The New Neo

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 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.]