 are Christopher Steele, who was funded by the Clinton campaign, and a Yahoo News article, that were used to obtain a FISA warrant against a Trump associate. That Yahoo story came from Michael Isikoff, the reporter who knew about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky but suppressed it. It was based on more leaks from Steele which the FBI and DOJ chose to ignore. Steele’s identity was already well known. The only new source revealed is Yahoo News.

No vital intelligence sources were compromised at Yahoo News. And no Yahoo News agents were killed.

The media spent a week lying to Americans about the dangers of the memo because it didn’t want them to find out what was inside. Today, the media and Dems switched from claiming that the memo was full of “classified information” that might get CIA agents killed to insisting that it was a dud and didn’t matter. Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.

To paraphrase a more recent song, it’s hard out there on a Dem. Staggered by Donald Trump’s unthinkable victory in the presidential election, Democrats have continued to be pummeled by the Trump’s tax reform, the supercharged economy, his withering tweet-scorn for them and their media flunkeys, their own failed government shut-down, and a rousing State of the Union address that raised his poll numbers and made the Democrat Congressmen in the audience look like pouting prom wallflowers.

And now comes the “Memo,” the House Intelligence Committee’s exposure of the slow-motion coup engineered by partisan FBI and DOJ functionaries, and other deep-state members of the “resistance.” Now it’s up to “we the people” to demand accountability from these abusers of the public trust and violators of the Constitution.

The intensity of the hysterical spin before and after the memo’s release has revealed the depths of anxiety over the chickens of corruption coming home to roost. Shrieks of “nuance” and “context” are desperate attempts to drown out the bad news. “How dare you!” protestations of the “professional integrity” and “sterling character” of political appointees and rank careerists in the intelligence agencies are pleas to the voters to pay no attention to the blue-state man behind the curtain.

Equally duplicitous as the Dems’ desperate misdirection is the squealing about damaging national security or intelligence gathering methods or vulnerable spies or the Constitution. But we know the FBI wanted to redact the names only to shield the possibly guilty men and women. None of the contents of the memo exposed intelligence-gathering techniques or undercover agents. And since when have progressives cared about the integrity of the Constitution? Where were they when their Messiah Obama, an alleged Constitutional scholar, trashed the Constitutional separation of powers and used an executive order to legislate the DACA program––something he said several times he couldn’t do because it was un-Constitutional?

What we have long suspected (see, e.g., here and here) has now been confirmed: The Obama Justice Department and the FBI used the unverified Steele dossier to convince a federal court to issue a warrant authorizing surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser. Confirmation came in the much-anticipated memorandum released today by the Republican-controlled House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The memo states that the Obama administration concealed from the court that the dossier was commissioned and paid for by the political campaign of Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Nor was the court informed that the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, told a senior Justice Department official that he was “desperate” to prevent Trump from being elected president.

Moreover, despite presenting dossier information as probable cause on four separate occasions — for the initial FISA warrant in October 2016, and three times in the ensuing months — the FBI failed to verify the dossier’s explosive allegations and failed to inform the court that its efforts to corroborate the allegations had been unavailing. Indeed, the memo relates that the government once presented a news story to the court as corroboration for Steele’s claims, apparently unaware that Steele himself was the source for the news story.

The dossier was a compilation of Steele’s reports, based on anonymous Russian sources. His informants provided information based on accounts that were multiple levels of hearsay removed from the events they purported to describe.

The FISA court warrant targeted Carter Page, who had volunteered to serve as a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser. The memo relates that the warrant was originally issued on October 21, 2016, and re-authorized three times thereafter. Under FISA, warrants targeting American citizens lapse after 90 days. If you’re keeping score, that means a warrant based on claims that Trump was corruptly aligned with the Kremlin was renewed twice after Donald Trump became president.