The FISA application for surveillance on Carter Page finally was released to the public on Saturday, in a heavily redacted but lengthy version. Saturday is the time that news stories ordinarily go to die, but this one has gotten quite a bit of attention nevertheless.

The person who has been the most consistently fine reporter and commentator on everything to do with these investigations is Andrew C. McCarthy. As I’ve written many times before, he is also the most knowledgeable and experienced about procedure related to such matters.

Here’s a video of McCarthy’s initial comments in reaction:

This is a particularly important admission because confirmation bias would ordinarily cause him to think the opposite. It’s one of the reasons I so admire McCarthy; he can admit he’s wrong. He also isn’t usually wrong. But he has been consistently wrong in thinking that the same agencies (and even in some cases the same people) he used to know in another time and another setting (a non-Trump-Derangement setting) are being on the up-and-up and have some integrity in connection with their actions towards Trump and anything to do with Trump.

McCarthy can hardly believe the truth he’s learned; it’s so disillusioning. But he does believe it when he sees the evidence right before his eyes.

McCarthy has had a little more time now to write a column, and he further expands on some of the ideas he touched on in that interview. Please read his column in its entirety. Here’s an excerpt:

When people started theorizing that the FBI had presented the Steele dossier to the FISA court as evidence, I told them they were crazy: The FBI, which I can’t help thinking of as my FBI after 20 years of working closely with the bureau as a federal prosecutor, would never take an unverified screed and present it to a court as evidence. I explained that if the bureau believed the information in a document like the dossier, it would pick out the seven or eight most critical facts and scrub them as only the FBI can — interview the relevant witnesses, grab the documents, scrutinize the records, connect the dots. Whatever application eventually got filed in the FISA court would not even allude en passant to Christopher Steele or his dossier. The FBI would go to the FISA court only with independent evidence corroborated through standard FBI rigor.

…[and] in the unlikely event the FBI ever went off the reservation, the Justice Department would not permit the submission to the FISA court of uncorroborated allegations; and even if that fail-safe broke down, a court would not approve such a warrant.

It turns out, however, that the crazies were right and I was wrong. The FBI (and, I’m even more sad to say, my Justice Department) brought the FISA court the Steele dossier allegations, relying on Steele’s credibility without verifying his information.

I am embarrassed by this not just because I assured people it could not have happened, and not just because it is so beneath the bureau…I am embarrassed because what happened here flouts rudimentary investigative standards. Any trained FBI agent would know that even the best FBI agent in the country could not get a warrant based on his own stellar reputation…

…Much of my bewilderment, in fact, stems from the certainty that if I had been so daft as to try to get a warrant based on the good reputation of one of my FBI case agents, with no corroboration of his or her sources, just about any federal judge in the Southern District of New York would have knocked my block off — and rightly so.

That’s why I said it.

And what I have to say to Andrew McCarthy is this: it’s not your FBI or your DOJ anymore. You’ve been away for a while, and the entire ethos seems to have changed, and those changes are dangerous. The frenzy to get Trump has caused the people involved to cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil:

I keep putting that video up on this blog, because it keeps being relevant. The law is, among other things, a set of processes and procedures designed to protect us all. Cut a great road through it and it endangers us all. FISA courts are especially dangerous because they are secret, and the protections must be that much greater for that reason. The system has apparently completely broken down, and the change of heart of Andrew McCarthy—who previously had faith in it—on this topic is proof of how very bad the situation is.

McCarthy also has a great deal more to say in that essay about what is actually in the application and what it means. Other people have written on the same subject, and in particular on how the release of the application vindicates the Nunes memo (see this).

And yet, of course, you can find articles (this for example) on the left saying the released application proves Nunes wrong. They rehash the same old ideas such as this:

The most notorious claim of the Nunes memo was that the FBI failed to properly disclose that one of the sources cited in the original warrant application, former British spy Christopher Steele, was hired by Trump’s political opponents. According to the Nunes memo, the FBI didn’t “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 and FBI officials.”

Democrats had later said that the FBI did acknowledge that the source’s employers were working against Trump, and sure enough, it seems Nunes left that detail out…

See that funny little shift there? That’s sophistry at its finest, and that’s the way this sort of thing is written. Nunes said the document didn’t mention the role of the DNC, the Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign. And guess what? That’s exactly what the release of the memo proves—they didn’t. Byron York deals with the same issue in much greater detail with much greater clarity and truth:

The fifth paragraph [of the Nunes memo]:

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.

[York writes] That is accurate. Readers will search the FISA application in vain for any specific mention of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign funding of the dossier. For the most part, names were not used in the application, but Donald Trump was referred to as “Candidate #1,” Hillary Clinton was referred to as “Candidate #2,” and the Republican Party was referred to as “Political Party #1.” Thus, the FISA application could easily have explained that the dossier research was paid for by “Candidate #2” and “Political Party #2,” meaning the Democrats. And yet the FBI chose to describe the situation this way, in a footnote: “Source #1…was approached by an identified U.S. person, who indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia…The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.”

Democrats argue that the FISA Court judges should have been able to figure out, from that obscure description, that the DNC and Clinton campaign paid for the dossier. That seems a pretty weak argument, but in any case, the Nunes memo’s statement that the FISA application did not disclose or reference the role of the DNC and the Clinton campaign is undeniably true.

But see how much longer it takes to say that? People who read that first article in NY magazine only will almost certainly not see anything amiss in the author’s assertion that the FISA application proved Nunes wrong, although in fact it proves the exact opposite.

The AP gets into the propaganda act as well. That article I just linked was written by John Hinderaker of Powerline, and he says:

With the AP, it is often hard to tell whether we are dealing with malice or ignorance.

It’s the old “knave or fool” question. But in the case of these distortions by the AP and others, I think we can safely say “malice” as well as “tactical lying.” My reason for saying that is that it’s not easy to write stuff like that; it takes effort and skill. The “mistakes” aren’t simple ones or intuitive ones. It is necessary to twist the facts in a fairly convoluted way to get there. And although I tend to think it’s wise to never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to simple incompetence or ignorance, incompetence (or ignorance) is not what’s going on here.

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]