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GOP Memo Criticizing FBI Surveillance is Released (washingtonpost.com)
The controversial four-page memo created by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee alleging abuse of surveillance authority by the Justice Department and FBI has been released Friday after being declassified by the president. The memo is unredacted. (Alternative link for the memo.) The Washington Post: The four-page, newly declassified memo written by the Republican staffers for the House Intelligence Committee said the findings "raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain (Justice Department) and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) calling it "a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process."
The memo accuses former officials who approved the surveillance applications -- a group that includes former FBI Director James B. Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates and current Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein -- of signing off on court surveillance requests that omitted key facts about the political motivations of the person supplying some of the information, Christopher Steele, a former intelligence officer in Britain. The memo says Steele "was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations -- an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI." The FBI Agents Association on Friday said that agents "have not, and will not, allow partisan politics to distract us from our solemn commitment to our mission." The full statement: The men and women of the FBI put their lives on the line every day in the fight against terrorists and criminals because of their dedication to our country and the Constitution. The American people should know that they continue to be well-served by the world's preeminent law enforcement agency. FBI Special Agents have not, and will not, allow partisan politics to distract us from our solemn commitment to our mission.
The memo accuses former officials who approved the surveillance applications -- a group that includes former FBI Director James B. Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates and current Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein -- of signing off on court surveillance requests that omitted key facts about the political motivations of the person supplying some of the information, Christopher Steele, a former intelligence officer in Britain. The memo says Steele "was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations -- an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI." The FBI Agents Association on Friday said that agents "have not, and will not, allow partisan politics to distract us from our solemn commitment to our mission." The full statement: The men and women of the FBI put their lives on the line every day in the fight against terrorists and criminals because of their dedication to our country and the Constitution. The American people should know that they continue to be well-served by the world's preeminent law enforcement agency. FBI Special Agents have not, and will not, allow partisan politics to distract us from our solemn commitment to our mission.
Full text (copy/paste from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/read-the-full-text-of-the-nunes-memo/552191/):
January 18, 2018
To: HPSCI Majority Members
From: HPSCI Majority Staff
Subject: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Purpose
This memorandum provides Members an update on significant facts relating to the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Our findings, which are detailed below, 1) raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and 2) represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.
Investigation Update
On October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (not under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is a U.S. citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.
The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. §,1805(d)(l)), a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Then-DAG Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.
Due to the sensitive nature of foreign intelligence activity, FISA submissions (including renewals) before the FISC are classified. As such, the public’s confidence in the integrity of the FISA process depends on the court’s ability to hold the government to the highest standard—particularly as it relates to surveillance of American citizens. However, the FISC’s rigor in protecting the rights of Americans, which is reinforced by 90-day renewals of surveillance orders, is necessarily dependent on the government’s production to the court of all material and relevant facts. This should include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application that is known by the government. In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts. However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted.
1) The “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. Steele was a longtime FBI source who was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.
b) The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person,
This release was entirely for the purpose of ANNOUNCING a big thing, TEASING a big thing, then DEBATING it as a black box, then acting as if the release was some big lesson of punishment against those that disagree with the administration.
The actual details don't really matter, so much as they constitute an illusion that they have a big argument, and that for their captive audience on their news sources, they are winning on their terms.
And yes, this is very much how despotic regimes have operated for centuries.
I'm always still more than a little confused why anyone actually plays any of the particular roles in these scenarios though - does Devin Nunes think he's actually serving his own self interest in ANY way, given how basically every other person that has served Trump in this way has ended up over time?
I am terribly sorry your crackpot theories are not mainstream.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Republicans are alleging that FISA was abused. If that's true, regardless the reasons or motivations, it only re-affirms what a lot of us were thinking would happen when the warrantless wiretapping program and "unmasking" was made public back in 2005.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If you build a giant surveillance machine with limited checks and balances and without regard for the constitution, things like what the memo alleges are eventually going to occur. It's human nature. What's more disturbing than the memo is that BOTH Democrat and Republican lawmakers allowed this sort of surveillance to proceed. There is no place for a FISA (Secret Courts) in a free society.
No they didn't. Carter Page had been under investigation since 2013. The dossier wasn't even the reason for the warrant.
I don't think that's the point. Your analysis requires nuance, and the point of the memo is to rally GOP partisans and give the talking heads on Fox News talking points that sound official. Most things that require nuance are beyond the comprehension of most voters (as the various AC posts that immediately flooded this story demonstrate), and this allows the administration to pretend to be the victim.
Trump and his supporters want to reframe the argument. If the argument is "did Trump collude with Russian to undermine American democracy?" he's in a losing situation. If the argument is, "was Trump being unfairly investigated by intelligence agencies?" then he has a chance to discredit any questions about his campaign. By selectively declassifying information, Nunes and Trump can lie by omission, which is enough to convince those who are stupid and those who don't care if Trump colluded with the Russians so long as he enacts their desired policies.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Ahem -
Fusion in 2015 began investigating Trump under a contract with the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website financially supported by GOP megadonor Paul Singer. That assignment ended once Trump was on track to win the nomination. But in April 2016, Fusion was hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to keep funding the research. (Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained the firm.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/01/09/what-you-need-to-know-about-christopher-steele-the-fbi-and-the-dossier/?utm_term=.4f4132d1b442
That argument breaks down entirely given the fact that the first 2 or 3 FISA warrents on Carter Page, were initiated several months before the Steele dossier was even prepared. The FISA warrent in question was the 3rd or 4th one approved by the FISA Court. The memo also leaves out numerous accounts tha tthe Steele dossier was intially commissioned by one of the GOP presidential campaigns prior to the Clinton campaign paying to get their hands on it.
You're talking like every word in there is the God's honest truth. The guy who wrote it is a full-fledged climate-change denying Trump supporter. He could easily have written the same nonsense for Breitbart and released it instantly. However, as head of a House committee he was instead able write his partisan screed under its aegis, get it approved on party line votes, then turn around and play like his own committees' rules are some kind of giant conspiracy of silence.
I think what he's trying to say is that the FISA warrant for surveillance on Carter Page happened before there was ever a Steele dossier. That means there was already probably cause for a warrant before the dossier.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Now that there's pretty solid evidence that the DNC basically used the DOJ to lie to the FISA courts as part of its campaign...
Where is that solid evidence? The memo didn't include that.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
I don't give a flying fuck about Hillary. I never voted for her at any level, and don't care for her at all. Her losing the election is not the part that looks like fascism. Trump trying to remove the independence of the FBI and DoJ and install people who are loyal to him above the nation, the law, or the constitution - that's the part that looks like fascism.
Even if that were true - and given the cherry-picked nature of the information in the memo, I doubt it's the complete story - the Steel dossier was just one more piece of information. It may have been the one that put them over the top (and it may not have been) - but there was plenty of reason to seek the FISA warrant. Page's past connections with Russia, along with his connections with the Trump campaign, along with multiple Russia concerns about that campaign, along with Popadopolis' admitted lies to the FBI about contacts with, wait, Russian agents.
Nunes is claiming (or at least hoping Hannity will make the convincing argument) that it's scandalous to use the Steel memo for anything at all. But that's not how intelligence works. Yes, some of the info you gather may come from dubious sources - and that gets taken into account. For all we know, the Steel dossier convinced the FBI to seek the warrant - but as confirmation of other sourced information they already had. In fact, the FBI has pretty much confirmed this in their arguments against releasing this bit of propaganda. But Nunes is refusing to allow the rest of the context for the warrant to be released - or at least not until Hannity has had the chance to play this out in the court of public opinion.
The ultimate goal is either to give Trump an excuse to fire Rosenstein - and by extension Mueller, or simply to cast enough doubt on the Russia investigation that anything it comes up with will be tainted, and Trump will be able to lie/power his way through the findings - and the House will have an excuse to do nothing about them. In any case, this memo is an act of political propaganda - not intelligence oversight. Who knows (well, maybe Mueller does) - there could be nothing more to the Russian collusion scandal then the obvious fact that the Trump campaign knew Russia was pulling strings for them, and thought that was fine. That's sleazy, but probably not illegal. And Trump probably could've left it at that - had he not tried to fight the investigation at every turn. But what's likely to be found is all manner of financial wrongdoing involving Russians that may well have been illegal. There's something there - or else they wouldn't be trying so hard to suppress it.
Oh. And then there's the little matter of actual direct interference in our election - about which nothing is being done. Slashdotters have been raising red flags for years about weaknesses in the voting systems - and indeed systems that handle our voter roles were broken into. But somehow enough Slashdotters have become 'anti-liberal' enough that running interference for the likes of Donald Trump is more important to them than, oh, the integrity of our democracy. As DJT would say, SAD!
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
So it seems the FBI/DOJ under Obama used smear information bought from Russian intelligence sources by the Clinton Campaign to justify secretly wiretapping and investigating their political rivals during a presidential election. Did someone say Russian Collusion?
You mean the information originally paid for by the conservative website, The Washington Free Beacon, funded by a major Republican donor, New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, and abandoned once Trump won the Republican nomination? And that the House Intelligence Committee knows this, but doesn't mention it? That one?
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by a major Republican donor, first hired the research firm that months later produced for Democrats the salacious dossier describing ties between Donald J. Trump and the Russian government, the website said on Friday.
The Free Beacon, funded in large part by the New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, hired the firm, Fusion GPS, in 2015 to unearth damaging information about several Republican presidential candidates, including Mr. Trump. But The Free Beacon told the firm to stop doing research on Mr. Trump in May 2016, as Mr. Trump was clinching the Republican nomination.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee had begun paying Fusion GPS in April for research that eventually became the basis for the dossier.
The Free Beacon informed the House Intelligence Committee on Friday that it had retained the firm.
And you're also implying information cannot be legitimate and useful if obtained by the opposition and/or potentially biased actors, and/or this fact isn't disclosed during review? Others, apparently, disagree:
“Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the D.N.C., Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior D.O.J. and F.B.I. officials,” said the memo, which was written by committee staffers.
That assertion is “potentially problematic,” said David Kris, a FISA expert and former head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division in the first term of the Obama administration.
If the warrant applications did disclose that Mr. Steele’s research was funded by people who were opposed to Mr. Trump’s campaign, even if it did not name the D.N.C. or the Clinton campaign, then the applications “would be fine,” he said, and the author of the memo and those who backed its release are trying to mislead the American people.
This is all political theater by Republican Congressman Nunes, who once worked for the Trump campaign (you know, the people being investigated), to distract people from, and discredit, the Trump/Russia investigation.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What I think everybody is missing here is that the only reason we don't have the complete story is because they created a special court so they could keep their investigations secret. And now, we are getting one side of the story, formulated by friends of the administration, and because of the FISA court's sealed records, we are unable to get the other side of the story.
If ever there were absolute proof that secret court proceedings are a fundamental threat to democracy, THIS IS IT RIGHT HERE. We absolutely MUST dissolve the FISA court and do so through a constitutional amendment to make it clear that such shenanigans must never be used again. There is no greater threat to our democracy than public officials who cannot be held accountable by the people, whether those officials are members of the White House, members of the FBI, or anybody else.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If that were true, why would the FBI use the Steele Dossier as justification for the initial FISA application and why would the FBI not tell the FISA courts about the political component of that dossier?
For probably the most stupid human reason of all: It was easy, and they knew that the FISA court would rubber stamp their request regardless.
I mean, if I needed to get something authorized in my building and I could just grab some dodgy report, chop off the bits that would raise eyebrows, and hand it in to get rubber stamped, why would I bother going through the effort of doing a decent job?
We've known that the FISA courts were a travesty for a long time. To my mind, this looks like just as much of an indictment of that process as it does the FBI's conduct. The FISA courts were supposed to be a check on the FBI's use of secret warrants, but as documented here, look how well that worked.
I'd love to see how common this is. While this event is obviously being unearthed for political purposes, I can't imagine that this isn't how a lot of the FISA rulings went over the last 40 years. Instead of focusing on the FBI, the real focus should be on the FISA courts, because they should have a level of rigor that nobody at the FBI would even think about trying to go to them with evidence like this.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
FFS, even Paul Ryan is requesting that the Democrat's rebuttal memo be released!
But in addition, I bet that they had additional evidence on Page that they didn't really want to write up in their FISA application. The ties with Russia are apparently so deep on the Friends of Trump side that I'm sure they probably had a few arrows pointed at him from other sources. For all we know, it might have stemmed from intelligence sharing between the NSA and FBI, where the NSA wasn't able to give them the full details, or at least not down to the level of the people investigating people like Page.
Potential political corruption and abuse if the boss says, "Find something on this guy, anything."? Quite possibly. But also possibly, "We have a smoking gun that we can't reveal, lets find another way to get this guy." And that might be totally legitimate due to a spying operation that it would reveal, or a source that it would compromise that could be used to nab even bigger fish.
This isn't exactly normal police work when you're dealing at this level.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Steele was paid $160,000 by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to write that dossier.
Incorrect.
The dossier was started by the request of The Washington Free Beacon while Trump was a Republican Primary candidate. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...
After Trump was likely going to win, Free Beacon stopped paying Fusion GPS for this research. The DNC then contracted Fusion GPS to continue doing the research.
Fusion GPS then hired Steele, and did not tell him who the client was.
That is a far cry from what you just said happened, and what that memo claims happened.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Yeah. You might want to be able to show that, say, he was previously involved with a known Russian crime ring, and is now travelling to Moscow and giving talks condemning the US while working for a presidential campaign.
Can't imagine why you might want to investigate whether such a person might be working as a foreign agent.
Also, of note concerning this memo: FISA applications are generally ~50-ish pages long. If we're to believe Nunes, it was nothing but a giant list of "Steele says this..." and "Steele says that", and "Please don't ask us anything about who this steel guy was", and the judge was like, "Sure, no need for that, the word of one person is good enough for a FISA warrant." Actually, no, because even Nunes himself contradicts this narrative when he briefly brings up George Papadopoulos, who was apparently also listed as justification. If we're to take Nunes at face value concerning him ("there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos"), the FBI said to the judge, "Hey, this guy Papadopoloulos is dirty, but has nothing to do with Carter Page, so let us spy on Page" and the judge said "Okay, that sounds logical" and granted approval.
Nunes mentions this in the same paragraph where he brings up his favourite FBI boogeyman, Strzok and - everyone prepare to be shocked - while working to portray him as part of a corrupt deep state conspiracy to elect Trump, doesn't bother to mention that Strzok advocated for and drafted the "Comey Letter" reopening the Clinton investigation, which cost her in polls more than her margin of loss in the key swing states. Aka, their boogeyman was a key figure in electing Trump.
It's time for Operation Crazy Plan.