BREAKING

BREAKING

MEMO WAS RELEASED

House Intelligence MEMO Released: What It Says !!!
By Gary Maher - February 2, 2018033

The House Intelligence Committee has released its controversial memo outlining alleged abuses of secret surveillance by the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation.

The House Intelligence Committee has released its controversial memo outlining alleged abuses of secret surveillance by the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation. Here are some key points:

* The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page.

* Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.

* The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications.

* DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele’s bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.

The FBI and Justice Department mounted a monthslong effort to keep the information outlined in the memo out of the House Intelligence Committee’s hands. Only the threat of contempt charges and other forms of pressure forced the FBI and Justice to give up the material.

Once Intelligence Committee leaders and staff compiled some of that information into the memo, the FBI and Justice Department, supported by Capitol Hill Democrats, mounted a ferocious campaign of opposition, saying release of the memo would endanger national security and the rule of law.

But Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes never wavered in his determination to make the information available to the public. President Trump agreed, and, as required by House rules, gave his approval for release.

Finally, the memo released today does not represent the sum total of what House investigators have learned in their review of the FBI and Justice Department Trump-Russia investigation. That means the fight over the memo could be replayed in the future when the Intelligence Committee decides to release more information.

But the memo isn’t the whole story

The release of the Nunes memo did not include the release of the underlying materials used in the FISA warrant application for Page. That’s important. As my colleagues Zack Beauchamp and Alex Ward explain:

[T]he memo’s claims are impossible to evaluate without seeing the underlying intelligence it was based on. Nunes could have highlighted the FBI’s citation of Steele without mentioning other, more concrete sources the agency listed.

“The memo won’t actually answer the underlying question, which is whether there was sufficient independent evidence to support the underlying FISA application,” Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said. “Only the application materials can conclusively shed a light on that.”

A FISA warrant application for Page would have included any and all information the FBI felt a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge should see in order to grant a warrant in the first place. In the case of Page, that may have included information from the Steele dossier, but also more details on Page’s existing relationships with Russian officials, which have been known to the FBI since at least 2013. To get a warrant to surveil Page, the FBI would only have needed to prove that Page was an “agent” of a foreign entity, even if that did not entail illegal activity.

And historically, it hasn’t been difficult for intelligence agencies to get FISA warrant applications approved by a judge. Warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are rarely denied — in fact, from 1979 to 2013, a FISC judge denied warrant requests just 12 times (with 533 requests for modifications to the warrant). In 2013, Slate reporter Brian Palmer found, “Despite receiving more than […] 1,000 requests every year since 2002, the court has never denied more than four applications in a single year.”

What comes next?

It’s unclear what the impact of the Nunes memo will be, as Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, who have already seen the memo, strongly disagree on its implications. House Republicans argue that the memo is evidence of an anti-Trump conspiracy within the FBI.

House Democrats on the committee, on the other hand, say that the memo is merely part of Trump’s strategy to discredit Rosenstein, replace him as deputy attorney general, and ultimately end the Mueller investigation. They also point to the fact that Nunes was a member of Trump’s presidential transition team and has an extremely close relationshipwith the White House.

Rosenstein is the person in charge of overseeing the Mueller investigation following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal. Rosenstein has defended Mueller in the past, telling Congress that he had “no good cause” to fire him from his role as special counsel.

Before Rosenstein testified before Congress in December, Trump reportedly asked Rosenstein if he was “on his team.” That in and of itself isn’t necessarily unusual, but combined with an ongoing war of words among House Republicans with regards to Rosenstein, it points to an effort to delegitimize the deputy attorney general within the GOP and among Trump’s supporters, an effort that Trump himself has engaged in on Twitter.

In theory, Trump firing Rosenstein would allow him to put in place a new deputy attorney general more amenable to Trump’s position — and more likely to either curtail Mueller’s investigatory powers or end the investigation altogether. In an interview with the Washington Post, former federal prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg said, “Rosenstein is in charge of the Mueller probe. He picked Mueller and has testified under oath that he won’t fire him absent clear misconduct. So if Rosenstein goes, Trump would pick a new deputy attorney general who would no doubt be much more compliant to Trump.” But as my colleague Andrew Prokop wrote in December, any effort to stop Mueller’s investigation or fire Mueller himself would be politically risky for Trump.

But no matter what happens, the release of the Nunes memo only serves to escalate the conflict between the FBI and the Department of Justice and Trump’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill and in the White House itself.

YO MULLER....GOOD LUCK IMPEACHING AND INDICTING PRESIDENT TRUMP

LOL...LMAO..LOL..

https://www.usapoliticstoday.org/fisa-memo-released/
https://www.usapoliticstoday.org/fisa-memo-released/