FBI desperately trying to sow doubt about accuracy of Nunes memo

I hope they realize this is all the more reason we need to see it. Clearly the Nunes memo alleges serious wrongdoing on the part of the FBI in obtaining the Carter Page wiretap, and the FBI is obviously worried that when the public reads it they will find the memo damning. This is the same FBI and DOJ, remember, that stonewalled a legitimate congressional subpoena of the relevant documents for five months, agreeing to turn them over to the House Intelligence Committee only when threatened directly by Paul Ryan with a contempt of Congress resolutioon. Even then they only agreed to let members of the committee view the documents and take notes, not keep copies. That's the only reason Nunes had to write the memo in the first place. He had to memorialize what he'd seen because he wasn't allowed to keep any of it.

If the Nunes memo isn't entirely accurate, whose fault is that? But I don't if the FBI is really worried the memo isn't accurate, the compelling response will be to make the documents they used in the FISA wiretap application public. That would settle it one way or the other. But that's not how they're playing it:

In an unexpected statement Wednesday, the FBI said that before the House vote, the FBI was “provided a limited opportunity to review this memo.” “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the FBI statement said. Republicans have complained that the secretive court overseeing FISA approved surveillance of at least one Trump associate based on "fake" information and the controversial "dossier” that, as one Republican lawmaker put it, was “dressed up” by former British spy Chris Steele, who authored the dossier that includes allegations of ties between Trump, his aides, and Russian operatives. Within weeks of the FBI launching its Russia-related investigation in 2016, agents obtained approval from FISA court to monitor the communications of then Trump adviser Carter Page, who was already on the FBI’s radar after being targeted for recruitment as an intelligence source by Russian spies in a previous case, according to sources with knowledge of the matter. The announcement of the Nunes memorandum has been followed by an online effort to reveal the memo publicly, pushed around the world with the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo, according to multiple data analysis firms

The complaint about only having a "limited opportunity to review this memo" is rich coming from the people who insisted a congressional committee with constitutional oversight of the FBI could have only a limited opportunity to review the documents related to the Page wiretap. They're reaping what they've sown with months of stonewalling. If the concern was that Republicans on the committee would politicize the information, which they're now trying to imply Nunes is doing, they could have done any number of things to prevent that from happening. For one thing, they could have provided Congress with the information when it was first subpoenaed so as not to create the impression they had something to hide. For another thing, they could have actually provided copies so ther would be no danger of any omissions of fact. And when the final deadline to turn over the information was at hand, they could have just turned it over instead of trying to go over Nunes's head to Speaker Ryan, who wasn't having their BS excuses about getting in the way of the DOJ's own inspector general investigation. Congress has the authority to investigate the Justice Department, which can't in turn tell Congress to wait its turn while it presumes to investigate itself. We won't know the facts about this memo until we see it, and we won't really know until the underlying documents are released. But it's easy to see which party here is acting like it has something to hide, and is desperately to persuade you that you shouldn't believe what you're about to read. It's the same party that's been acting like it had something to hide all along. Now let's see that memo.

Dan Calabrese——Bio and Archives

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