Byron York on why the FBI had so much faith in Christopher Steele

The New Neo Posted on by

Recommended. I think York’s got a point:

[After discovering Steele had violated his contract with them not to talk to the media, and suspending their relationship with him over it] “The FBI still seemed to believe Mr. Steele’s earlier claim that he had only provided the dossier information to the FBI and Fusion ”” and not to the media ”” prior to his October media contact that resulted in the FBI suspending the relationship,” Grassley and Graham wrote. “Accordingly, the FBI still deemed the information he provided prior to the October disclosure to be reliable.”

Why? The FBI went into the relationship with Steele believing he was reliable. His information about Trump was spectacular, and if true would be the basis of a historically important FBI investigation. And Steele had denied talking to the press. And one more thing, Grassley and Graham drily noted: “Lying to the FBI is a crime.” FBI officials did not want to admit that Steele had lied to them, in part because if they did, their prized informant would be in legal jeopardy, instead of the investigation’s real target, Donald Trump.

So in the end, the FBI vouched for Steele and his information without verification and without fully grappling with the question of Steele’s honesty. “The FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information, funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to conduct surveillance of an associate of the opposing candidate,” the Grassley-Graham referral said. “It did so based on Mr. Steele’s personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information.”

Top FBI officials wanted to believe Steele. They needed to believe Steele. So they believed Steele.

If so, this would be a form of confirmation bias that’s very very common and very very human. But investigators need to be very very aware of it and very very guarded against it. In this case, the FBI apparently violated that caveat.

Of course, that’s if you subscribe to the “fools” theory rather than the “knaves” theory. Then again, it might be “knaves and fools.”

You might think that the FBI never expected Trump to be elected when all of this happened. But some of the requests for renewal of the FISA surveillance occurred after Trump’s election.

Meeting cute in New York apartments

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article in the NY Post about couples who met because they lived near one another in apartment buildings. Then they fell in love and got married.

It used to be a somewhat common way to meet. Apparently it still happens now and then, despite the vast inroads of internet dating.

I was reading and enjoying the article and the stories and thinking how nice that was, but I had almost finished it before I remembered: that’s how I met my husband!

Serendipity. I was starting law school and looking for a place to live. I was 21 years old, and while I was searching for a permanent apartment I was living in another apartment temporarily, staying in one of four bedrooms and paying them weekly rent for it. A guy who was a friend of a friend of one of the roommates who was away in Europe was staying in the next room.

It was love at first sight, I must say, something that had never happened to me before or since. It led to a three-decades-long marriage and a wonderful son. Also a divorce. But still, not a bad stint of apartment-hunting.

Oh, and I did find a wonderful house with five bedrooms and moved into one of them, staying there for two pleasant years.

Tomorrow morning I have dental surgery

The New Neo Posted on by

Please wish me luck!

I’ve had a lot of dental work in my life. I’m a textbook of dental anomalies: several congenitally missing teeth and/or misplaced teeth that required a removable bridge when I was a young teenager, and later implants and something called a cantilevered bridge and a bunch of other stuff I don’t even know the names of anymore.

I am scrupulous about brushing and flossing and have often gotten compliments on my dental hygiene (from dental hygienists, that is, not from random people on the street). Nevertheless, and apparently because my two dental implants were placed in a space that was much smaller than average for two implants, I have developed a common problem called peri-implantitis.

As I’ve gotten older you’d think I’d get braver about this sort of thing. Actually, I believe I’m getting wimpier. But I started out very brave about dentistry for some reason. That’s good, because as a child I was subject to an unusual amount of it.

And then there’s the Grassley-Graham letter

The New Neo Posted on by

How many memos and letters will be released before this is over?

More details of the letter issued by senators Grassley and Graham have come out, quoted in this article by Mollie Hemingway. I had originally referenced that memo in a post I wrote two days ago, and noted that the memo is a criminal referral for Christopher Steele of the notorious Steele dossier.

The Grassley-Graham memo tells quite a tale, but it’s a hard one to summarize. So I suggest you read the entire Hemingway article. I’ll just recap a few of the main points, and I urge you to get the details and the other main points there.

The dossier formed the bulk of the FISA application, and furthermore: “The application appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page, although it does cite to a news article that appears to be sourced to Mr. Steele’s dossier as well..”

This is not the way it’s supposed to work. But as Comey testified, the FBI was relying on Steele’s prior reputation as a truth-teller. At the time, they apparently were unaware that Steele was the source for the news article (the Yahoo piece by Isikoff). If true, that would be bad enough, but it arguably would only be mere incompetence (although serious incompetence) rather than deception or coverup on the FBI’s part. The lying and coverup would have been from Steele at that point.

Which brings us to the following [emphasis mine]:

In Steele’s sworn court filings in litigation in London, he admitted that he “gave off the record briefings to a small number of journalists about the pre-election memoranda [i.e., the dossier] in late summer/autumn 2016.” In another sworn filing in that case, Mr. Steele further stated that journalists from “the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New Yorker, and CNN” were “briefed at the end of September 2016 by [Steele] and Fusion at Fusion’s instruction.”The filing further states that Mr. Steele “subsequently participated in further meetings at Fusion’s instruction with Fusion and the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Yahoo News, which took place mid-October 2016.””¦

The first of these filings was publicly reported in the U.S. media in April of 2017, yet the FBI did not subsequently disclose to the ISC this evidence suggesting that Mr. Steele had lied to the FBI. Instead the application still relied primarily on his credibility prior to the October media incident.

The FBI also learned from an interview with a source that Steele was “desperate” to make sure Trump was not elected president, but this rather salient fact was never reported in the FBI’s subsequent FISA applications for a renewal of the Page surveillance. In other words, as the credibility of Steele and his otherwise-unverified dossier grew weaker and weaker and basically evaporated, the FBI hid that situation from the FISA court, much as they hid the fact that the DNC and the Hillary campaign funded the Steele dossier in the first place.

The Grassley-Graham letter also indicates that, even after the FBI had suspended its relationship with Steele because they discovered he’d talked to the press in violation of an agreement they’d had with him, and then he’d lied to them about that—even after that happened (a fact they apparently did disclose to the FISA court) they kept vouching for Steele’s veracity and that of the Yahoo article by Isikoff as constituting independent corroboration of Steele’s dossier. In other words, despite the fact that they knew he’d talked to the press and lied to them about talking to the press, they claimed to the court that Steele somehow hadn’t been the press’s source for the Isikoff article (for which he actually was the source).

And remember that controversy over whether the Nunes memo was telling the truth about whether the FBI had told the FISA court that the Steele dossier was funded by Hillary and the DNC? Both sides agree that those particular details were never revealed to the FISA court. But the Democrats have said that at least the FISA court was told by the FBI that a “political entity” had funded the dossier (I previously dealt with the question here). But this is what the Grassley-Grahm letter reveals:

[T]he FBI noted to a vaguely limited extent the political origins of the dossier. In footnote 8 the FBI stated that the dossier information was compiled pursuant to the direction of a law firm who had hired an “identified U.S. person””“now known as Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS”“[REDACTED] The application failed to disclose that the identities of Mr. Simpson’s ultimate clients were the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

That’s certainly an unimpressive amount of disclosure on the part of the FBI. In fact, it’s inadequate and deceptive. No doubt the Democrats will claim this part of Grassley-Graham isn’t true, either. And on and on and on, until perhaps the actual FISA application will be released and we can see its wording.

At this point, why on earth not? Redact the sensitive parts and get on with it. It sets a bad precedent for the future, but we already basically know what’s in it. As I’ve noted earlier, the worse precedent was set by the FBI’s behavior, rather than the disclosure of it. If we have to decide which is more dangerous, I say the former. An out of control FBI bent on political ends and using deception and a secret court to achieve those ends would be extraordinarily perilous.

And remember, we were never supposed to learn any of this.

[ADDENDUM: And this is speculative but interesting. It’s certainly occurred to me lately that the entire Steele dossier may have been a Clinton-associate creation that was laundered through various layers of sources to hide the original source.]

I’m going to step out into the storm…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for a little bit.

I happen to like winter, at least for a while—and as long as there’s no ice storm. Today the big question is if and when the storm might turn to ice. But in the meantime, I like to go out and see what’s what.

Will the snow be heavy and wet or flaky and dry? Big flakes or small? I once ventured out after a class, many years ago, and the sight was enthralling. It was nighttime, but the streetlights shone on the largest flakiest driest snowfall I’d ever seen. It was magical. No way to make a snowball; the snow wouldn’t pack at all, but its beauty was phenomenal.

Now I look it up and see that such conditions are even more unusual than I’d thought. Wet snows are apparently the ones that tend to produce large flakes, and dry snows produce small.

What was going on that night? A mystery, that’s what.

[ANTICLIMACTIC ADDENDUM: I came back inside pretty darn quickly. It had just started to rain/ice over the snow that had already fallen. Ugh!]

Recent revelations from the Strzok/Page archives

The New Neo Posted on by

The Strzok/Page texts are the gift that keeps on giving:

Newly revealed text messages between FBI paramours Peter Strzok and Lisa Page include an exchange about preparing talking points for then-FBI Director James Comey to give to President Obama, who wanted “to know everything we’re doing.”…

Senate investigators told Fox News this text raises questions about Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email investigation.

It sure does. Especially since Obama has vociferously denied knowing anything about the details:

In the fall of 2016, Mr. Obama’s spokesmen at the White House were stating repeatedly that the president didn’t know details of the probe, and didn’t want to know.

“The White House is going to be scrupulous about avoiding even the appearance of political interference in prosecutorial or investigative decisions,” said then-press secretary Josh Earnest on Oct. 31, 2016.

Two days earlier, Obama deputy press secretary Eric Schultz told reporters that the White House had been caught by surprise when Mr. Comey announced that the FBI had uncovered more Clinton emails.

“We saw it in the media. That was the first we learned of it,” Mr. Schultz said.

Mr. Schultz, who is still serving as a spokesman for Mr. Obama, had no immediate comment on the disclosure about the FBI agents.

Of course not. It’s not necessary, because only the right seems to care.

In addition, the lovers’ texts reveal that the FBI got the Weiner laptop emails (containing some from Clinton that may have been classified) in late September of 2016. And yet when Comey told Congress about this a full month later, he said he’d been briefed on it the day before.

Did this mean that the information about the Weiner laptop emails from Hillary was withheld from Comey till then? Or does this mean he was lying when he indicated he’d just learned about the matter the day before? Or was his statement to Congress on that purposely misleading although technically correct? Here’s what he told Congress:

In connection with an unrelated case [the Weiner case], the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday”¦

Note that he doesn’t say “I was briefed on this for the very first time yesterday,” or “I just learned yesterday of the existence of…”. He merely said he was briefed on it yesterday. It might have been the 20th time he was briefed, right? Lawyers tend to be very careful about how they talk.

Whichever it was, it’s not good. But as far as I can tell from a quick look it’s almost solely on the right that’s it’s been reported so far, except for a brief mention from the WaPo. The WaPo coverage is actually a rather interesting example of how to bury a story. The title of the article is “FBI texts reveal admiring view of then-director James Comey.” Sounds like a big ho-hum, as well as being favorable to Comey, right? The article is long; about 1000 words, and it’s basically about how much Strzok and Page admired Comey. The part that mentions the timing of when the FBI learned about the Weiner laptap emails from Clinton occurs around 800 words into it, long after the point when most people would probably have stopped reading it. Not only that, but this is how it’s presented:

The texts also make clear that FBI leadership knew weeks before Comey alerted Congress that a trove of emails relevant to the Clinton investigation had been found on a laptop belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner. It remains unclear why the FBI waited a month before revealing the discovery of new emails and before obtaining a warrant to scour them. On Sept. 28, 2016, one month before the news became public, Strzok told Page that he’d been summoned to the deputy director’s office because “hundreds of thousands of emails” had been turned over by Weiner’s attorney to prosecutors as part of a sexting investigation, with a “ton of material” believed to be from Weiner’s wife.

“This,” Strzok wrote, “will never end.”

A person could read that and not think there was any problem there other than some sort of minor delay. Notice that there’s no mention of Comey’s statement to Congress that he’d been briefed on it the day before, which was a month after the FBI got the emails.

Now, maybe I’m missing something. But when I Googled “fbi learned of new emails on weiner laptop back in sept 28” I got plenty of right-wing sites with the story, but virtually none in the MSM or on the left (unless you consider the Wall Street Journal to be the MSM) except the WaPo article I just discussed. So there’s two stories: the facts of the story itself (the content, if you will) and the coverage/noncoverage of the story (the process angle).

If a story falls in the forest and the MSM steps over it and moves on, does anybody hear?

[NOTE: And this on Sidney Blumenthal has nothing to do with Strzok/Page, but it’s of interest and I thought I’d put it in this post, too. Blumnethal may just be the Zelig of the left—although he’s less an observer and more actor.]

[ADDENDUM 2/8: Of the two text stories that appeared in Fox, the first one—about Obama wanting to be briefed on the FBI investigation—may have referred to the investigation of Russian interference in the election rather than the Clinton email investigation. This WSJ article says that the information that the reference was to the Russia story came from “associates of the FBI employees involved in the exchange.” Make of that what you will. We don’t know whether this is true or who the “FBI employees” are (they seem to be colleagues of Page and Strzok), but on the whole I’m inclined to believe that Obama was briefed on the Russia case rather than the Clinton email case. Because the Russia investigation was a counterintelligence operation, it would have been proper for Obama to have been briefed on it, unlike the email case.

The original Fox story said, “this text raises questions about Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email investigation.” Perhaps those questions have been answered. The timeline (the email investigation had been temporarily closed at the time) also suggest that those “associates of the FBI employees involved in the exchange” are telling the truth.

The other parts of the story seem quite solid.]

Will Daniel Day-Lewis come out of retirement to play Jordan Peterson?

The New Neo Posted on by

Daniel Day-Lewis:

Jordan Peterson:

Day-Lewis and Peterson have a similar “look”: long face, handsome features but not pretty-boy handsome, dark hair graying. I originally thought of them both as similarly dour, although of course I’ve seen each of them smile. But when I tried to look for still photos that illustrated their resemblance, I discovered two things.

The first is that their features are more dissimilar than I’d thought. Day-Lewis has the bigger nose, for example. The second is that it was hard to find a solemn photo of Day-Lewis and even harder to find a smiley one of Peterson. I don’t know it that reflects the fact that Day-Lewis is actually quite smiley in his regular life as opposed to screen roles, or if he’s just usually photographed when at ceremonial events that are generally happy.

I know that Peterson has described himself as having had a problem with depression, and that could account for the solemnity in his photos. Or it may also be a conscious act of his (he’s nothing if not deliberate) connected with getting the seriousness of his message across. But Day-Lewis has suffered from depression, too.

So I’ll leave that mystery be.

Peterson now joins the ranks of the other Day-Lewis lookalikes I’ve noted. So maybe it’s quadruplets now (click on the link to understand what I mean).

The Big Effing Deal versus the Nothingburger

The New Neo Posted on by

I want to clear one thing up.

The anti-Trump forces tried to sell the idea that release of the Nunes memo would be terribly dangerous because it would compromise sources, methods, and security, and release classified information. That was originally an assertion of the FBI, which sought to block the memo’s release. The assertion that releasing the memo would constitute a dangerous compromise of security was picked up by the Democrats and the MSM and proclaimed with great vigor.

That was the “Big Effing Deal” part.

Then after the memo was released anyway, the argument become “nothing to see here, no big deal.”

That was the “Nothingburger” part.

I’ve read a great many statements from people on the right (including commenters around the web) that these two statements contradict each other. That sounds correct on the face of it, but it’s not. There’s actually no contradiction.

I say that despite the fact that I completely disagree with the two characterizations. That is, I think they should be switched and that it was the FBI’s actions as described in the memo that appear to be a Big Effing Deal and the brouhaha over the supposedly classified nature of the information in the memo that proved to be the Nothingburger.

The reason I say there’s no contradiction in the two characterizations by the forces opposing the memo and its release, however, is that they concern two different aspects of the memo. In other words, information can be feared as too dangerous to release for some reason while at the same time being too unimportant to justify the danger inherent in that release.

However, as I’ve tried to make clear, I think the situation with the memo is actually the reverse of that: its release involved virtually no classified information and in that way represented no threat at all, whereas its content was very important indeed (or should be, to thinking people who love liberty). Therefore the decision to release it ought to have been a no-brainer. The anti-release forces, however, were arguing that its release was highly risky for security reasons while at the same time of such an unimportant nature that its suppression should have been a no-brainer.

Of course, perhaps all the FBI really meant when it said the Nunes memo would be so damaging to national security was that it would damage the reputation of the FBI. But (as I wrote here), that argument has it backwards. It was the actions of the FBI as revealed in the memo that had the potential to damage the FBI’s reputation. But the FBI seems to think that what the American public doesn’t know won’t hurt them. That’s the sort of thing people mean when they talk about the dangers of the Deep State.

And that’s a Big Effing Deal, not a Nothingburger.

[ADDENDUM: More here.]

A lawyer’s and a judge’s reaction to the Nunes memo

The New Neo Posted on by

Surprisingly enough, this piece by Hugh Hewitt appeared in the WaPo, of all places. Hewitt formerly held a job that’s very relevant to opining on the FBI’s FISA application to surveil Carter Page:

Having reviewed hundreds and hundreds of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications [in his former job as special assistant to the attorney general] as the final stop between the FBI and the desks of Attorneys General William French Smith and Edwin Meese III, I read the Nunes memo as revealing one major fact that stands out above all other revelations: The FISA warrant for surveillance on Carter Page (and the three subsequent renewals of the warrant) omitted a material fact. While the FBI admitted that the information came from a politically motivated source, the bureau did not disclose that the source had been financed by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That is a damning omission.

Note that Hewitt says this despite the fact that it’s been reported (by anonymous sources) that in its FISA application re Page, the FBI made some sort of reference to political funding of the Steele dossier. As I wrote this past Saturday [emphasis mine]:

But let’s accept for the sake of argument that the FISA application did include an indication that some “political entity” had backed the dossier. The FISA court certainly would not have assumed that it was actually the DNC and the Clintons who were that entity or entities. Remember, among other things, that many Republicans were very anti-Trump, and that the MSM originally reported that the Steele dossier was funded by Republicans. There are a lot of political entities in the world, some big and some small, major and very minor. The DNC and Clinton were among the biggest fishes of all, and the most suspect in terms of their motives. The FISA court was unaware they were the funders of the dossier, although the FBI was well aware of it.

That’s the issue Hewitt is talking about in that quote, and that’s the issue being referred to as well in this quote from Hewitt’s article involving an email he received [emphasis mine]:

Upon publication of the Nunes memo, a retired federal judge emailed me: “There is not an officer of the court in the land who in the context of this particular application to the FISA court should not have identified the source of the information as having been the [Democratic National Committee] and the Clinton Campaign. If I had granted the application and then subsequently learned that the information was sourced to the DNC and the Campaign, I would have rescinded the authorization and issued a show-cause order to the Government to explain who and why this sourcing was not made known to the court. The fact (if it be that) that the Government told the court that it was a political source, but did not identify who, in this particular instance, is highly probative that the Government purposely misled the court.”

Hewitt points out that, among other things, this will have an effect on the trust between the FISA court and the FBI:

The non-disclosure of a material fact in an application for a FISA warrant ”” its minimization, indeed one could argue its camouflaging ”” is a very big deal and its provenance should be thoroughly investigated. It threatens to undermine every warrant submitted to a FISA court.

It’s not about President Trump, or shouldn’t be.

I agree, but good luck with that. Everything is about Trump. Everything.

[NOTE: The point Hewitt makes about trust between the FBI and the FISA court also harks back (indirectly) to James Comey’s ranting tweet about which I wrote in this post last Friday. One of the things Comey wrote in that tweet was that the publication of the Nunes memo had “damaged relationship with FISA court.” In my post about it I commented:

…“damaged relationship with the FISA court”””how, and whose relationship? If anything might have “damaged” that relationship, it would have been the alleged actions themselves, if in fact the FISA court was not informed of the extremely pertinent information about the origins of the dossier.

Comey’s tweet shows an interesting state of mind on his part. Remember the old saying, “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup”? It originated with Watergate, but the idea was that Nixon’s guilt was more seriously involved in the coverup rather than the original act itself. Comey is saying a sort of twisted form of that here—in other words, he’s trying to assert that there was no breach of trust between the FBI and the FISA court as long as the FISA court didn’t know about what the FBI had done to deceive it. Comey places the locus of blame for disrupting that trust with the people who revealed the breach of trust (Nunes and company) rather than those who committed it.

As I said, twisted. It becomes more and more disturbing that this man was once head of the FBI.]

[ADDENDUM: Please see this. It fits right in with the ideas I’m presenting here. The Deep State is a reality and wishes to be autonomous and answerable to no one except itself and those in line with it.]

First we had “Clinton and Co. paid for the dossier.” Now we have…

The New Neo Posted on by

…”Clinton and Co. supplied information for the dossier.”

Both of those allegations describe an extremely disturbing and dangerous set of circumstances, if true. The newer allegation can be found in this memorandum sent from the Senate Committee on the Judiciary (Chairman Charles Grassley, and Lindsay Graham) to Deputy AG Rosenstein (DOJ) and FBI Director Wray, about a potential violation of 18 U.S.C. § 100 by Christopher Steele:

…when information in those classified documents [supplied to the Committee by the FBI] is evaluated in light of sworn statements by Mr. Steele in British litigation, it appears that either Mr. Steele lied to the FBI or the British court, or that the classified documents reviewed by the Committee contain materially false statements…

Mr. Steele also admitted in the British litigation to briefing journalists from the Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New Yorker, and CNN in September of 2016. Simply put, the more people who contemporaneously knew that Mr. Steele was compiling his dossier, the more likely it was vulnerable to manipulation. In fact, in the British litigation, which involves a post-election dossier memorandum, Mr. Steele admitted that he received and included in it unsolicited-and unverified-allegations.

That filing implies that he similarly received unsolicited intelligence on these prior to the election as well, stating that Mr. Steele “continued to receive unsolicited intelligence on the matters covered by the pre-election memoranda after the US Presidential election.”…

One memorandum by Mr. Steele that was not published by Buzzfeed is dated October 19, 2016. The report alleges that…the report was the second in a series, and that the report was information that came from a foreign sub-source who “is in touch with, a contact of, a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to [redacted].” It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises considerable concerns about his credibility.

His credibility? How about their culpability? Steele was just a useful instrument, a conduit through which information passed and who afforded plausible deniability to the Clinton campaign—which never expected any of this to come to light, anyway.

To recap: it appears that there is good evidence that the “Trump colluded with Russia” story was devised and disseminated by the Clinton campaign, which seeded the story in various ways—working through Steele, Fusion, the media, and the FISA court, not just to fund the report but to influence and supply information for its content. The actions of the Clinton operatives may have constituted collusion with Russia, as well.

Anyone who professes to care about the rule of law and the integrity of our elections, court system, and government institutions, should care and care deeply about this.

Who was Carter Page and why investigate him?

The New Neo Posted on by

You can always count on our troll visitors to apprise us of the latest party line talking points. For example:

If Carter Page was not part of the Trump Campaign [according to the Trump spokespeople, after news came out that Page was being investigated], and if the FISA application was applied for after the Trump Campaign publicly said so, how exactly does this warrant prove that the FBI was trying to spy on the Trump Campaign via Carter Page?

Let me count the ways.

From Wiki:

Page served as a foreign-policy advisor to Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. In September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials investigated alleged contacts between Page and Russian officials subject to U.S. sanctions, including Igor Sechin. After news reports began to appear describing Page’s links to Russia and Putin’s government, Page stepped down from his role in the Trump campaign.

When someone is running for office they have a ton of advisors. Most of what they do is give advice on certain policy areas with which they are familiar and are expert. Much of that advice is given through papers. Some of them probably never even meet the candidate. Perhaps that was true of Page; we really don’t know. But no one has ever alleged that Page was a higher-up who had significant direct contact with Trump.

That denial from Miller was issued after it was already in the news that “Page was being investigated for allegedly meeting with Kremlin officials.”

In fact, all we know about Page’s involvement with the Trump campaign is that Page was initially named as a foreign-policy advisor to the Trump effort back in March of 2016, along with quite a few others. He quit after he was already being investigated, although it happened to have been prior to the FISA application from the FBI.

Back to Wiki:

Shortly after Page resigned from the Trump campaign, the Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained a warrant from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISA] to surveil Page’s communications. To issue the warrant, a federal judge concluded there was probable cause to believe that Page was a foreign agent knowingly engaging in clandestine intelligence for the Russian government…The 90-day warrant was repeatedly renewed.

In January 2017, Page’s name appeared repeatedly in a leaked contract intelligence dossier containing unsubstantiated allegations of close interactions between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

That last bit, the “leaked contract intelligence dossier,” would have been the now-famous Steele dossier that was used to get the FISA warrant and was actually financed by Clinton and the DNC.

So sometime late in the summer or September of 2016, while Page was still at least nominally a Trump foreign policy advisor, he started to be investigated regarding his Russia ties and specifically ties between the Trump campaign and Russia by way of its supposed agent Carter Page. That news was publicly reported in September of 2016 [emphasis mine]:

U.S. intelligence officials are looking into a Donald Trump foreign policy adviser over possible ties to Russia, Yahoo News reported Friday.

Carter Page, who was included on a list of foreign policy advisers that the GOP presidential nominee released in March, is a former banker with Merrill Lynch based in Moscow and has extensive business ties in Russia.

Intelligence officials are reportedly probing whether Page has opened up private lines of communications with top Russian officials, including talks about potentially lifting economic sanctions.

According to multiple sources briefed on the issue, Page’s Russian dealings have been the topic of congressional briefings.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reportedly wrote a letter to FBI Director James Comey after one of the briefings this summer about reports of Page meeting with “high ranking sanctioned individuals” in Moscow, asking for an investigation and calling the meetings evidence of “significant and disturbing ties” between the campaign and the Kremlin.

Top Democrats in the House have similarly asked the FBI to investigate whether any Trump aides played a hand in the widespread hack of Democratic groups, largely attributed to Russia.

So this was done at the behest of Harry Reid, in addition to the involvement of the DNC and Clinton in the dossier itself.

Once the FISA application was granted, the FBI now had access not only to Page’s past dealings but his future dealings. Perhaps they thought that he was still working for Trump, just not officially. Almost certainly they hoped he would lead them to someone who was working for Trump. And they kept hoping and hoping long enough to renew that application three more times.

But they didn’t really give a rat’s patootie about Page. It was Trump they were after.

As this author writes:

Page was the camel’s nose under the tent. A suspicious character who worked in Russia. That was all the FBI needed. And the FBI camel wasted no time in crawling entirely into the tent.

As the Nunes memo clearly outlined, the FBI and DOJ had two choices at this point in their pursuit of Donald Trump via Carter Page. A FISA Title VII warrant, for surveillance of US persons abroad, specifically those in contact with potential terror organizations, which Page was not.

Or a FISA Title I warrant, with a much higher threshold…Title I is reserved for an, “agent of a foreign power” who is “knowingly engaging in clandestine intelligence activities.”…

The Obama administration made the claim that Carter Page was an actual Russian spy, basing the claim on the Steele dossier, which FBI director Comey at the time described to Congress as “salacious and unverified.” This FISA application was made on October 21, 2016, months after Page left the Trump campaign. Furthermore, the application was renewed three more times, twice while Trump was President.

Whether the FISA judge was duped or in on the charade is as of yet unknown, but the Obama justice and intelligence forces were now in the Trump tent.

Anyone and everyone who Page had contact with, past, present, and future, was fair game to spy on. If Page was an advisor to the Trump campaign, even if for only a few months, he undoubtedly had contact with every principal in the campaign, including candidate Trump and his family. Obama and Clinton were essentially embedded within the Trump campaign.

These “incidental contacts” of Carter Page could then be unmasked by Susan Rice and others in the Obama administration. This information then was placed in Obama’s Presidential Daily Brief.

Oh, and by the way, another leftist talking point I’ve seen about Page—that the FBI had investigated him for spying back in 2013, long before he worked for Trump, so he was really the target in 2016—has been refuted:

…[Page’s] name popped up in a case against three Russians who in 2013 were posing as businessmen and trying to recruit Americans to become Russian agents. The Russians apparently wanted to enlist Page, who in the end was not accused of any wrongdoing and has denied any contacts with the Russians beyond ordinary business communications. For their part, the Russians came to view Page as something less than a prize; one of them was captured on a wiretap calling him an “idiot.”

So Page was no Russian agent, nor did he ever appear to be in danger of becoming a Russian agent.

Here’s more from Scott Johnson:

Back in 2013 the FBI was listening to its standard, ongoing, FISA coverage of all things Russian. They were NOT investigating or wiretapping Page. The FBI was investigating and wiretapping Russians. It had no idea who Page was. By listening to Russians, however, the FBI discovered that Page was in touch with Russians.

What they would have done next is standard operation procedure in the counterintelligence world: they did some background on Page, contacted him, and got him to cooperate against those Russians. Anyone who read the court filing in the resulting case”“including the Russians”“would have had no trouble figuring out that Page had been cooperating with the FBI.

Page was a businessman who had done business with Russia, and his name came up earlier and was completely cleared. That does not translate to the needed evidence for the FISA application that was required to allege that there was credible information that he was a Russian spy before he could be fully investigated. There was no such credible evidence, and the FBI had reason to know it, although it’s much more likely that the FISA court didn’t.