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A Few Words About the Nunez Memo
With apologies once again for a prolonged absence, I return to our little island of the Internet, an island of calm and reasoned debate surrounded by a frothing maelstrom of invective and ignorance. I call your attention to my most recent contribution over at PJ Media, in which I discuss the troubling implications raised by the Nunez Memo.
Please read the whole thing, but I can summarize the piece here by saying it seems to me that Christopher Steele “played” his handlers at the FBI, whose willingness, even eagerness, to believe the worst about Donald Trump blinded them to what should have been obvious defects in the information Steele was providing.
I regret that I neglected to say in the column that I, unlike some who have opined on the matter, have not lost all faith in the FBI, some of whose members I have worked with and know personally. The FBI remains an outstanding law enforcement agency, albeit one whose leadership may have allowed their personal opinions of Donald Trump to cloud their judgment.
The comments section over at PJ Media devolved into a sadly typical frenzy of baseless allegations and ad hominem attacks, some of which cause one to wonder if the commenters had bothered to read piece. Which is why I turn to you, my fellow Ricochetti, to restore my faith in mankind (or personkind, as Justin Trudeau would have it). As always, I look forward to your thoughtful commentary.
Published in General
How was that article controversial?
No MAGA hat here, and I saw nothing objectionable. Excellent piece.
These question were also posted in a comment to the Steven Hayward podcast with John Yoo.
People bring their own bias to this critical issue.
Here’s how I see this.
Sadly, the corruption can go all the way down to the men and women “just following orders” at the street level. The malfeasance in the Bundy case wasn’t exposed by a whistleblower in the FBI. The whistleblower was (had been?) a BLM agent who seriously disliked the Bundys but was faithful to his oath of office.
I’m not familiar with Mr. Page’s previous work with the FBI, but there’s no warrant requirement to “wire up” an informant and have him record conversations with suspected criminals. Nor is there a warrant needed to bug a non-U.S. citizen in another country during a counter-intelligence operation.
I’m also unfamiliar with the exact time limits placed on federal warrants for electronic eavesdropping, but they do expire and have to be renewed by showing that the effort has been fruitful.
Has the comment thread been cleaned up? As is it seems informative, lively and pretty creditable. A few trolls.
Article itself is nuanced, backgrounded nicely and very persuasive.
True
The thing I don’t understand about this situation is that it seems to me that the Obama administration could have deserved about a dozen or so independent counsels over his 8 years, but Obama, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, Hillary Clinton, Kathleen Sebelius, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Eric Shinseki, and Valerie Jarrett never received anything like this. However, President Trump gets hit with this mess essentially on or about his first day in office. He’ll never be able to shake this anymore more that Mark Steyn and that six-year-old Michael Mann libel case.
The independent counsel is there to harm, taint, and slow down a Republican president. It seems to be working perfectly.
See this from the DOJ. It’s widely accepted that Carter Page was UCE-1.
In a possibly related story:
As they say, “More to come…”
Thanks!
I agree with all of it.
Jack,
First, nice to hear from you. I think we should break down this situation into multiple problems. The first problem, as you have described to us, is the general problem of obtaining a surveillance warrant. The second problem, is that this isn’t just an ordinary warrant but issued by an agency of the federal government designed to spy on foreign threats. The third problem, is that the object of the investigation isn’t just an ordinary one but an ongoing Presidential campaign and then a sitting President.
The first problem is already very iffy. The use of questionable information that was known to be questionable at the time of the application for the warrant is in itself very suspicious and likely to produce disciplinary action. The second problem raises the general concern over the private rights of citizens v. the modern sophisticated surveillance state. The US Constitution and every conservative idea of limited government are put on alert because of this aspect. Misuse of the FISA Court on American citizens is an affront to our civil liberties. Rand Paul’s cell phone data concern is peanuts compared to this. Finally, the third problem is really the one that moves the alert all the way up to DEFCON 5. The American Presidency has a huge amount of raw political power and influence on the course of this country. Anything that would pervert the political process in reference to the Presidency is an extreme danger. The whole Russian hacking nonsense is ridiculous because by and large the entire Russian effort was microscopic and couldn’t have affected the outcome if every single suspected bot was perfectly on target and they weren’t. However, the misuse of FISA to surveil an ongoing Presidential campaign and then the surveillance continuing on a sitting American President is an absolute threat to this democracy.
I would remind people that in comparison to this present situation the Watergate break-in was an Easter Egg Hunt by the cub scouts. Weaponizing a foreign intelligence service for domestic political purposes is as bad as it gets. I don’t think that ending the Mueller investigation is a Constitutional crisis. I think that allowing the Mueller investigation to continue to threaten this Presidency with its false accusations and baseless innuendo while the real threat to democracy, weaponizing FISA, isn’t addressed is the Constitutional crisis.
Regards,
Jim
Thank you. That would certainly cover the Russian spy case. Assuming for the moment that Page was a paid or unpaid informant in the Trump campaign, those were U.S. citizens, counter-intelligence operation or not, though it looks as though he might have been able to record conversations he was party to regardless.
I guess the oversight committees will be looking at that, and how UCE-1 in March became an agent of a foreign power in a FISA application in October.
From what I’ve been reading it’s a 90 day period.
Thanks for the kind words. I stopped paying attention to the comments after a short while. Life is short, after all.
John C. Dvorak took a look at the bios of Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and the man that recruited GP into the Trump Campaign – Sam Clovis and concluded it was a “spot the spooks” situation on Sunday’s “No Agenda Podcast 1005: Circular Reporting” – based on their various work for Defense Intelligence, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc. This was a couple days before I saw any mention of the Carter Page working for FBI to sting Russians. No Agenda is out there at times, but sometimes outside the box, one can see things missed when safely moored to normal preconceptions about what is reasonable, honest behavior of people & institutions. Just about 5 minutes into this gets to the heart of it, but it continues to be interesting for much longer: https://noagendaplayer.com/listen/1005/22-28
It seems George P. was continually trying to get Trump Campaign people to fly to Russia to meet with Russian government officials. Can an agent provocateur not poison an opposition group by entangling them in Anti-American controversy just as well the traditional throwing a brick through a window at an otherwise peaceful protest to enable arrests??
Rob Long was the one who recommended “The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad several months ago. Not a bad little story, huh?
Well, how exactly does the president exonerate himself? When will that ever happen?
Paul Manafort was supposedly the worst, but no one cared about him until his name became attached to Trump, and now I hear that Manafort was getting most of his money from Ukraine — not Russia, but a country at war with Russia!
As with most news stories out of Washington for the last two decades (or more), it’s always fun to play Switch the Parties. Imagine the apoplexy in the media if a Republican administration unleashed the country’s security apparatus to spy on a Democratic campaign. But now what we get is, “Can you believe he wants a military parade?”
I think the points raised in the article at PJ are important ones to ponder, but can we just from the information we have actually conclude anything or are we simply stuck speculating? Which seems to be the underlying problem in all of this that there is enough evidence and smoke to raise questions. Questions that our political biases incline us to want to guess at the answer to, but that ultimately we have no definitive proof for one way or the other.
I think the possibilities of how this breaks down are all bad. At best we have massive levels of stupidity, and credulity mixed with toxic partisanship, at worst we have serious levels of corruption, and a fatally flawed FISA system that can be easily manipulated for partisan gain or revenge. To me it seems the only way to know this is to see the actual warrant applications. I know the process is classified and for arguably good reasons, but at this point the balance of public interest I think is to resolve this as definitively as possible. Someone here is lying, all the parties have ulterior motives, the public needs to be able to judge for itself.
Yes, this.
The president will have done nothing wrong about Russia but there’s a chance his son or son-in-law have some significant financial impropriety that these cannibals will try to prosecute, mostly because they are vicious slime.
My theory, and it’s not a pleasant one, is that the president is using major wrongdoing as a bargaining chip to help his family/friends from facing the consequences of a sham investigation that nonetheless disclosed some shady financial crap. Just a theory though.
The way the president gets Mueller to wrap this up is to keep at the FBI/DOJ corruption case and possibly remove Jeff Sessions which will signal Mueller to close shop or be cancelled while public opinion is with the president.
I prefer Mueller to wrap it up without charges which truly will exonerate the president. If Mueller refuses to finish then he needs to be fired before summer.
I also feel that if Mueller goes for some BS fabricated obstruction charge there’s not a single safe place on the planet for him or his extended family.
I’d heard that reported, but hadn’t seen the link. Thanks, Ontheleftcoast.
Well exonerating Trump could be what Muller does.
With respect to Manafort. He was being paid by the Ukrainians that were the puppets of Russia. He lost his gravy train once the Maidan Revolution caused Yanukovich to topple from power and flee to Russia. I have no idea if the FBI was investigating him prior to his affiliation with Trump. Frankly given what I have read about his dealings I hope they were. The people he was connected with were and are some of the scummiest bags of scum out there.
I think one thing that is actually very possible is that Manafort was trying unbeknownst to Trump or his campaign to sell his connection to it and a possible future post in an administration as an asset to the Russians. Luckily he was let go after the convention (or was it before, around that time) because had he gotten higher up and landed an actual government position things might be worse for Trump and his administration. As it is having had him around was probably bad enough.
Jack,
Oh so true. “Look a squirrel”, the desire to defuse all situations with stories that are irrelevant or trivial or both is the stock & trade of this leftwing kept media. I’m reading a tweet by someone with a journalistic resume retweeted by someone with a bigger journalistic resume. It’s all about Estonian Foreign Intelligence reporting about Russian cyber threats. Anything to enhance the reputation of Russian cyber capability to keep the crazy narrative going. Of course, when Estonia was left hanging in the breeze by Obama and the EU with Russian motorized divisions sitting on their border these same journo types had nothing to say. Trump comes in and bolsters NATO (as much as he can with the lazy French and Germans as partners). Believe me, Estonia is thrilled with Trump and wouldn’t want an Obama clone anywhere near the White House. That’s a story that these journo types won’t bother to tell.
Regards,
Jim
But has the Mueller investigation made “false accusations and baseless innuendo” yet? It doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything aside from harassing peripheral players. Mueller himself has stayed out of the limelight. All of the controversy seems to surround pre-Mueller investigation activities in the DOJ. I have a wait-and-see attitude toward Mueller, who could surprise us, as he seems to be a blank slate on which everyone is projecting anti-Trump hopes and fears.
Dorrk,
The existence of a special prosecutor investigating the President of the United States is the giant blue whale in the room. It is a giant innuendo all by itself. This crap should end.
Regards,
Jim
Agree, with this caveat re: #1: I have yet to see any evidence that the president or his team did anything improper. A basic principle of logic: It is impossible to prove a negative. This is, however, the very – and only – thing the Democrats keep hawking.
Other clues which can help direct one to a conclusion is which political Party has tried to block House and Senate Intel Committee’s investigations from day one, and currently will not allow the Carter Page FISA warrants from being made public.
Conclusion: The Democrats have stood in the way of the House and Senate investigations from the beginning, and in one of the most bizarre spectacles in my lifetime the MSM has now taken the position of being opposed to declassifying government information in the midst of an obvious scandal.
The upper management in the DOJ and FBI are all too happy to go along with the (D)’s because all normal humans have an aversion to getting in trouble/being publicly embarrassed/ destroying a high level career/ spending six figures on attorney’s fees/going to prison. Even those currently running the Agencies, while not part of he scandal themselves, would like nothing more than to have it all go away quietly or the next best thing is to let it drag out until after the next Congress is seated in 2019 so hopefully the new (D) committee chairman will quietly put a pillow over the investigations and smother this thing once and for all. Couple that with the MSM’s(purposeful)/General Public’s(meh!) short attention spans and that should do the trick …. another (D) scandal averted with the issuance of the standard Obama era penalty for those quietly found culpable = early retirement on a full pension ….
What I find interesting is that the author of the Steele Dossier was a paid informant for the FBI. I’ve seen the figure that he was to be paid around $160,000 for the dossier. That doesn’t count what he was paid by others for the dossier, the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and there is involvement from Fusion, as well as a law firm that handled the payment. He also talked to the media when he was told not to do so.
We have no idea if the judge was informed of all the players in obtaining the warrant. It is a lot of interested parties to say the least.
Your Honor I need a warrant, there is this dossier, a dossier that involves God knows how many people, and the only people who can corroborate the dossier are unnamed, and unknown Russian intelligence agents.
This should have set off alarm bells in the DOJ, and FBI before it was presented to a FISA Judge.
I highly doubt anything improper happen regarding this Russia nonsense too. The whole event is mind boggling. Mueller needs to finish and go home.