Prior to last week’s release of the memorandum prepared by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes regarding the request made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct surveillance on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page based on evidence of his ties to Russia, many on the right were claiming that the memorandum would end up being a “bombshell.” Principally, of course, they claimed that would undermine the credibility of the bureau and of the investigation into Russian interference in the election and contacts between the Trump campaign and people connected to the Russian government. As Niall Stanage points out today in The Hill, one week after the memo was released it’s clear that it was a complete dud:
The GOP memo alleging FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) misdeeds, emanating from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), has not proved to be the game-changer that some of President Trump’s most ardent supporters had hoped for.
Even before the memo was released last Friday, media reports suggested that even some figures within the White House considered the document underwhelming. That judgment seems to have been borne out, as the memo has begun to fade from the headlines with the political landscape not fundamentally altered.
“I don’t think it is the bombshell it was billed as being,” said Joyce White Vance, a former United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.Other experts in the field argue that the memo has actually helped the FBI and DOJ.
For example, it stated that the initial impetus for opening a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia was not the disputed dossier prepared by a former British spy, Christopher Steele.
Steele was employed by Fusion GPS, which was in turn being paid in part by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But the probe had been opened because of separate suggestions of Russian meddling emanating from former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, according to the Nunes memo, though Steele approached the FBI around the same time.
The memo “helps the FBI and the DOJ rather than advance the conspiracy theory that is being advanced by Nunes,” said Jimmy Gurulé, a former assistant attorney general who served in senior law enforcement positions under Republican and Democratic presidents.
“I don’t think it is the bombshell it was billed as being,” said Joyce White Vance, a former United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.Other experts in the field argue that the memo has actually helped the FBI and DOJ.
For example, it stated that the initial impetus for opening a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia was not the disputed dossier prepared by a former British spy, Christopher Steele.
Steele was employed by Fusion GPS, which was in turn being paid in part by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But the probe had been opened because of separate suggestions of Russian meddling emanating from former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, according to the Nunes memo, though Steele approached the FBI around the same time.
The memo “helps the FBI and the DOJ rather than advance the conspiracy theory that is being advanced by Nunes,” said Jimmy Gurulé, a former assistant attorney general who served in senior law enforcement positions under Republican and Democratic presidents.
The reality of what the Nunes memo actually said became apparent quickly after it was released. While President Trump claimed that the memorandum’s supposed revelations regarding the application that the F.B.I. made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to conduct surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page “totally vindicates” him in the Russia probe, it obviously does no such thing. The primary piece of evidence in this regard, of course, was contained in the memo itself, which acknowledged that the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation actually began several months prior to the request for the warrant against Page and happened as a result of a conversation that yet another Trump campaign associate, George Papadopoulos, had with an Australian diplomat. During that conversation, which occurred around the same time as the now famous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign associates and a Russian lawyer with links to the Putin government, Papadopoulos told the diplomat that he had been told by a Kremlin conduct that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. That information eventually made its way to the Bureau, and it was at that point that the investigation was opened. Papadopoulos has since pled guilty to a charge of lying to the F.B.I.. and is now cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The memo also doesn’t address that aspect of Mueller’s investigation that involves potential instances of attempts to obstruct justice or at least undermine the Russia investigation that has surfaced in the year since Donald Trump became President. In other words, even if the allegations in the Nunes memo were entirely accurate, and they are not, there is no connection between the surveillance warrant against Page and the underlying investigation now being headed by Bob Mueller.
In addition to failing to vindicate the President as supporters claimed it would, it also turns out that the Nunes memo was woefully incomplete and in many respects misrepresented the truth about the FISA warrant it was supposed to summarize. The central claim of the memorandum, and the one thing that supporters of the President pointed to most aggressively immediately after it was released, was that the warrant against Page was based primarily upon a dossier prepared by a former MI6 agent who was working for a company called Fusion GPS that had received funding from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. While it is true that Fusion GPS did receive this funding and that the funding was, at least in part, meant to pay for background research about Trump, it was also true that the initial funding for what became the so-called “Steele Dossier” came from the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news and opinion website that was opposed to Trump during the race for the GOP nomination. Not only doesn’t the Nunes memo not disclose that last fact, it also apparently misstated the truth in its claim that the roots of the Steele Dossier as what essentially amounts to opposition research was not disclosed to the FISA Court when the warrant application. In reality, several reports after the memo was released have made clear that the political motivations behind the document were disclosed to the court. The memo also claimed that the Steele Dossier was the primary piece of evidence supporting the probable cause application for the memo. While we can’t be sure unless and until the underlying warrant application itself is released, which may not be possible without significant redactions of classified material, it does appear that the Bureau had far more than just the Steele Dossier to support its initial warrant application as well as the three renewals that were granted over the year after October 2016. Given these significant factual omissions and outright misstatements, the veracity of the entire Nunes memo seems to have been completely undermined.
With the Nunes memo thoroughly discredited, attention is now turning to what comes next. Earlier this week, the House Intelligence Committee voted to allow the release a rebuttal memorandum prepared by Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, the Committee’s ranking member. That memo is currently before the President for the same review that was conducted prior to the release of the Nunes memo, but it isn’t presently clear what action President Trump will take with regard to it. As with the Nunes memorandum, he could choose to do a number of things. The first option would be to allow its release in its current form and send it back to the Committee for further action as he did with the initial memo two weeks ago, or he could release it through the White House. Alternatively, he could order redactions in the name of “national security,” or he could block the release of the rebuttal memo at all. Either of the last actions, of course, would quickly lead to charges that he was using the excuse of national security to block the release of a memo that is likely to prove to be politically embarrassing at the very least, but it’s unclear if he would care about that.
All of this means, of course, that the Nunes memo ended up being far less impressive than the pre-release hype that was being spread by conservative media and the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag on Twitter, at least part of which was energized by bots and propaganda sites that appear to be Russian in origin. In fact, instead of undermining the Russia investigation it’s arguably the case that the controversy that the memo has caused has only guaranteed that it will expand and will last longer than many on the right seem to think.
