There's getting to be a backlash among certain conservatives, mainly of the #NeverTrump variety, against the idea that there's really a serious matter to be uncovered in the case of the FISA wiretap application for Carter Page, and in the attempts to cover up the documents related to it.
The thinking goes like this: Paranoid Trump superfans see some sinister deep state conspiracy in everything! Missing text messages! Unreleased memos! These nutcases are so off the rails, they're convinced they're going to find something "worse than Watergate"! What fruitcakes.
I've been using the term "worse than Watergate" for months in reference to this, and apparently that's now being turned against me and people like me by those on the right who never liked Trump to begin with and want to remain acceptable in polite society.
Let's be clear about what "worse than Watergate" means and why it's been used by me and others: The Watergate scandal was about people associated with the Nixon re-election campaign breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and planting listening devices in the hope they could get some useful information to wield against George McGovern in the 1972 presidential campaign. The commission of a burglary against your presidential opponent so you could plant a listening device is obviously a crime and a massive scandal. The ensuing attempts to Nixon and others to cover it up only made the scandal worse.
Now, let's fast-forward: We know that in 2016, during the Obama Administration, the FBI applied for a FISA warrant to wiretap Carter Page, who was an official of the Trump presidential campaign. There are multiple indications that the primary evidence presented as probable cause in this application was a dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, who was working for an outfit called Fusion GPS, which was being paid - albeit indirectly - by the Clinton campaign. It also appears that almost all the information in this dossier was unverified, and that much of it was false, and that the FBI made no attempt to verify any of it before using it in the FISA application.
If all this is true, I believe that is worse than Watergate for this reason: While the Nixon campaign used private citizens to commit a crime, and that's a very bad thing, the scenario laid out above would mean that the Obama Administration, via the Justice Department and specifically the FBI, abused a law enforcement mechanism of the federal government - feeding it false information to obtain legal cover for the act of spying on a political opponent. That's not just breaking the law. That's corrupting the institutions of the law itself to accomplish the same thing.
That's what makes it worse.
If #NeverTrump disagree, I'd like to hear them explain why. But for now they seem content to dismiss the whole idea that the information contained in the Nunes memo really contains damaging information about the actions of the FBI and the Justice Department under Obama, Lynch and Comey. Yet if the memo really is just a bunch of partisan hackery, they sure seem desperate to discredit it and keep it from being seen. Why's that?
The indispensible Kim Strassel thinks she knows:
This is highly convenient, given the Justice Department retains those documents and is as eager to make them public as a fox is to abandon the henhouse. Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had to threaten a contempt citation simply to get permission for his committee to gain access, and even then investigators had to leave Capitol Hill to view them, and were allowed only to take notes. Mr. Nunes has no authority to declassify them. The best he can do in his continuing transparency efforts is to summarize their contents. Only in Schiff land is sunshine suddenly a pollutant.
The Schiff pressure gauge is outmatched only by the Justice Department and the FBI, which are now mobilizing their big guns to squelch the truth. That included a Wednesday Justice Department letter to Mr. Nunes—written by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, designed as a memo to the media, copied to its allies in Washington, and immediately leaked to the public. And the department wonders why anyone doubts the integrity of all its hardworking professionals.
Mr. Boyd gets in his cheap shots, for instance slamming Mr. Nunes for moving to release a memo based on documents that Mr. Nunes hasn’t even “seen.” He apparently thinks Rep. Trey Gowdy —the experienced former federal prosecutor Mr. Nunes asked to conduct the review of those docs—isn’t qualified to judge questions of national security. He hyperventilates that it would be “reckless” for the committee to make its memo public without first letting the Justice Department review it and “advise [the committee] of the risk of harm to national security.” Put another way, it is Mr. Boyd’s position that the Justice Department gets to provide oversight of Congress. The Constitution has it the other way around.
The bigger, swampier game here is to rally media pressure, and to mau-mau Mr. Nunes into giving the department a veto over the memo’s release. Ask Sen. Chuck Grassley how that goes. Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently sent a referral to the department for a criminal probe into dossier author Christopher Steele. He then in good faith asked the department its views on an unclassified portion of that referral that he wants to make public. The department invented a classified reason to block public release, and has refused to budge for weeks.
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Remember, Trey Gowdy has seen all the documents, and he is convinced impropriety occurred - certainly in the pursuit of the Page wiretap and probably in the spiking of the Hillary e-mail investigation as well.
I have never liked the lazy media trope that "when there's smoke, there's fire." That's an all-purpose excuse for them to treat the appearance of scandal as the real thing without doing the legwork of finding out what's actually going on. Only when you can get access to all the facts can you render a judgment one way or the other.
The problem here for the Justice Department and the FBI - and remember, we're talking about Obama holdovers and they actions they took while Obama was still in office - is that they are the ones moving Heaven and Earth to keep us from getting access to the facts. The only reason Nunes had to write a memo summarizing the contents of the documents is that the DOJ and FBI insisted members of Congress not even be able to keep copies - only review the documents and take notes.
The only reason we're speculating about what's in the memo is that no one is willing to release it.
The only reason it's even a big deal is that the DOJ and the FBI stonewalled a subpoena for the documents for five months, even asking in their desperation for a meeting with Paul Ryan in the hope that he would overrule Nunes and allow them to continue hiding the documents. Ryan refused.
So what are they afraid of the rest of us seeing? If there's something that would give a false impression, then they should explain that. But they don't want to do that. They just want to spike the whole thing.
The unmistakable conclusion for me is that the entire Trump/Russia collusion narrative, along with the Mueller investigation it spurred, is a complete fraud, based on a phony dossier by a campaign oppo researcher being paid for his efforts by Hillary Clinton. And this was treated as legitimate information and not as the political smear job it actually was, precisely because the Obama DOJ and FBI hated Trump as much as the Clinton campaign did.
If federal law enforcement allowed itself to be corrupted that badly, it's no surprise they want it kept secret. It surely would have been had Hillary won. That was the biggest of many things they tried that did not go according to plan.
There's getting to be a backlash among certain conservatives, mainly of the #NeverTrump variety, against the idea that there's really a serious matter to be uncovered in the case of the FISA wiretap application for Carter Page, and in the attempts to cover up the documents related to it.
The thinking goes like this: Paranoid Trump superfans see some sinister deep state conspiracy in everything! Missing text messages! Unreleased memos! These nutcases are so off the rails, they're convinced they're going to find something "worse than Watergate"! What fruitcakes.
