House Democrats' Counter-Memo Released, Alleging Major Factual Inaccuracies (vox.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader Rei writes: Three weeks ago, on a party-line vote, the U.S. House Intelligence Committee voted to release a memo from committee chair and Trump transition team member Devin Nunes. The "Nunes Memo" alleged missteps by the FBI in seeking a FISA warrant against Trump aide Carter Page; a corresponding Democratic rebuttal memo was first blocked from simultaneous release by the committee, and subsequently the White House. Tonight, it has finally been released.

Among its many counterclaims: the Steele Dossier, only received in September, did not initiate surveilance of Page which began in July; the Steele dossier was only one, minor component of the FISA application, and only concerning Page's Moscow meetings; Steele's funding source and termination was disclosed in the application; and a number of other "distortions and misrepresentations that are contradicted by the underlying classified documents". Perhaps most seriously, it accuses Nunes of having never read the FISA application which his memo criticized.
Vox argues the memo proves that no one was misled when the surveillance was authorized. "The FBI clearly states right there in the FISA application that they believe Steele was hired to find dirt on Trump... After the Schiff memo was released on Saturday, House Republicans released a document rebutting its core claims. Their response to this damning citation is -- and I am not making this up -- that the vital line in which the FBI discloses the information about Steele was 'buried in a footnote.'"

Comments

Re:I wish they'd back off the Russia stuff

[DNS-and-BIND]

She didn't "ignore" them, it was quite deliberate. One of the themes that emerges from Shattered (the book of the Clinton campaign) is that the Clinton operation didn't want to make a strong play for working-class white voters in swing states. The Clintonites thought these voters were disposable.

Leftist whites wanted to be rid of the culturally conservative, economically liberal, working-class white voters whom Democrats had always represented. Upper-middle-class whites were embarrassed by these people. They felt dirty trying to get their votes. The idea was that Hillary would win and spike the football in their faces, telling them that now they were politically irrelevant and decisions could be made without their input. Not that that wasn't always the case, but under Hillary it would have been policy.