RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Sometimes Donald Trump is right. The President set off another tempest in a teapot in Britain Monday with a tweet telling the truth about the U.K. National Health Service. Criticizing Democrats for proposing single-payer in America, Mr. Trump said Britain’s NHS is “broke and not working.”

In classic Trump style, he undermined his credibility in the same tweet by wrongly claiming Brits are marching against the NHS because they know the system is broken. Recent protests against Prime Minister Theresa May have been orchestrated by the left to demand more cash, not reform. The real scandal is that so many British politicians and commentators who know better claim the NHS is working fine.

The NHS is in the middle of its annual winter crisis—wherein central planners forget which season follows spring, summer and autumn and must reschedule surgeries and leave the ill in hospital hallways because the health service hasn’t prepared for its busiest time. Hospitals are running at 95% occupancy, and patients are waiting longer for urgent treatment. Only 85% of emergency-room patients were seen within four hours of arrival in December, the lowest share on record and well short of the NHS goal of 95%. January was probably worse.

The pressure for more spending is constant but it must compete against other demands in a country with already high tax rates. Spending on the NHS has increased by 1.3% annually in inflation-adjusted terms since 2010. That’s faster than British living standards are growing as wage increases have lagged inflation since the 2008 financial panic.

The case of the FBI and Christopher Steele gets curiouser and curiouser. In the latest news, GOP Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham late Tuesday released a less redacted version of their criminal referral letter to the Justice Department concerning Mr. Steele, who wrote the now famous dossier alleging Russian collusion with Donald Trump. The letter supports the recent House Intelligence Committee claims of surveillance abuse and offers new evidence that the Clinton campaign may have been more involved than previously known.

Democrats claim the House Intel memo distorts the FBI’s actions in obtaining in October 2016 an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor former Trump aide Carter Page. But the Grassley-Graham referral makes public for the first time actual text from the FBI’s FISA application, as well as classified testimony the FBI gave the Senate Judiciary Committee about the dossier and FISA application.

In particular, the referral rebuts the Democratic claim that the FBI told the FISA court about the partisan nature of the Steele dossier. “The FBI noted to a vaguely limited extent the political origins of the dossier,” says the letter. And “the FBI stated that the dossier information was compiled pursuant to the direction of a law firm who had hired an ‘identified U.S. person’—now known as Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS,” the firm that hired Mr. Steele.

But, adds the referral letter, “the application failed to disclose that the identities of Mr. Simpson’s ultimate clients were the Clinton campaign and the DNC [Democratic National Committee].” That’s not being honest with the judges who sign off on an eavesdrop order.