You probably read last night that the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines to release to the public the Devin Nunes memo that summarizes what committee members learned when they were finally - after five months of FBI and DOJ stonewalling - allowed to view and takes notes on (but not keep copies of, thus the need for the memo) the documents related to the FBI's pursuit of a FISA wiretap warrant against Trump campaign official Carter Page.
The suspicion has been building for months that the FBI's application for the FISA warrant against Page relied mainly on the discredited and unverified Steele dossier, prepared for the sleazebags at Fusion GPS on the dime of the Clinton campaign. If the DOJ and FBI under Obama used false information to justify a wiretap on a Trump campaign official, that - as I've explained in detail - would be a scandal worse than Watergate.
Did they?
Nunes has seen all the documents, and his memo summarizes his take on what he saw. Trey Gowdy has also seen all the documents and he believes improper activity took place at the FBI. The Nunes memo almost certainly makes this case, although what we don't know his how well the memo backs up his case with references to the documents, and what other information a skeptic might cite to cast doubt on Nunes's likely assertions.
We need to see the memo. The Democrats have prepared a rebuttal memo, and we need to see that too. We also need to see the underlying documents the DOJ and FBI tried to keep secret from the committee from the issuance of the subpoeana in August until they finally relented a few weeks ago under threat of a contempt of Congress resolution. We need to see all of this, or we won't know if either memo tells the whole story.
And that's why last night's vote doesn't really mean that much.
All of these documents are classified. President Trump has the authority to declassify any document, any time he wants. The committee's vote merely throws the ball into the president's court, giving him five days to either release the document or hold it back because of national security concerns that will surely be raised by the Justice Department, who will argue that release of the memo - let alone the rest of the documents - will compromise sources and methods.
Yet at any time, the president could have declassified all of these documents. If he had done so weeks ago, it's unlikely last night's House vote would have even taken place. They would have been released as a matter of course. If President Trump chooses not to declassify the documents now, that is for one of two reasons:
They really don't show the impropriety Nunes, Gowdy and others allege, and releasing them will rob Trump of a narrative that the Obama DOJ abused its power to perpetrate a scam investigation of him and his campaign. Or . . .
The information really does jeopardize national security and there is no way to release it without causing much bigger problems.
Internally, you know that DOJ is going to push the national security angle as an argument for not releasing any of this. What we don't know is if this is a legitimate argument or just a pretense for hiding information that proves their own wrongdoing - especially if it was clearly at the behest of Barack Obama and the documents show that.
My own belief is that the Trump/Russia collusion business is a big bunch of nothing invented for political purposes by a DOJ and FBI that was trying to prevent Trump from winnign the election. If there was really anything to it, we would have seen the evidence by now. And we've learned enough about the misdeeds of people like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to reach the reasonable conclusion that everything was not by the book or motivated by facts and facts alone.
What I don't know is if this abuse of power was blatant enough that the documents related to the FISA application prove it beyond a doubt. I don't even know if Trey Gowdy and Devin Nunes know that. They seem to think that's the case, but I don't know if what they saw was conclusive enough to prove it.
It's easy for them to take a vote calling for the release of the memo. But it ultimately falls to President Trump to make that call, and the Nunes memo alone isn't enough to settle the matter anyway. We need to see everything. And that is really no more likely to happen today than it was yesterday.
The suspicion has been building for months that the FBI's application for the FISA warrant against Page relied mainly on the discredited and unverified Steele dossier, prepared for the sleazebags at Fusion GPS on the dime of the Clinton campaign. If the DOJ and FBI under Obama used false information to justify a wiretap on a Trump campaign official, that - as I've explained in detail - would be a scandal worse than Watergate.
