Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

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Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 22, 2018 9:22 pm

Republican lawmakers are pushing for the House Intelligence Committee to release a memo written by the panel's chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, that outlines purported surveillance during the transition period against President-elect Donald Trump by former President Barack Obama's administration.

And Russia-linked Twitter bots have jumped on the bandwagon.


Indeed, Gaetz, DeSantis, and King — three of those squawking the loudest — voted to give the same FBI they’re claiming is rife with abuse more power to spy on Americans, including political dissidents. Nunes, who wrote this alarming report, also wrote the bill to expand the power of the FBI he’s now pretending is badly abusive.


I found the memo :P

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Russia-linked Twitter accounts are working overtime to help Devin Nunes

#ReleaseTheMemo has spiked 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to Hamilton 68, a website that tracks Russian propaganda in near-real time.

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Meet the guys behind the earth shattering "Memo" :roll:

Florida Republican Matty Gaetz stuns MSNBC’s Chris Hayes by calling ‘disgusting’ Haiti ‘all sheetmetal and garbage’

Again, not one of the Republicans screaming most loudly to #ReleaseTheMemo voted the way you'd expect on 702 reauthorization if they really believed the FBI was abusing its power.


ROLL CALL: Trump’s Biggest Enablers In Congress On Russia Probe
By Allegra Kirkland | January 19, 2018 6:00 am
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The Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to derail, undermine, and distract from the federal investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has had some crucial help from the President’s enablers on Capitol Hill.

These Trump allies have turned public committee hearings with senior intelligence officials into debates about leaks to the media. They’ve proposed bills to decapitate special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, recasting the lifelong Republican former FBI director as a liberal hack. They’ve called for additional investigations into what they describe as anti-Trump bias at the FBI and DOJ. And of course, they’ve aimed to change the subject by attacking Hillary Clinton.

In doing all this, they’ve often appeared to put their loyalty to the president ahead of the need to conduct a full investigation into a major threat to national security.

In descending order, these are the GOP lawmakers who have most aggressively gone to bat for Trump.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA)
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Nunes has used his powerful perch to cast doubt on the existence of any links between the Trump campaign and Russia, and to carry out shadow probes that better suit the administration’s storyline.

First, there was his one-man “unmasking” debacle last spring. The California Republican took to the press “evidence” he received directly from the White House, describing it as proof that Obama administration officials improperly revealed the identities of Americans caught up in classified intelligence reports. After Nunes’ claims were debunked by bipartisan lawmakers and national security experts, he found himself facing a House Ethics Committee probe for allegedly mishandling classified documents. In response, Nunes temporarily recused himself from his panel’s Russia probe.

That didn’t stop him from issuing a series of subpoenas to intelligence agencies and to Fusion GPS, the firm that assembled a dossier documenting Russia’s alleged coordination with the Trump campaign. He and other House Intelligence Committee Republicans are currently hunting for evidence that top DOJ and FBI officials improperly handled the dossier.

Nunes has also put himself on the frontline of two other issues the GOP has used as counterweights to the Russia probe. In October, he announced a new probe into the debunked Uranium One scandal involving the Obama administration’s approval of a deal selling part of a company that exports uranium to Russia’s government, a move said to have benefited a donor to the Clinton Foundation. And he threatened to hold DOJ leadership in contempt of Congress for allegedly withholding information about former top FBI official Peter Strzok, who was forced off of Mueller’s team after the discovery of text messages he’d sent disparaging Trump.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
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Grassley began the new year by sending off Congress’s first criminal referral in the Russia probe. But the target wasn’t anyone accused of colluding with Putin’s government. Rather, it was Christopher Steele, the former British spy who put together the dossier detailing alleged collusion, and a favorite target of the right. Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) alleged that Steele lied to federal agents about his contacts with the media.

The Iowa Republican also wrote to the Justice Department suggesting that then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe may need to recuse himself from the Russia probe for matters related to his wife’s unsuccessful Democratic campaign for state office in Virginia. And he publicly questioned whether the FBI warned the Trump campaign about ties between some of its staffers and Russian officials. Both moves furthered the conservative storyline alleging anti-Trump prejudice at the bureau.

Grassley has also called for a special counsel to investigate Uranium One, and made much hay of the allegations against Strzok, announcing in December that he was opening a probe into the former FBI official’s “reported bias.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)
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The freshman Florida congressman in November became the first lawmaker to openly demand Mueller’s firing.

After months of calling for a second special counsel, Gaetz led a group of GOP lawmakers in introducing a resolution calling for Mueller to step down immediately because he was the head of the FBI when the Uranium One deal was approved. Gaetz called Mueller’s impartiality “hopelessly compromised” and urged other Republicans to join his cause.

The outspoken Freedom Caucus member frequently appears on Fox to float allegations that it was the DNC that collaborated with Russia. And Gaetz has said he personally warned Trump about his concerns that Mueller’s probe is “infected with bias,” putting the country at risk of a “coup d’etat.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)
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Jordan has leveraged his seat on the House Judiciary Committee to push conspiracy theories in public hearings with senior U.S. officials.

The Ohio Republican has called for a special counsel to investigate whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the FBI cooperated to promote the Steele dosser. And he offered FBI director Wray his “hunch” that Strzok was personally responsible for using the dossier as justification for the FBI to “spy” on the Trump campaign.

The Freedom Caucus member kicked off 2018 with an op-ed calling for Sessions to step down for failing to plug the steady stream of leaks emanating from the DOJ on the Russia probe.

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL)
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DeSantis in August became the first lawmaker to propose a measure that would end Mueller’s investigation, which DeSantis has called a“fishing expedition.” It would have eliminated funding for the probe six months after the amendment’s passage, and prohibited Mueller from looking into matters that occurred prior to the June 2015 launch of Trump’s presidential campaign.

At the same time, DeSantis, who is running for governor of Florida, has argued that the dossier—which was initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon before the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign took over—proved “without a shadow of a doubt” that the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC)
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UNITED STATES - JULY 28: Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference in the Capitol on July 28, 2017. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

The House Freedom Caucus Chairman co-wrote the Washington Examiner piece with Jordan calling for Sessions’ resignation over leaks.

But his op-ed campaign to change the conversation about Russia dates back far earlier. Last June, he lamented that the Democrat-led “hysterics surrounding Russia” were a concerted effort to derail Trump and Congress’ agenda. After all, Meadows reminded CNN’s readers, “no formal charge has been leveled against anyone.”

Meadows would make a similar case in a Fox News op-ed published just days before Mueller’s team announced its first charges, asserting “it’s time to move on” from investigations into Trump’s campaign and Russia. In the op-ed, he called for a special counsel to investigate matters involving Clinton and the Obama DOJ.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
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In early 2017, Graham, a long-time foreign policy hawk, was questioning Trump’s softness on Russia and mocking Nunes’ “Inspector Clouseau” investigations into classified leaks. By the end of the year, Graham had changed his tune.

The veteran South Carolina senator signed off on Grassley’s letter referring Steele for criminal investigation. He alleged that Trump’s “blindspot” on Russia is “changing for the better.” And he has lent weight to calls for a second special counsel with his loud, public calls for independent investigations of the Trump-Russia dossier, Uranium One deal, and alleged anti-Trump bias at DoJ.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC)
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Gowdy has maintained his public support for the Russia probe and Mueller, but the House judiciary and intelligence committee member has done plenty to cast doubt on the investigation’s legitimacy.

The South Carolina lawmaker latched on to the leaks issue early on, and spent much of the House Intelligence Committee’s first hearing on Russia last March grilling then-FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers about how the press obtained classified information about Trump officials. Gowdy ran through a list of Obama officials who could have leaked ousted national security adviser Mike Flynn’s contact with the Russian ambassador, even suggesting that the former President himself could have been behind it.

Gowdy has dismissed calls for a second special counsel, but has railed against leaks from and bias on Mueller’s team, recently telling CNN it was “tone-deaf” that the special counsel was unable to “find prosecutors that don’t have an ‘I’m With Her’ T-shirt on.”

Gowdy came to national prominence as the chair of the special House committee created in 2014 to investigate the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attacks. Many Democrats described the panel as an effort to damage Clinton.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker ... estigation


Devin Nunes Will Do Anything to Protect Donald Trump
By Josh Marshall | January 22, 2018 6:01 pm

We are on genuinely untrodden territory with a faction of House Republicans working to discredit federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies because they are investigating the President and finding damning information about him and his 2016 campaign. As you’ve likely heard, Rep. Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House intel committee had his staff write this “memo” which allegedly presents evidence of intelligence and law enforcement wrongdoing during the 2016 presidential campaign – basically “deep state” plotting against candidate Donald Trump.

Over the last week there’s been a huge campaign on the right to “release the memo”. That campaign has also been supported by Russian intelligence backed social media accounts.

All of this stems from and began with Mike Flynn’s efforts to snoop on the investigators probing his actions during the 2016 campaign which Flynn began as soon as he got into the White House almost exactly one year ago. This is the story of the “review” conducted by Flynn protege Ezra Cohen-Watnick and the whole “un-masking” charade from earlier in the year. Devin Nunes was the Hill leader who made common cause with Flynn and Cohen-Watnick and got himself temporarily knocked off the Russia investigation for his shenanigans. Now he’s back with this. It’s simply a continuation of the un-masking nonsense.

Now we learn that Nunes, after circulating the classified “memo” to the entire House of Representatives, has refused to allow the FBI itself to see the document. CNN just reported this a few moments ago and that comes after a report of the same yesterday from The Daily Beast. Keep in mind, the FBI in its counter-intelligence capacity is the organization being accused in the memo. Nunes is clearly a clown and willing to subvert the rule of law to defend a lawless President. What is striking is that the entire House GOP and, critically, House Speaker Paul Ryan is going along with it.

The FBI of course needs deep scrutiny and has a history of various misdeeds. But there’s simply no evidence of any misdeeds in this case other than the crime of helping to uncover facts about the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russian intelligence operatives during the 2016 campaign. It’s amazing that this is happening.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/de ... nald-trump


Executive Intelligence Review has a really wacky take
Rep. Devin Nunes Sets Stage for Taking Down British Coup Aimed at the President


....google it I will not link to it here :P

Fox News of course is all over the story...I refuse to link to them but again if one is interested not hard to find one can even find their crap about it posted here

and then there's Breitbart for those who can stomach reading that site you can go there and see their crap I won't post it here.

last but not lest there are plenty of blogs and so called discussion sites pushing this shit

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Wow, lots of hyperventilating going on. Could be Hannity knows all about that NRA-Russia connection. Caught a few minutes of his show today and the guy sounds like he's going into complete panic.

Matty Gaetz and L'il Jimmy Jordan would do well to go read the transcript released today by the House Intelligence Committee - (Yeah, I know... Intelligence.... scary stuff for two members of the Freedom from Facts Caucus, but...)...

the transcript of the testimony of the Fusion GPS founder Simpson....

the hearing that, if you read the transcript, it seems that all the Con members of the Committee up and left after about two hours, because for the remainder of the transcript, it seems only Democrats are asking questions.....guess the Cons had more important things to do, like make up false talking points about "palace coups"...

anyway, lots of important info, like Fusion originally being hired to do its research by the very conservative Washington Free- Beacon newspaper - not the DNC and Hillary - and being tasked to look into the Donald's business dealings.... which led to investigations in to the business ties he had with Russian oligarchs that he like sot deny.....

because lying that you have no business deals in Russia is not the same as saying you have no business deals with Russians....

and then there are all the strange purchases of Trump-owned real-estate by Russians in all cash deals, when they seemingly purposely over - pay for the properties..... also known as money- laundering.

So, there is no "palace coup", but there is an investigation into criminal activities, and the resulting obstruction of justice.

- RyansGdad


Democrats derided the release of the report as part of an attempt to discredit senior leaders of the agencies leading investigations into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and whether any of his associates aided Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election.

“[T]he Majority voted today on a party-line basis to grant House Members access to a profoundly misleading set of talking points drafted by Republican staff attacking the FBI and its handling of the investigation,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement. “Rife with factual inaccuracies and referencing highly classified materials that most of Republican Intelligence Committee members were forced to acknowledge they had never read, this is meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI.”



Release the Memo: What's the Conspiracy Behind the Right-Wing Meme?
Republicans claim a secret document reveals a Hillary Clinton plot "worse than Watergate" – and they're getting a big boost from Russian bots
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On a day like Friday, with a shutdown looming and DACA in the balance and Chuck Schumer huddling with President Trump in the White House, you might logically expect right-wing Twitter to be blowing up – but not, necessarily, with the seemingly unaccountable hashtag that's dominated the platform since Thursday evening: #ReleaseTheMemo. But then again, you might not logically expect American conservatives to work in concert with Russian state propagandists and Twitter bots – though by now, God knows, nobody should be surprised.

The "memo" in question is a confidential four-page document assembled by a stealthy group of House Republicans, led by Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes, over the past month. These members, as part of the G.O.P. effort to discredit Robert Mueller and demolish his investigation into the Trump campaign's Russian collusion, undertook to "probe" whether the FBI and Justice Department misused the infamous dossier compiled by British intelligence expert Christopher Steele. Surprisingly enough, they seem to have found what they set out to find – judging, at least, from the dark and hysterical hints about the contents of the memo that right-wingers in Congress began to issue last evening.

Mark Meadows, chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, declared himself "shocked" to the core by his fellow Republicans' findings, and demanded they be released "so that all Americans can judge for themselves," adding, "Part of me wishes that I didn't read it because I don't want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much." Releasing a four-page partisan memo is the last, best hope to "preserve our democracy," according to Rep. Matt Gaetz, another Freedom Caucus member. Rep. Lee Zeldin, a New York Republican, was among those who dashed to the House floor to sputter: "The American people deserve, they must, they want to know what's in this document. Release the memo! Release the memo and all of the related documented sourced in the memo."

On Thursday night's Hannity, the host led the show by calling the memo's findings – whatever they might be – "worse than Watergate," borrowing from the ultra-reliable Rep. Steve King. How so? "What we're talking about tonight is the systematic abuse of power, the weaponizing of those powerful tools of intelligence and the shredding of our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights," Hannity declared. Details, of course, were not forthcoming. But Hannity knows what he knows – and, rest assured, it's more than enough to justify putting a swift end to Mueller's Trump "witch hunt." Don, Jr. signaled this morning that he'd gotten the message loud and clear:



So what's in this "bombshell report," as it was soon being called almost universally? According to Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, "a profoundly misleading set of talking points drafted by Republican staff attacking the FBI and its handling of the investigation," which references "classified materials that most of the Republican Intelligence Committee members were forced to acknowledge they have never read." One of those talking points, it appears, involves an accusation reported by Politico that one Trump foreign-policy aide was “inappropriately” surveilled during the campaign, in a misuse of FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).

If that doesn't sound quite like the advertised "bombshell," you aren't exercising your imagination – or your Twitter account – nearly enough. Nunes' talking points, right-wing Twitter trolls have been declaring, means nothing less than the destruction of Barack Obama's presidential legacy and the unraveling of the real conspiracy to steal the 2016 election for the Democrats. "Obama, Comey, McCabe, Hillary, Rosenstein, Strzok, Page, Huma, and Susan Rice need to go to prison for illegally spying on Donald Trump!" tweets Red Nation Rising. The indisputable bases for all of their convictions is, of course, in that four-page memo – hiding from the American people, practically in plain sight! (Of course, Trump or House Republicans could easily make the memo public – even some progressives are beginning to call for #release, certain that the memo can't be that damning.)

What's remarkable about this meme isn't the fact that it's being spread far and wide – it's how much it's dominated Twitter these last two days, with so many other banner headlines in the news. The Hamilton 68 Dashboard, a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States which tracks more than 500 Russia-influenced Twitter accounts to gauge the reach of disinformation campaigns, shows a massive surge behind the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag in the last 48 hours, led by the usual mix of right-wing platforms like Breitbart, Fox News, and The Gateway Pundit – along with Russian bots and state media outlets like Tass, RT, and Sputnik.

It's hardly unprecedented, in these Trump times, for right-wing sites to be amplifying messages from Russian propagandists, or for members of Congress to chime in. But "the degree to which they're promoting this hashtag is significant," says Jonathon Morgan, one of the creators of the "disinformation dashboard." Morgan, CEO of Austin-based New Knowledge, which tracks disinformation campaigns in social media, can't recall anything quite like this: Whereas the periodic explosions of Russian-Republican memes – especially when they're designed to undercut the Trump-Russia probe – occasionally reach 400 uses of the hashtag per day, "we're measuring more than 3,000" uses of #ReleaseTheMemo since Thursday. That's not a meme; it's an avalanche.


Morgan speculates that the sudden explosion of #ReleaseTheMemo partly stems from "the way these websites, like Breitbart, are positioning the story to place Obama in a bad light," along with the way the meme is being framed as "manufactured justification for ending the Mueller investigation." (Rumor also has it that the memo will somehow be "the final nail in the coffin" for the Clintons.)

The #ReleaseTheMemo craze is not just wishful right-wing thinking. It's not simply your run-of-the-mill right-wing plot to distract Trump voters from Stormy Daniels, "shitholes," and the shutdown. It's one more piece of powerful evidence of how Russia and its Twitter bots are teaming with right-wing Republicans in a concerted pro-Trump propaganda campaign. The actual memo, as soon as its contents are leaked or revealed in full, is bound to disappoint those screaming for its release – and sure to raise red flags about the sources and methods of the House Republican staffers who put it together. But that won't stop the next Russian-Republican propaganda shitstorm from taking over social media; in fact, it guarantees exactly the opposite. The American right is doing the work of Russian bots. Which, come to think of it, might just be something that needs investigating.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/n ... me-w515654






STEVE KING JUST VOTED TO SUBJECT AMERICANS TO “WORSE THAN WATERGATE”

January 19, 2018/1 Comment/in FISA, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
Devin Nunes has launched the next installment of his effort to undercut the Mueller investigation, a “Top Secret” four page report based on his staffers’ review of all the investigative files they got to see back on January 5. He then showed it to a bunch of hack Republicans, who ran to the right wing press to give alarmist quotes about the report (few, if any, have seen the underlying FBI materials).

Mark Meadows (who recently called for Jeff Sessions’ firing as part of this obstruction effort) said, “Part of me wishes that I didn’t read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.”

Matt Gaetz (who strategized with Trump on how to undercut the Mueller investigation on a recent flight on Air Force One) said, “The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency. There is no higher priority than the release of this information to preserve our democracy.”

Ron DeSantis (who joined Gaetz in that Air Force One strategy session with Trump and also benefitted directly from documents stolen by the Russians) said it was “deeply troubling and raises serious questions about the [the people in the] upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI,” who of course largely remain in place in the Sessions DOJ and Wray FBI.

Steve King claimed what he saw was, “worse than Watergate.” “Is this happening in America or is this the KGB?” Scott Perry said. Jim Jordan (who joined in Meadows’ effort to fire Sessions) said, “It is so alarming.” Lee Zeldin said the FBI, in using FISA orders against Russians and facilities used by suspected agents of Russia was relying “on bad sources & methods.”

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It all makes for very good theater. But not a single one of these alarmists voted the way you’d expect on last week’s 702 reauthorization votes if they were really gravely concerned about the power of the FBI to spy on Americans.

Indeed, Gaetz, DeSantis, and King — three of those squawking the loudest — voted to give the same FBI they’re claiming is rife with abuse more power to spy on Americans, including political dissidents. Nunes, who wrote this alarming report, also wrote the bill to expand the power of the FBI he’s now pretending is badly abusive.

Even those who voted in favor of the Amash-Lofgren amendment and against final reauthorization — Meadows, Jordan, and Perry, among some of those engaging in this political stunt — voted against the Democratic motion to recommit, which would have at least bought more time and minimally improved the underlying bill (Justin Amash and Tom Massie, both real libertarians, voted with Democrats on the motion to recommit). Zeldin was among those who flipped his vote, backing the bill that will give the FBI more power after making a show of supporting Amash’s far better bill.

In short, not a single one of these men screaming about abuse at the FBI did everything they could do to prevent the FBI from getting more power.

Which — if you didn’t already need proof — shows what a hack stunt this is.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/01/19/s ... watergate/


ON DESANTIS ATTEMPTING TO STOP CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION INTO THEFT THAT BENEFITTED HIM

August 28, 2017/5 Comments/in Mueller Probe, Russian hacks /by emptywheel
Florida Congressman Ron DeSantis has presented a bill that would defund the Robert Mueller investigation six months after the bill passed.

DeSantis has put forward a provision that would halt funding for Mueller’s probe six months after the amendment’s passage. It also would prohibit Mueller from investigating matters that occurred before June 2015, when Trump launched his presidential campaign.

The amendment is one of hundreds filed to a government spending package the House is expected to consider when it returns next week from the August recess. The provision is not guaranteed a vote on the House floor; the House Rules Committee has wide leeway to discard amendments it considers out of order.

It’s interesting that DeSantis, of all people, would push this bill.

After all, he’s one of a small list of members of Congress who directly benefitted from Guccifer 2.0’s leaking. Florida political journalist Aaron Nevins obtained a huge chunk of documents from Guccifer 2.0.

Last year, a Republican political operative and part-time blogger from Florida asked for and received an extensive list of stolen data from Guccifer 2.0, the infamous hacker known for leaking documents from the DNC computer network.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Aaron Nevins, a former aide to Republican state Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, had reached out to Guccifer through Twitter, asking to “feel free to send any Florida-based information.”

About 10 days later, Nevins received about 2.5 gigabytes of polling information, election strategy and other data, which he then posted on his political gossip blog HelloFLA.com.

“I just threw an arrow in the dark,” Nevins told the Journal.

After setting up a Dropbox account for Guccifer 2.0 to share the data, Nevins was able to sift through the data as someone who “actually knows what some of these documents mean.”

Among the documents stolen from the DCCC that Nevins published are five documents on the DCCC’s recruitment of DeSantis’ opponent, George Pappas. So effectively, DeSantis is trying to cut short the investigation into a crime from which he directly benefitted.

Call me crazy, but this seems like an ethical violation, and possibly a good reason to submit a bar complaint against DeSantis. And his constituents might want to ask why he’s trying to help Russia and its domestic enablers undermine democracy.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/08/28/r ... itted-him/


Republicans authorize sharing of classified report on FBI, DOJ officials' conduct
By KYLE CHENEY 01/18/2018 07:45 PM EST Updated 01/18/2018 08:19 PM EST

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have authorized their colleagues to access a highly classified report that they say details their concerns with the conduct of top FBI and Justice Department officials, as well as the agencies’ handling of a controversial surveillance program.

“We have concerns — FISA concerns — that all members of the body should know,” said Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), a member of the committee, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Some of President Donald Trump’s allies in the House have argued that the program was inappropriately used to surveil a foreign policy aide to the Trump campaign.


Democrats derided the release of the report as part of an attempt to discredit senior leaders of the agencies leading investigations into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and whether any of his associates aided Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election.

“[T]he Majority voted today on a party-line basis to grant House Members access to a profoundly misleading set of talking points drafted by Republican staff attacking the FBI and its handling of the investigation,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement. “Rife with factual inaccuracies and referencing highly classified materials that most of Republican Intelligence Committee members were forced to acknowledge they had never read, this is meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI.”

“This may help carry White House water, but it is a deep disservice to our law enforcement professionals,” he added.

Conaway noted that the classified report would probably remain off-limits to the public, though all members of the House are permitted to view it. But by releasing it to other House members, it gave Trump allies outside the Intelligence Committee a chance to batter FBI leadership and underscore complaints they’ve raised about the agency’s handling of its investigation of Trump associates’ contacts with Russia. Throughout the day Thursday, a handful of Trump’s top House allies began calling for the immediate public release of the report.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said the report must be released to “preserve our democracy.” Another conservative ally, Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), called the report “deeply troubling” and said the Intelligence Committee should dust off a little-used process to reveal classified information publicly in order to show the public. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) said the report would reveal “FISA abuse.”

“Releasing this classified information will not compromise good sources and methods,” Zeldin said in a statement. “It will, however, reveal the feds’ reliance on bad sources and methods.”

A source familiar with discussions between the leader of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), and House leadership — amid high-stakes negotiations over the government spending bill — said Meadows asked Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) explicitly to authorize a vote on releasing the report. The source said Ryan deferred to the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who has authority over whether to start the process on releasing the report.

Meadows, taking to the House floor late Thursday, said he was “shocked” by the contents of the report.

“It is time that we become transparent on all of this,” he said. “And I am calling on our leadership to make this available so that all Americans can judge for themselves.”

Conaway, though, told reporters he’d counsel his colleagues against revealing classified material.

“That’d be real dangerous,” he said, suggesting that a version of the committee’s findings could be made public without getting into the specifics of what drove Republicans’ decision to share the report with colleagues.

Another member of the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), said he would like to release an unclassified version of the report “scrubbed” to protect classified information. He said that in addition to questions about FISA, the report would highlight concerns among Republicans about “the judgment of some members of the FBI or some members of the Department of Justice.”

The report appears to be the result of an inquiry by a subset of Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee, the details of which were revealed last month. That investigation, led by Nunes, focused on what some Republicans on the panel have come to view as abuses of the FISA process by senior FBI and DOJ officials, as well as the handling of a disputed Trump-Russia dossier by intelligence and law enforcement officials.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... fbi-348024



Russia-linked Twitter accounts are working overtime to help Devin Nunes and WikiLeaks

Natasha Bertrand

Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations have begun promoting the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo.
It's a reference to a document written by Rep. Devin Nunes that purports to show abuse by the Obama administration of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The frequency with which the accounts have been promoting the hashtag has spiked by 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to an analysis.
The most-shared URL has been a link to WikiLeaks' "submit" page.

Republican lawmakers are pushing for the House Intelligence Committee to release a memo written by the panel's chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, that outlines purported surveillance during the transition period against President-elect Donald Trump by former President Barack Obama's administration.

And Russia-linked Twitter bots have jumped on the bandwagon.

#ReleaseTheMemo is the top-trending hashtag among Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, according to Hamilton 68, a website launched last year that says it tracks Russian propaganda in near-real time.

The frequency with which the accounts have been promoting the hashtag has spiked by 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to the site. The accounts' references to the "memo," meanwhile, have increased by 68,000%.

The most-shared domain among the accounts has been WikiLeaks, and the most-shared URL has been a link to WikiLeaks' "submit" page.

WikiLeaks said on Thursday that it would reward anyone with access to the "FISA abuse memo" who chooses to submit it to the site. The Russia-linked accounts have evidently been sharing the "submit" page to push the memo's release.


Hamilton 68 has been working to expose trolls — as well as automated bots and human accounts — whose main use for Twitter appears to be an amplification of pro-Russia themes. The site's mission is to monitor and illustrate the themes that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Americans to be thinking and talking about, including "the failure of democratic governance in the United States."

Bret Schafer, a communications coordinator at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy who tracks the Hamilton 68 accounts, said he "certainly can't remember" the last time the researchers had seen a topic "promoted to this level" by the Russia-linked bots and trolls.
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"On a normal day, our top hashtag is typically used around 400 times in a 48-hour period by the network we track," he said in an email on Friday.

"As of right now, #ReleaseTheMemo has been used over 3,000 times (and five other related hashtags are in the top 10)," he said. "In total, they've easily shared more than 4,500 hashtags on the topic in the past two days, and our top URL is Assange's offer to pay for a copy of the memo. That certainly seems to be a sign of a coordinated effort by the bots and trolls."

Mueller's top critics want the memo out


Several Republican congressmen — many of whom have been highly critical of the special counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the investigation into Trump's ties to Russia — have released statements calling on the House Intelligence Committee to declassify and release Nunes' four-page memo.

The executive branch would have to review the document before it could be released to the public, but "this could happen real quick," Rep. Jim Jordan told Fox News on Thursday. "Chairman Nunes is committed to getting this information to the public."

The document purportedly describes classified information Nunes obtained from the FBI and Justice Department as part of his investigation into whether the Obama administration misused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Trump and his associates during the presidential transition.

"The House must immediately make public the memo prepared by the Intelligence Committee regarding the FBI and the Department of Justice," said Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who has called on Mueller to resign. "The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency. There is no higher priority than the release of this information to preserve our democracy."

Rep. Ron DeSantis, who has introduced legislation that would curtail Mueller's mandate and budget, said in a statement on Thursday that "the classified report compiled by the House Intelligence is deeply troubling and raises serious questions about the upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI as it relates to the so-called collusion investigation."

'A profoundly misleading set of talking points'
Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-CA) speaks after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions attended a closed door interview with the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol in Washington, U.S., November 30, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
Rep. Adam Schiff. Thomson Reuters
Democrats, meanwhile, have called the Nunes memo grossly exaggerated and misleading.

"The Majority voted today on a party-line basis to grant House Members access to a profoundly misleading set of talking points drafted by Republican staff attacking the FBI and its handling of the investigation," Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel's top Democrat, said in a statement on Thursday.

"Rife with factual inaccuracies and referencing highly classified materials that most of Republican Intelligence Committee members were forced to acknowledge they had never read, this is meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI," Schiff continued.

A source with knowledge of the memo told Business Insider that it was "a level of irresponsible stupidity that I cannot fathom," adding that it "purposefully misconstrues facts and leaves out important details."

Schiff said the document "may help carry White House water, but it is a deep disservice to our law enforcement professionals."

Nunes began investigating the Justice Department and FBI after he traveled to the White House to view classified information in March without telling his committee colleagues. There, he viewed classified information that he said showed FISA abuse by Obama administration officials.

Nunes would neither confirm nor deny that he got the information from the White House.

"We have to keep our sources and methods here very, very quiet," he told reporters at the time. He told Bloomberg later that the information had come from a "network of whistleblowers."

Nunes briefed Trump on the intelligence, which Nunes said showed that the president and his advisers may have had their communications "incidentally collected" — and their identities "unmasked" in intelligence reports — by the intelligence community after the election.

A source of concern has been why some of Trump's associates who had been caught up in the surveillance and later unmasked, such as Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, had their names leaked to the press.

But Republican and Democratic congressional aides told reporters in early April — after being briefed on the classified reports — that Obama administration officials did not act inappropriately.

Indeed, the committee under Nunes' leadership made at least five unmasking requests to US spy agencies between June 2016 and January 2017 related to Russia's election meddling, The Washington Post reported last year.

The report came days after Nunes, who would have had to sign off on any committee requests to reveal the identities of US persons mentioned in intelligence reports, called unmaskings "violations of Americans' civil liberties."
http://www.businessinsider.com/release- ... nts-2018-1
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby Jerky » Tue Jan 23, 2018 3:49 am

...aaand the bogus, ginned-up "groundswell" demanding (who, exactly?) hashtag-release-the-memo is already pretty much dead in the water.

Such is the nature of these artificial, Astroturf attempts at mounting organic-seeming outrage campaigns. Nobody was sincerely outraged to begin with, and faking-it-til-you-make-it only goes so far.

When all is said and done, it ain't easy to fake authenticity, and people aren't stupid enough to believe that what amounts to an op-ed piece by Devin Fucking Nunes is of any import whatsoever beyond the conservative movementarian echo chamber.

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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 23, 2018 7:54 am

British Coup Aimed at the President :rofl:

If a winery could talk, it would rat Nunes out!

he was on the transition team...Mueller has ALL his emails :D

now Nunes won't show the FBI the MEMO

has he realized fabricating evidence is a CRIME?


FBI: Devin Nunes Won’t Show Us Memo Alleging Surveillance Abuses

The FBI has yet to see a controversial memo alleging the intelligence community engaged in grave abuses. And that could make friction between the Hill and the bureau even worse.

The FBI has not been permitted to see the memo Rep. Devin Nunes and his staff wrote about alleged abuses by the intelligence community, The Daily Beast has learned.

“The FBI has requested to receive a copy of the memo in order to evaluate the information and take appropriate steps if necessary. To date, the request has been declined,” said Andrew Ames, a spokesperson for the FBI.

Reached for comment, Nunes spokesperson Jack Langer said, “The Daily Beast has become America’s foremost publication for regurgitating the Democrats’ talking points.”

Nunes, who heads the powerful House Intelligence panel, put together the four-page memo based on intelligence the FBI showed him and a few of his staff, as well as Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the committee. More than 150 members of the House have seen Nunes’ memo. Scores are calling for its release, while Democrats say it is “a misleading set of talking points attacking the FBI.”

The fact that Republicans refuse to show the memo to FBI, which characterizes the intelligence they shared with Nunes, has Democrats concerned. One Senate aide told The Daily Beast it means Nunes’ efforts are just politics.

“If this is about FBI abuses, why wouldn’t they share it with the Trump-appointed director who wasn’t at the bureau when the abuses supposedly occurred?” the aide said. “If this is about cleaning up the FBI like they claim, wouldn’t they want Wray as an ally?”

That aide added that making the memo public without letting the FBI see it first could exacerbate tensions between the Hill and the bureau, and that it could make it even less cooperative with congressional requests and subpoenas.

Republicans, meanwhile, say the bureau shouldn’t expect any surprises.

“Sessions, Wray, and Rosenstein testified before the Judiciary Committee,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of the most vocal advocates for releasing the memo. “I’ve read the memo. Nothing contained in it will surprise them. But it has surprised and horrified many of us.”

As the government shutdown rolls on, many Hill Republicans are pushing for the memo’s release. A leadership source told The Daily Beast yesterday that its release was “only a matter of time.” And there’s a significant—though not unanimous—appetite in the House Republican conference for its release.

The House Intelligence Committee decided against letting Democrats release a minority report characterizing the intelligence underlying the memo.

The memo’s release would provide fuel to Republicans’ criticism of Robert Mueller’s investigation into connections between Trump’s allies and the Kremlin. Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., has been one of the most vocal advocates for its publication. Gen. Flynn is cooperating with the Mueller probe, and has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-fbi-h ... ia=desktop




It's a MEMO. It is not evidence of anything. It's Nunes' narrative of events based partly on info given to him by the FBI in the first place.


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#ReleaseTheMemo Is the Latest Laughable Scheme in the Plot Against Mueller
House Republicans gin up another bogus story to trash the special prosecutor.
By Jefferson Morley / AlterNet January 23, 2018, 10:57 AM GMT

The accumulating facts are damning.

President Trump is under investigation. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted four of his former aides, including his campaign manager, for making false statements related to the FBI’s ongoing investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Two of the defendants have pleaded guilty.

Former adviser Steve Bannon has devastated the White House claim that the Russia investigation is fake news, by saying a meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian agents in June 2016 was “unpatriotic” and “treasonous.”

What’s a good Republican to do? Once upon a time, conservatives might have said conservative things like, “Let’s wait for all the facts.” Or, “Let law enforcement do its job.” Or, “The president is a good man.”

No more. Pro-Trump Republicans prefer "alternative facts" to real ones. They know showing respect for law enforcement will only endanger Trump and his entourage. And no one seeking to be credible dares to say the porn-star loving president is a decent human being, at least not to the 63 percent of Americans who disapprove of how he’s doing his job.

The Bogus Memo

Instead, the Republican response to Trump’s deepening legal predicament is #ReleaseTheMemo, a disingenuous social media campaign that falsely insinuates the government is suppressing a memo that supposedly exposes a "Deep State” plot against the president.

The claims of the memo, written by House Republicans, are narrow: They allege that Christopher Steele, a senior British intelligence official, lied to FBI agents who interviewed him as part of an investigation into the 2016 election, telling them he had not spoken to reporters about collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, before revealing in a separate lawsuit that he had in fact spoken to them prior to the election.

The memo reportedly claims Steele’s information was then used in the FBI’s application to surveil Trump associate Carter Page through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

So the allegation is that the investigation of one lower-ranking Trump aide—Page—who has not been indicted, somehow discredits the investigation and indictment of more senior aides. And even this narrow charge is unfounded.

The testimony of Glenn Simpson, the private investigator who hired Steele to investigate Trump’s Russia connections, refutes the claims in the memo, which is why Republicans opposed its release.

In fact, the investigation of Page had begun in July 2015 and the FISA surveillance followed shortly thereafter, before Steele spoke to the FBI. Steele's information did not launch the government's case; it strengthened it.

Steele went to the Bureau because he had accumulated a great deal of evidence about possible illegal activities involving a dozen members of the Trump entourage, not just Page (who has not been indicted). And as a retired senior British intelligence official, Steele was (and is) regarded by the FBI as a credible source.


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The implication that the bogus memo is being kept secret is also bogus. President Trump could order declassification of the memo at any time. But sharing new information about the investigation of Trump’s dealings with the Russians is not the goal here. The aim is to create the conditions in which Trump can fire Mueller.

The Real Plot

The plot to undermine the special prosecutor got underway last fall with the hyping of the Uranium One story. This Benghazi-style smear claimed Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, "gave away" 20 percent of America’s uranium by approving the sale of a Canadian mining company to Russia’s atomic energy commission in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

The story, as framed, is essentially misleading, if not false, as Politifact notes. Clinton wasn’t involved in the decision, which was approved by 12 U.S. government agencies. In any case, no uranium left the United States.

Without any factual basis for its allegations of wrongdoing, the story has been ignored by law enforcement and forgotten by pro-Trump media.

#ReleaseTheMemo, now trending on Twitter, is the same sort of gambit: a collection of factoids framed with partisan intent to distract attention from the investigation of Trump.

Even Tiffany Cross, a talking head on Fox News, pointed out the obvious: “This is a memo drafted by the Republican Party.”



“I think that it is a shadow investigation to undermine the actual investigation into the collusion… the good patriots that watch this network, we can agree, this is something that is drafted with a slant, with an opinion. Imagine how the rest of the country sees this. All of a sudden, people who champion Blue Lives Matters and law enforcement [now champion] a memo that undermines… law enforcement….”

While the memo accuses the FBI of politicizing law enforcement, House Republicans did not even give the Bureau the opportunity to comment on its charges, according to the Daily Beast.

"The FBI has requested to receive a copy of the memo in order to evaluate the information and take appropriate steps if necessary. To date, the request has been declined,” said Andrew Ames, a spokesperson for the FBI.

Which is actually good news. The House Republicans' refusal to share the information with the FBI indicates they are well aware that the memo will not be credible with law enforcement or with the non-Fox media.

So by all means, #ReleaseTheMemo. So everybody can see that this is a set of partisan talking points to smear the prosecutors closing in on the lawbreakers in the Trump entourage.
https://www.alternet.org/releasethememo ... st-mueller
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:33 pm

I'll bet Trump has his own memo too, based on rigorous analysis of IC revelations, of course. Probably nails the moment of truth that this all began when Obama and Putin conspired together by putting Flynn in charge of DIA, whom Trump never trusted, of course. Release that memo! I'm sure it will be hella entertaining, a real "Storm."
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 23, 2018 6:28 pm

Bahahahaha. Infowars just posted an ‘exclusive’ that they’ve got that secret “memo” about spying on the trump campaign. Except they don’t. It’s a FISA Court opinion on 702 that’s been public for months.

Literally the first page of the document says that it is a FISC opinion. So Infowars either did not even look at the ‘exclusive’ document before publishing it or (maybe more hilariously) did not comprehend what they were looking at in the most basic possible way.

This is a document SO EXCLUSIVE that you can download it from the Director of National Intelligence website, where it was publicly posted 8 months ago.

Jones knows his followers won't read it (99 pages? Ain't nobody got time for that). They will just take his word for what's in there and blast it all over social media.

Why is Binney sending anything to Alex Jones and why doesn't he know this? I just don't understand


EXCLUSIVE: INFOWARS RELEASES SECRET FISA MEMO
Here’s the reported memo leaked to Infowars
Kit Daniels | Infowars.com - JANUARY 23, 2018
EXCLUSIVE: Infowars Releases Secret FISA Memo

Update: Despite media claims to the contrary, our congressional sources confirmed that the below memo documenting NSA spying on US citizens serves as a primary source of information for the Nunes summary memo:
William Binney, former tech head of the NSA contacted us this morning to send us the link to the reportedly classified memo that lawmakers said was a blueprint of how the Obama administration and the Deep State spied on President Trump.
This memo, hiding in plain site, serves as the basis for the four-page memo of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) which reveals perjury by the Obama administration when connected to other research.
This is the basic compendium of the NSA abuses spotlighted by Nunes:
https://www.infowars.com/exclusive-info ... fisa-memo/
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 24, 2018 9:40 pm

Justice Dept.: 'Reckless' to release Nunes memo without review

GOP may release memo alleging FBI abuses

Washington (CNN)The Justice Department warned Wednesday that it "would be extraordinarily reckless" for the House intelligence Committee to release a classified memo publicly "without giving the Department and the FBI the opportunity to review the memorandum," and to "advise" on possible harm to national security and ongoing investigations from its public release.

CNN has obtained a copy of the letter sent by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd to committee Chairman Devin Nunes.

The letter asks "why the Committee would possibly seek to disclose classified and law enforcement sensitive information without first consulting with the relevant members of the intelligence community."

Boyd wrote that the Justice Department has turned over more than 1,000 pages of classified documents to the committee "relating to the FBI's relationship, if any, with a source and its reliance, if any, on information provided by that source."

Citing media reports that the memo suggests FBI abuse of FISA authorities, Boyd says the Justice Department is "currently unaware of any wrongdoing relating to the FISA process," but says the department takes any allegation of such abuse seriously and "we agree that any abuse of that system cannot be tolerated."

Boyd also wrote that "wider distribution of the classified information" presumably contained in Nunes' memo would be a "significant deviation" from the Department's agreement with House intel and the office of House Speaker Paul Ryan.

The letter reveals that FBI director Christopher Wray personally asked to review the memorandum and is renewing the request before any committee vote to release it. It also gives Nunes the option to provide the document to the Justice Department's inspector general to investigate any alleged wrongdoing and "independently assess whether prior release of the memorandum would impair its ability to do so."
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/24/politics/nunes-memo-fbi/
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby Grizzly » Thu Jan 25, 2018 1:48 am

https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7b3_1516535346
Greatest Scandal In History Explained
Congress now knows that everything you are about to watch in this video, happened. Watergate was a minor crime compared to this.

An absolutely outstanding interview with Joe di Genova about the worst scandal in US history.


:lol2: :lol2: :lol2:
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 25, 2018 11:29 am

need to clarify something here for the fact challenged who are pushing this bullshit republican FAKE story


FBI failed to save texts from [b]thousands of phones in glitch that affected officials once on Mueller team[/b]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... c7bae2dfb1



not JUST the texts from Page and Strzok .......OK?

load of crap story pushed by slimy apologists for trump .....that's all it is
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jan 30, 2018 3:52 pm

"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:07 am

Devin Nunes was ‘in like Flynn’ with the Trump Campaign from the beginning

The House Intel Chairman was closely allied with General Michael Flynn during his tumultuous tenure at the DIA; In spring 2016, Nunes began providing private intelligence briefings to the campaign, and after Trump secured the nomination, he traveled with and fundraised for the candidate. Limiting his role to that of “Transition Team member” has allowed major conflicts-of-interest to go unchallenged.

Erin L.Jan 30


In the early months of the 2016 presidential campaign, California Congressman Devin Nunes had taken to repeating a singular talking point anytime he was questioned about his endorsement. Consistently, Nunes would state he only planned on “supporting the Republican nominee out of the convention.” Nunes was referred to as a “no-namer” — the category of GOP lawmakers who would not name Trump directly, but who were nonetheless committed to supporting him if and when he won the nomination. As the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes’ apparent objectivity was appropriate. He explained that “as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he stays neutral because he has to brief the nominees.”

An examination of open source information, however, reveals that Nunes’ involvement with the Trump Campaign was far more extensive than has been purported. In fact, Nunes had an already established, years-long relationship with Trump’s National Security Advisor — Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. He likely played an integral role in providing behind-the-scenes national security guidance to a fledgling campaign otherwise lacking in such expertise. And once Trump emerged as the party’s nominee in July 2016, Nunes’ support of Trump became absolute. In the lead up to election day, Nunes fundraised for Trump, defended him in the media, downplayed Russian interference, and secured himself an influential position on the Transition Team.

Presently, Nunes serves as the lead House Republican responsible for investigating the Trump campaign’s conspiracy with Russian actors to influence the election. Yet universally, U.S. media perpetuates a revisionist version of history, limiting Nunes’ role to merely that of a post-election “Transition Team member”. This misrepresentation has allowed Nunes to skate free on clear ethics violations and continue to serve in a role for which his conflicts-of-interest are considerable.

Allies in arms

In 2011, California Congressman Devin Nunes was selected for a much-coveted seat on the powerful House Intelligence Committee. At 40 years old, Nunes brought little more with him than a few years of farming experience and a decade serving his rural constituency in congress. He had earned a reputation, however, as an effective fundraiser for his GOP colleagues and a reliable party vote for then Speaker of the House John Boehner. As a reward for these efforts, Nunes became one of twenty-one House members responsible for overseeing a swath of seventeen agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community.

It was in this capacity as a committee member that Nunes first met and came to develop an alliance with Lt. Gen Michael Flynn — appointed director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in July 2012. Nunes himself said after the 2016 election he had:

“‘Known Flynn for a long time and had been briefed by him dozens of time,’ describing him further as ‘one of the best and most knowledgeable generals’ he had seen during his career in Congress.”

General Flynn’s tumultuous two-year tenure at DIA has by now been well-documented. It was a period defined by Flynn’s chaotic management style and his persistent conflict with other U. S. intelligence agencies. Having served previously as a top intelligence adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan, Flynn brought with him to DIA entrenched beliefs about the ongoing serious threat posed by Islamist terror groups in the Middle East. Once inside the administration, it became quickly evident to Flynn that President Obama did not share in this assessment. In Flynn’s view, Obama was looking for the intelligence community to comport their findings to align with his administration’s narrative of a post-bin Laden era of rapidly declining terror threats. In Flynn’s words, it was Obama’s “big lie”.

From contemporaneous reporting of this same 2012–2014 period, Nunes was clearly allied with Flynn on these grounds. As a member of the intelligence committee, Nunes was separately investigating the administration for the September 2012 Benghazi attack that left four American officials dead. The attack had come on the heels of a then-confidential draft National Intelligence Estimate produced by the Obama Administration that concluded al Qaeda was no longer a direct threat to America.

Flynn fought hard against this assessment, setting the stage for what would become a sustained confrontation between the administration, certain senior intelligence officials, and GOP members of the congressional committee appointed to oversee them.


Part of the acrimony was related to the administration’s handling of documents seized during the 2011 raid of Osama bin Laden’s lair. Believing they possessed critical intelligence of the sustained threat posed by Al Qaeda, Flynn lobbied alongside Nunes and others for the documents to be declassified. Nunes later revealed that “informants came to me in late 2012 stating that they had information related to the bin Laden raid and the analysis of intelligence.” According to Nunes and others, the documents where both alarming and in direct contradiction to Obama administration claims of al Qaeda’s waning influence. Flynn was allegedly told directly to stop producing reports based on these documents.

More serious allegations were also levied by Flynn, Nunes, and others. Senior intelligence officials had begun to accuse U.S. Central Command of manipulating ISIS intelligence to “portray the campaign as more successful than it really was.” Flynn was later quoted as saying that intelligence reports were “disregarded” by Obama if they “did not meet a particular narrative that the White House needed” for Obama’s re-election.

In May 2013, Nunes traveled to CENTCOM Headquarters in Tampa for a briefing by analysts involved in the push back against these allegedly manipulated reports. The topics were slated to include “Iran’s relationship with al Qaeda, bin Laden’s involvement in the day-to-day operations of al Qaeda, and his operations guidance to offshoots, such as Boko Haram.” Once in Tampa, Nunes was denied access to the analysts and their findings, creating further schisms between the parties.


Michael Flynn testifies before the House Intelligence Committee, February 4, 2014.
Flynn’s ultimate undoing came in 2014, after a February presentation of the DIA’s “annual threat assessment” to congress. The report predicted the Islamic State would probably “attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.” The forecast, while ultimately proved to be true, clashed with Obama’s description a month earlier of ISIS as “a jayvee team.” In March, Flynn then gave an interview to NPR, further deriding the administration for its failure to heed DIA’s warnings over Russia’s preparations to invade Ukraine. By April, Flynn had been asked to step down as director of the agency.

But based on repeated allegations of intelligence manipulation by some senior officials, the Pentagon’s Inspector General did open an investigation in the summer of 2014. Nunes continued to press the government to declassify bin Laden documents, going so far as to require the document release in committee bills to authorize spending for the agencies. And later in 2015, a House Republican task force report — written by members of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees — concluded that intelligence on the ISIS threat was systematically altered by senior U.S. Central Command officials to put it in a more positive light.

A campaign trail reunion

By June 2015, the ex-DIA director was routinely appearing on television voicing increasingly vitriolic criticisms of the Obama administration — a characteristic that undoubtedly endeared him to then-candidate Trump. By late 2015 Flynn had officially joined the Trump campaign as the novice politician’s national security advisor. Given the storied history between Nunes and Flynn, it’s not surprising the two men would eventually reunite during the 2016 election season and rally in support of the same “tough on terrorism” Republican candidate.

Nunes, by now Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was projecting a public appearance of neutrality in the Republican primaries. Yet according to post-election reports from Politico and McClatchy, by spring 2016 Nunes had already begun meeting with members of the Trump team and providing them private national security briefings. As Politico described it:

“Early this year, (Nunes) made a standing offer to brief any of the Republican presidential hopefuls on national security issues. Trump’s campaign took him up on it in March. From those meetings, Nunes grew close with retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.”

Donald Trump in Fresno, California — May 27, 2016.
In late May 2016, Trump scheduled a campaign rally in Fresno, a central California city next to Nunes’ home district. The appearance was a rarity for Republican presidential candidates, who stand essentially no chance of winning the solidly blue state. According to CNN, a leading player behind the scenes of the event was Nunes’ former Chief of Staff Johnny Amaral, who “(managed) lobbyists for Westlands Water District, a massive water district in the Central Valley.” While it is unconfirmed whether Nunes attended Trump’s pre-rally town meetings or the event itself, he claimed later in June that he was “looking forward to meeting Donald Trump (at the convention) to discuss California water, tax reform and intelligence issues.”

After the Republican National Convention, Nunes’ outward support for Trump became more apparent. According to his hometown paper Fresno Bee, in August 2016 Nunes arranged a fundraiser for Trump in his local district of Tulare. The Bee reported that the cost to attend the event was $2,700, with a $25,000 opportunity for a VIP meeting. Nunes “expected Trump to raise at least $1.25 million and possibly as much as $1.5 million.” He also planned to travel to the Bay Area to brief Trump on water and prepare him for the event. “‘He’s already been here once, so I think he has a decent handle on it,’ said Nunes, who will also brief Trump on intelligence issues,” the paper reported.


In a follow-up report, Fresno Bee provided further details on Nunes’ Bay area trip to brief Trump. According to that report, “Nunes ended up getting prime time with the Republican nominee, though he did not plan on it….Trump invited him to come along on his jet flight to Los Angeles, where he spent Monday night.” McClatchy went further, reporting “in August, the two men spent more time together in Trump’s plane and at fundraising and campaign events in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Tulare County.”

Later in October, after the Access Hollywood tape leaked, a third report from Fresno Bee showed that Nunes’ support remained firm. In a text message to the paper, Nunes said “‘As you know, I stayed out of the primary (election campaign) and as a party leader agreed to support and help whoever won…That remains my commitment, to help make our candidate the best that he can be on (intelligence) and military issues.’”

Evolving views on Russian interference

Nunes’ outward support for candidate Trump was not the only thing to evolve during the 2016 campaign. So too did his views on Russia and his confidence in the intelligence communities assessment of Russian interference. In a CNN interview in April 2016, Nunes told Jake Tapper that the U.S. government has badly “misjudged” the intentions of Putin “for many, many years,” declaring “the biggest intelligence failure that we have had since 9/11 has been the inability to predict the leadership plans and intentions of the Putin regime in Russia.” On the invasion of Ukraine, Nunes added “We missed that..and then we completely missed entirely when they put a new base, a new base with aircraft into the Mediterranean, into Syria. We just missed it. We were blind.”


By July, as the extent of Russian hacking was becoming better known, Nunes conceded there was “a high confidence” Russia hacked into the DNC computers. Still, his stance on the threat posed by Russia had noticeably softened. He insisted many other foreign countries were doing the same thing and that the release of material during a U.S. election was “nothing new”. Nunes further denied there was evidence that Russian hackers gave the information to WikiLeaks, even as he acknowledged they had operated as a conduit for Russia in the past. And in regard to Trump’s call on Russia to find the “missing 33,000 emails”, Nunes brushed off concerns, say Trump “was simply making light of Hillary Clinton setting up her own homebrew email server that trafficked in classified information.”

After Trump won the election in November 2016, Nunes denials of Russian interference only grew, putting him at direct odds once again with the intelligence community he was sworn to oversee.

Transition period influence

The overwhelming majority of media reports since the election have focused on Nunes’ role as a Trump Transition Team member, effectively erasing his involvement in the very campaign he is investigating. Clearly, however, Nunes role and relationships with key subjects of the investigation are substantial.


It is likely for this reason that Nunes wielded such significant influence as a Transition Team member. According to various reports, it was Nunes’ recommendations that formed the basis for Trump’s selections of both General James Mattis (who he knew from his days investigating U.S. Central Command) as Defense Secretary and fellow Intel committee member Mike Pompeo for CIA Director. Like Nunes, Pompeo had a history of criticism towards the intelligence community and had also been dismissive of Russian election interference, claiming that 2016 was no different than any other election year.

Nunes freely admitted that as a Transition Team member, he was responsible for fielding calls from foreign leaders and ambassadors who were trying to reach Flynn. He strenuously defended Trump in the media when it was leaked that the President-elect was skipping intelligence briefings. And, he now-infamously attended a pre-inauguration breakfast with Turkish officials as a guest of Flynn’s. The public later learned the General was being paid to represent the interests of these government officials.

Because he has never been questioned as a witness, it is unknown what, if any, knowledge Nunes had of Flynn’s arrangement with the Turkish government or the campaign’s contacts with Russia during the election.

Duty and obligation

With this context, the bizarre actions by Nunes over the past year come sharply into focus. When Flynn was fired from his White House position after conversations with the Russian Ambassador leaked in February 2017, it was Nunes that the White House tapped to defend the General in the media — which he dutifully did. And when Trump levied unsubstantiated claims of wiretapping by the Obama administration, it was Nunes that conspired with Flynn’s National Security Council appointees to create the diversionary “unmasking scandal.”

Now, almost a year into the House Intelligence investigation, Nunes is set to release an “intelligence memo” with its target set directly on the FBI, DOJ, and intelligence community. It’s long past time to set the record straight about Nunes and the central role he played in the very campaign he is charged with investigating.
https://medium.com/@Erinlank/devin-nune ... dd209b3f4a



DISPATCH, EXPLAINER JANUARY 25, 2018
THE NUNES FILE

As Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is abusing the power of his office. He has run a year-long campaign to hide the truth about Russian interference in the 2016 election and attack the credibility of U.S. law enforcement by spreading lies and misleading information.

At every turn, Nunes—a member of the Trump transition team—has conspired with the Trump White House to undermine the FBI investigation and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. He has made his wildest allegations at moments when it could most distract from damaging revelations about the President and his team. In every instance, Nunes’ charges have proven to be baseless fabrications that crumble under the slightest scrutiny. His efforts are nothing more than deceptive political stunts, often carefully orchestrated with or at the direction of the White House.

The recent “memo” Nunes has prepared and hyped up is another such stunt, a distortion of classified material provided by the FBI twisted to advance a political point. Moreover, its use in this manner violates the terms of an agreement Speaker Ryan and Chairman Nunes had with the Justice Department about how this highly sensitive information would be handled. Nunes has refused to share the memo with anyone outside the House Intelligence Committee who has access to the classified information upon which these claims are based. That includes the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as with Trump’s own appointees in the FBI and Justice Department. In doing so, Nunes has hidden the “memo” from anyone who could provide an independent assessment of its veracity. However, right-wing media figures have been fed the memo’s wild claims, and they have been relentlessly hyping its contents for more than a week.

This political stunt has real costs. By deploying his deceptive spin, Nunes may have jeopardized the original—and sensitive—classified information. A recent letter from the Justice Department, authored by a Trump political appointee, called Nunes’ effort to publicly release classified and sensitive law enforcement information “excessively reckless.” Nunes has been aided and amplified by Russian intelligence operatives online, as well as by Wikileaks, which Trump’s own CIA Director has described as a “hostile intelligence service helped by Russia.” It is this very Russian influence operation that the House Intelligence Committee is supposed to be investigating.

The Chairman of the Intelligence Committee has been derelict in his duty. His position is one of the most powerful in the entire legislature, placing Nunes among the eight members of Congress with access to America’s most closely held secrets. As Chairman, Nunes also oversees a professional intelligence committee staff, who he commandeered as pawns in his attack on U.S. intelligence and law enforcement. Not only has he inappropriately engaged them in a partisan effort, he may very well be hindering their efforts to determine the full extent of Russia’s interference in our election.

An examination of Devin Nunes’ actions over the past year shows a clear pattern of abuse of power, which has undermined U.S. national security and left the United States dangerously vulnerable to ongoing attacks on our democracy.

Nunes is a White House Surrogate

Nunes was an official member of the Trump Transition Team. During that time, he publicly expressed doubt about the conclusion of the Intelligence Community that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, saying in December 2016, “I’ll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there’s clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence—even now.” In January 2017, Nunes publicly said that Congress should not investigate any possible contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign, claiming, “House committees don’t go operational like that, that I know of.” In January, Nunes did call for one investigation, however, into leaks of material related to Trump to the media, including the Steele dossier.

In February, Nunes, acting at the explicit request of the White House, spoke to reporters in an effort to refute stories in the media alleging that the FBI was investigating contacts between Trump campaign officials and the Russians: “They’ve looked,” he said, “and it’s all a dead trail that leads me to believe no contact, not even pizza-delivery-guy contract.” We now know that the FBI was in fact investigating this and that, far from being infrequent and inconsequential, Russians interacted with Trump campaign officials, including his campaign chairman and other high-ranking officials, at least 31 times. Of course, as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, this is information that Nunes already knew then.

Later in February, Nunes called the investigation “almost like McCarthyism revisited” and a “witch hunt.” He went on to say, “[o]nce we begin to look at all the evidence, and if we find any American that had any contact with Russian agents or anybody affiliated with the Russia government, then we’ll be glad to, at that point, you know, subpoena those people before the House and let the legislative branch do its oversight and then we would recommend it over to, you know, the appropriate people.” As evidence has come to light of just those kinds of contacts, Nunes has done nothing of the kind.

Nunes’ bogus “unmasking” accusations

The details of Nunes’ most notorious claim should consign him to the sidelines in any meaningful national political debate. Nunes’ story was that he received information from “a whistleblower” revealing that senior officials in the Obama administration had unlawfully unmasked the identities of Trump campaign officials caught on foreign intelligence intercepts. Nunes claimed this information was so serious that he first briefed House Speaker Paul Ryan and then went to the White House to reveal the information to the Trump team. Trump used the Nunes revelations to claim that he was vindicated for his infamous accusation that Obama had wiretapped him during the campaign.

In reality, this was a scheme developed by the White House and Nunes to distract from FBI Director James Comey’s announcement two days earlier that the FBI was investigating possible Trump-Russia collusion. Nunes’ “whistleblower” actually turned out to be senior Trump White House officials Ezra Cohen-Watnick, John Eisenberg, and Michael Ellis. Nunes secretly went to the White House to obtain this “information” the day before, and then staged a return the next day to pretend to tell the Trump administration what it already knew. And even that information itself was completely untrue; Trump’s own National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, found that the accusations against Obama officials had no merit. The blowback from this fiasco, including concerns that Nunes had improperly handled classified information as part of his political stunt, forced Nunes to nominally recuse himself from the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, although he apparently did not even abide by the terms of his recusal.

Nunes’ tries to resurrect debunked Uranium One allegations

In late October 2017, Nunes tried to resurrect allegations pertaining to the sale of Uranium One, another bogus scandal that was used to try to smear former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Nunes and other House Republicans made wild accusations about Clinton approving the sale of U.S. uranium stocks to Russia in exchange for more than $100 million in contributions to the Clinton Foundation. Nunes announced that the House Intelligence Committee was partnering with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate.

But this too was another completely bogus partisan effort that was quickly and easily debunked. First, the sale was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, or CFIUS, a panel comprising nine Cabinet Secretaries and chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury. The Secretary of State is only one of the nine, and cannot make a final determination on his or her own. It is correct that a Russian company did own the company that operates a U.S. uranium mine, but it does not have an export license for the uranium, meaning it all remains in the United States. The extent of the uranium production was also wildly overstated, as the mine in question produced just 2.3% of uranium in the United States in 2016. Even the $100 million contribution figure to the Clinton Foundation is grossly inaccurate, with the overwhelming majority of that coming from a donor to the Foundation who had sold any financial interest in the company at issue two years prior to the sale.

Given the nonsensical nature of the claims, it was clear Republicans did not intend to find any actual evidence. Rather, Nunes—joined by other Republicans in Congress—was responding to Trump’s repeated demands for renewed investigations of Hillary Clinton and trying to distract from the first indictments in the Mueller investigation. Trump’s outside confidant Roger Stone said the motivation behind this push was to get a new Special Counsel who “would immediately have to inform Mueller, Comey, and [Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein that they are under federal investigation. Trump can’t afford to fire Mueller politically. But this pushes him aside.” (Mueller was the head of the FBI at the time of the sale.)

Nunes subpoenaed Fusion GPS

Nunes has used his subpoena power, but not to probe deeper into possible ties between Trump campaign officials and Russians. Rather, he signed subpoenas for the firm that investigated those contacts and was responsible for producing the Steele dossier. In October 2017, Nunes reportedly signed subpoenas for testimony and documents from Fusion GPS despite the fact that he was nominally recused from the investigation at that point and that there was “good faith engagement thus far by the witnesses on the potential terms for voluntary cooperation.”

The Nunes “Memo”

The four pages of talking points that Nunes has prepared must be viewed through the lens of his long campaign of dishonesty to defend Trump and undermine the Mueller investigation. In this case, it appears Nunes used the professional staff of the House Intelligence committee to develop an opposition memo to undermine the FBI. The furor comes as news broke that Mueller interviewed the Attorney General and is actively seeking an interview with Trump himself.

Nunes appears to have subpoenaed sensitive classified and law enforcement information with the express intent of mining this information to attack the Department of Justice and the FBI. In January, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray met with Speaker Ryan to ask him to get Nunes to relent. Ryan declined and, according to a letter released on January 24th from the Department of Justice to Nunes, the department agreed to turn this information over to Speaker Paul Ryan and his committee if it was protected. Instead, Nunes distorted the information to draft a “memo” that was made available to the entire House of Representatives, violating the agreement with the Justice Department.

Similar to Nunes’ earlier White House unmasking incident, he is again staging a laughably bizarre event to generate press attention—in this case, demanding that House Republicans release a document that he and fellow House Republicans themselves drafted and have already shared with House Republicans.

Conservatives have launched a media campaign to hype the memo, including breathless allusions to unlawful actions by the FBI in investigating Trump. The crazed conspiracy theories have reached a fever pitch, with members of Congress alleging without any evidence that there is a “secret society” in the FBI that is out to bring down the president. Congressional Republicans have briefed their allies in conservative media who have dutifully gone on the attack, demanding the investigation and jailing of top FBI officials, and even saying “it may be time to declare war on the deep state and clear out the rot at the upper levels of the FBI and the Justice Department.”

The actions and motives of Devin Nunes and House Republicans pushing this memo could not be more clear: they are pursuing a scorched earth strategy to protect Trump from being held responsible for his actions and they will bring down the entire FBI and Department of Justice if that is what it takes.

NUNES TIMELINE: A YEAR OF ABUSE OF POWER TO OBSTRUCT US LAW ENFORCEMENT

TRANSITION TEAM

Nov 2016-January 2017 – Nunes serves as a member of the Trump Transition Team.

December 2016 – Nunes questions the CIA’s assessment that Russia interfered. After the CIA reaches its initial assessment in December 2016 that Russia had interfered in the election, Nunes casts doubt on the veracity of the CIA’s conclusion, commenting, “I’ll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there’s clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence—even now.”

January 6, 2017 – The Intelligence Community releases its report concluding unanimously that Russia interfered on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election.

January 13, 2017 – Nunes resists opening an investigation. He tells Politico in January that he does not believe Congress should be investigating contacts between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, saying, “House committees don’t go operational like that, that I know of.”

January 13, 2017 – Nunes calls for an intelligence probe of “leaks” from the intelligence community about Trump’s ties to Russia.

January 18 – Nunes attends a breakfast roundtable with Michael Flynn and the Turkish Foreign Minister. Flynn at that time is an unregistered Foreign Agent of Turkey.

NUNES LEADS INVESTIGATION – FOCUSES ON “LEAKS”

January 25, 2017 – House Intelligence Committee announces its investigation. Despite Nunes’ link to the Trump administration, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan allows Nunes, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to lead the House’s effort to investigate Russian interference.

February 24, 2017 – Nunes operates as a White House surrogate and speaks to reporters at the direction of the White House to counter stories on Trump’s Russia ties. In mid-February, Nunes becomes one of several members of Congress enlisted by the White House to help publicly counter news stories about alleged contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials. Unlike the others contacted by the White House, Nunes goes on the record with The Wall Street Journal. Nunes’ spokesman says that, “at the request of a White House communications aide, Chairman Nunes then spoke to an additional reporter.”

February 25 – Nunes compares the Trump-Russia investigation to McCarthyism and a witch hunt. Nunes calls the Trump-Russia investigation a “witch hunt” and likened it to “McCarthyism revisited.”

TRUMP SURVEILLENCE CLAIM

March 4 – Trump claims Obama had his “wires tapped.”

Trump tweets alleging surveillance by the Obama administration. Trump first claims that the Obama administration surveilled his campaign on March 4, 2017. That morning, Trump tweets that President Barack Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
White House later admits no evidence for charge. The White House ultimately acknowledges that it has no evidence that Obama had ordered Trump’s wires tapped, but claims that, because Trump had initially made the allegation in quotes, he was referring not to actual wiretapping but to general surveillance.
March 15 – Trump defends his wiretapping claim, and says more information will come “over the next two weeks.” Trump tells Tucker Carlson, “When I say wiretapping … that really covers surveillance and many other things … I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.”

March 19 – Nunes goes on Fox News Sunday, raises concerns about “unmasking,” and seems to indicate a White House individual is under surveillance. When asked by Chris Wallace if he thinks “there was any surveillance of people in Trump world,” Nunes responds, “Well, if you look at the folks that are working in the White House today that are involved in the—in the Trump—in the Trump administration, I don’t think there’s any but one there that’s under any type of—of—of investigation or surveillance activities at all.” Boris Epsteyn abruptly announces he will be leaving the White House on March 25.

COMEY TESTIFIES AT NUNES HEARING

March 20 – Nunes chairs the first public hearing on Russia where FBI Director Comey announces there is an FBI investigation into collusion. Republican members of the committee focus almost exclusively on “leaks.”

UNMASKING

March 21 — Nunes receives a phone call, abruptly gets out of his Uber, and goes to the White House.

That night, Nunes reportedly receives a communication on his phone and promptly gets out of the Uber he is riding in with a staffer.
It is later revealed that Nunes went to the White House to review intelligence reports alleging that Trump and his associates had been “incidentally swept up” in legal foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.
Nunes’ sources have since been revealed to include two White House lawyers, John Eisenberg and Michael Ellis, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, at the time a staffer on the National Security Council.
March 22, morning – Nunes meets with Paul Ryan.

Nunes informs Speaker of the House Paul Ryan of the intelligence reports alleging that Trump and his associates had been intercepted in foreign surveillance.
March 22, afternoon – Nunes holds press conference on the Hill at 3 p.m. and says he was contacted by a “whistle-blower.” He says he is going to the White House to “brief” them on the information he received from them the night before.

Nunes alleges that he has seen information indicating that Obama administration national security officials, including National Security Adviser Susan Rice and CIA Director John Brennan, had “unmasked,” or received the identities of, Trump associates whose communications had been intercepted.
March 22, afternoon – Nunes goes to White House. He then holds another press conference.

March 23, 7:00am – Nunes holds another press conference where he claims White House didn’t know about the information he had been given by the White House.

Nunes says, “The president didn’t invite me over, I called down there and invited myself because I thought he needed to understand what I say and he needed to get that information.” This statement is later proven false, as Nunes had in fact received the intelligence from the White House in the first place.
March 28 – Nunes cancels additional hearings. Nunes cancels a hearing during which former acting Attorney General Sally Yates had planned to testify, leading top congressional Democrats to claim that the investigation had stalled. Under Nunes’ leadership, regular meetings are canceled as well.

April 6 – Nunes, under ethics investigation, is forced to recuse himself. Facing an ethics investigation into his handling of sensitive material, Nunes announces on April 6 that he will be recusing himself from his committee’s investigation into Russia.

NUNES RECUSED, YET STILL INVOLVED

Even during the period of his recusal, Nunes continued to run interference for the White House. He did so by attempting to refocus the controversy around Rice’s decision to unmask Trump associates’ identities in intercepts.

June 26– Nunes tells CNN will still be engaged, despite recusal. Nunes says: “When I temporarily stepped aside from leading the investigation, that’s exactly what it means: It doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to be involved, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to be fully read in.”

July 27 – Nunes continues to make “unmasking” allegations against Obama officials. According to CNN, “Nunes [leads] an effort to subpoena the FBI, CIA and NSA about Trump associates whose identities were allegedly unmasked during the presidential transition by Obama administration officials.” Nunes writes a letter to the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in which he claims that “current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information.”

August 3 – NSA McMaster dismisses claims of wrong-doing. Bloomberg reports that Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has concluded that Rice had violated neither the law nor intelligence community protocol.

Summer – Nunes sends House Intelligence Committee professional staffers on a secret trip to London to “track down” Steele. According to Politico, the staffers showed up unannounced at Steele’s lawyer’s office. The trip “inflamed simmering tensions between House and Senate investigators.” Nunes also does not tell his Democratic colleagues or special counsel Robert Mueller’s office about this trip.

Summer/Fall – Nunes meets with a future witness in the investigation. Nunes meets with Erik Prince, who is later called to testify before the House Intelligence Committee during its Russia probe. This meeting includes a discussion of “Nunes’ investigation into the unmasking of Americans’ identities in U.S. intelligence reports.” Prince was reportedly involved in efforts to set up secret backchannel communications between the Kremlin and President-elect Trump.

Late August – Nunes subpoenas the FBI and Department of Justice to provide records on its relationship with Steele and the Trump Dossier. According to CNN, “Nunes signed off on subpoenas to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide the panel with records about the Justice Department’s relationship with Steele and the Trump dossier, warning in a letter that he would haul them to Capitol Hill to answer questions at a public hearing if they did not comply.”

October – Nunes, despite his recusal, subpoenas Fusion GPS. These subpoenas are reportedly issued “without the minority’s agreement.” Nunes’ involvement in these subpoenas indicates that he is still involved in an investigation from which he has recused himself, thus potentially undermining the investigation itself.

October-December – Nunes subpoenas Fusion GPS’ bank (thus far the only bank subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee). Natasha Bertrand reports that “The House Intelligence Committee has only issued one subpoena to a financial institution in the 11 months since it opened its investigation.” Nunes has ignored calls to subpoena Deutsche Bank, one of the few financial institutions to lend to Trump in recent decades.

October 26 – Nunes leads the effort to create a new bogus scandal involving Uranium One. In another effort to distract from the investigation, Nunes holds a press conference calling for an investigation into former Secretary of State Clinton’s role, as one of nine cabinet members, in the approval of a sale of uranium mine.

Even though these claims have been repeatedly debunked, Nunes still announces a new probe into how the Obama administration handled the deal.
Roger Stone explained the true motive for this, telling Vanity Fair that a prosecutor looking into Uranium One would also have to investigate the FBI’s role in approving the deal, making Mueller a target because he was FBI director at the time.
October 27 – News leaks of potential indictments in Mueller investigation. CNN reports that the first charges have been approved in the Mueller investigation. The charges are sealed, and it is reported that those who have been indicted will be taken into custody the following Monday.

October 30 – Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are indicted; George Papadopoulos’s guilty plea is unsealed. The Mueller investigation indicts Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates on twelve charges, including conspiracy against the United States, money laundering, failure to register as a foreign agent, making false and misleading FARA statements, and failing to report foreign bank accounts; they plead not guilty. Documents are unsealed revealing that George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty on October 03, 2017, to “lying to federal officials about his contacts with Russian nationals.” Papadopoulos has signed a plea agreement indicating his cooperation with Mueller.

#RELEASE THE MEMO

December 7 – Nunes is cleared of ethics violation. The House Ethics Committee clears Nunes of allegations that he improperly handled classified information, allowing him to resume his leadership of the Russia investigation.

December 8 – Nunes says DOJ/FBI investigators are “dirty” and asks “who’s watching the watchman?” In an interview with Fox, he says, “I hate to use the word corrupt, but they’ve become at least so dirty that who’s watching the watchmen? Who’s investigating these people? There is no one.”

December – Nunes leads group of House Republicans seeking “to build a case” that there is “corruption and conspiracy” in the FBI and Justice Department. Politico reports on December 20 that “a subset of the Republican members of the House intelligence committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes” has “gathered secretly for weeks in the Capitol in an effort to build a case that senior leaders of the Justice Department and FBI improperly—and perhaps criminally—mishandled the contents of a dossier that describes alleged ties between President Donald Trump and Russia … the goal is to highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement. The group hopes to release a report early next year … That final product could ultimately be used by Republicans to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.”

December 28 – Nunes writes a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein demanding the DOJ and FBI turn over information by January 3 or face “contempt citations.”

January 3, 2018 – Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and FBI Director Wray meet with Speaker Paul Ryan asking him to turn off Nunes’ subpoenas; Ryan refuses and backs Nunes; DOJ/FBI provides information. According to Fox, “among the information being sought by the committee are reports that summarize meetings between FBI confidential human sources and FBI officials about the Steele dossier.”

January – Republican Staff on HPSCI write a “memo” based on the information Speaker Ryan forced the FBI/DOJ to turn over. Politico reports that, “compiled by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes and fellow Republicans on the panel … the memo, according to three people who have viewed it, raises questions about how the FBI handled a fall 2016 application for a warrant to surveil a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, and whether agents were forthcoming about the role a controversial dossier alleging Kremlin influence over Trump played in their decision to seek the warrant.”

January – Republicans on House Intelligence Committee divided on whether to release the memo. The main debate in the House has so far centered not around the memo’s secret allegations, but whether the classified document can be publicly released without compromising FBI sources and methods. Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), who is leading the Russia probe, has said releasing it would be “dangerous.” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) opposes releasing the memo, saying, “you don’t want the enemy to know that.” Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) has said the memo would need to be “scrubbed” and made unclassified for him support its release. Other GOP members continued to push for the memo’s release, with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) stating, “I think that this will not end just with firings. I believe there are people who will go to jail” and Rep. Steve King saying “I no longer hold out hope there is an innocent explanation for the information the public has seen. I have long said it is worse than Watergate.”

January – Nunes makes the memo available to all House Republicans, violating his agreement with the DOJ to protect the information.
https://themoscowproject.org/explainer/the-nunes-file/


crazy Mr. Trey Benghazi Gowdy (one of the transition team) has decided not to run for re election ....I wonder why...because Mueller has all of your emails too?

what’s really going on here. Trey Gowdy and Devin Nunes were on the Trump transition team. That’s a problem for them, because General Yellowkerk Flynn was updating the transition team about his illegal plotting with the Russian Ambassador in real time. Mueller now has Flynn as a cooperating witness, and he has all of the transition team emails. In other words, he has evidence that Nunes and Gowdy were a part of that criminal conspiracy on some level.


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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 01, 2018 12:45 am

The Nunes memo exposes the hypocrisy of selective classification

Ron WydenRon WydenVerified account
@RonWyden 3 hours ago
The government isn't always right or wrong about secrecy. But if this memo comes out, I don't want to hear another word about how pervasive secrecy is necessary for national security.


If the White House releases this memo over the FBI’s objection, I don’t want to hear another word from these people about how pervasive secrecy is necessary for national security.

If this memo comes out, I have a long list of less sensitive, but still classified, information that the American people deserve to see. #secretlaw

Remember when we were told a program that collected millions of innocent Americans’ telephone records couldn’t be revealed to the public?

The Director of National Intelligence won’t tell us if #FISA702 can be used to collect communications the government KNOWS are entirely domestic. But the administration may release a memo the FBI says jeopardizes national security.

The Trump administration is trying to make sure the Torture Report never sees the light of day, but the administration may release information the FBI says jeopardizes national security.

The Trump administration won’t tell Americans WHO can be spied on under #FISA702, but it may release information the FBI says jeopardizes national security.

It’s not that the government is always right or always wrong about secrecy. It's that Americans would be right to see this release as proof that selective classification is used more often to deceive them than to protect them.
https://twitter.com/i/moments/958859070584352768


Adam Schiff‏Verified account

BREAKING: Discovered late tonight that Chairman Nunes made material changes to the memo he sent to White House – changes not approved by the Committee. White House therefore reviewing a document the Committee has not approved for release.
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 01, 2018 10:19 am

The Real Aim of the Nunes Memo Is the Mueller Investigation
By CHARLIE SAVAGEJAN. 30, 2018

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said that Americans should see a secret memo that portrays the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation as a partisan endeavor. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said on Tuesday that he wanted Americans to see a secret memo that portrays the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation as scandalous, he also said he cautioned his Republican colleagues not to use it to impugn Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel running the inquiry.

“This is a completely separate matter from Bob Mueller’s investigation, and his investigation should be allowed to take its course,” Mr. Ryan told reporters.

But as a matter of political reality, the memo — written by Republican staffers for Representative Devin Nunes of California, the House Intelligence Committee chairman — has everything to do with defending President Trump from Mr. Mueller’s investigation.

As Mr. Mueller has accelerated his pace — indicting Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman and a deputy, interviewing White House aides and inducing two people connected to his campaign to plead guilty and cooperate — Mr. Trump’s allies in recent weeks have increasingly sought to shift the focus away from Russian election interference and instead portray the actions of investigators as the real scandal.

The memo is their latest salvo. Led by Mr. Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee is pivoting from examining Russia’s election meddling to instead investigating F.B.I. and Justice Department officials connected to the inquiry, putting them — with Mr. Ryan’s clear blessing — at the forefront of the broader pushback.

Republicans are pushing the narrative that a cabal of politically biased law enforcement officials set out to sabotage Mr. Trump. And they are portraying a dossier written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, which laid out unverified claims that Russia had compromised Mr. Trump and was conspiring with him, as the fountainhead of the Russia investigation. That assertion disregards unrelated evidence that Russia sought to influence the election and the pattern of contacts between Russians and Mr. Trump’s associates.

Mr. Nunes’s three-and-a-half page memo bolsters conservatives’ story line. According to people who have read it, the memo centers on a fall 2016 application for a wiretap order targeting Carter Page, a onetime Trump campaign official who had visited Moscow that June and was preparing to return there in December. The memo is said to criticize law enforcement officials for including information provided by Mr. Steele in the application without adequately explaining to the judge that Democrats financed Mr. Steele’s research.

Democrats have pushed back. Representative Adam B. Schiff, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who has seen the underlying classified materials on which the memo is based, has said the memo contains both inaccurate assertions and material omissions to misleadingly impugn law enforcement officials. Other people familiar with it say, for example, that Mr. Steele’s information was only one thread in a tapestry of evidence from various sources that the memo ignored, exaggerating its relative importance.

Democrats on the committee produced their own classified memo that they said pointed out and explained inaccuracies in the Republican memo and filled in the missing context. But on Monday, the committee voted along party lines to make the Republican memo public and rejected a request to simultaneously make public the Democrats’ rebuttal.

Asked on Tuesday about why it would not be more appropriate to make both memos public at the same time, Mr. Ryan was evasive. He said the Democratic memo first had to go through a process in which House members outside the Intelligence Committee could read it. Pressed on why the Republican memo should not be held back until that process was done, he said a reporter had asked enough questions.

Mr. Ryan then began remarks he said he had prepared, stressing that he respected the F.B.I. and the Justice Department as important institutions for “keeping the rule of law intact.” But on Monday, Intelligence Committee Republicans signaled a widening attack on both institutions — informing Democrats that the committee has opened an investigation into them, according to Mr. Schiff — as they voted to make their memo public.

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Representative Devin Nunes, center, leads the House Intelligence Committee, which released the memo. Credit Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency
Of particular importance, the Republican memo is said to cite the role of Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general appointed by Mr. Trump last year, in signing off on an application to extend the surveillance of Mr. Page — meaning he approved the resubmission of Mr. Steele’s information to the court. Mr. Rosenstein’s role could provide critics of the inquiry ammunition to go after him.

Under Justice Department regulations, only Mr. Rosenstein can fire Mr. Mueller, and only if he finds that the special counsel has committed misconduct — something he has repeatedly said he has not seen any sign of. But if Mr. Trump were to fire Mr. Rosenstein, he could install a more accommodating replacement willing to say that he or she had spotted a reason to justify removing the special counsel and shutting down the investigation.

On Tuesday, when Mr. Ryan maintained there was no connection between the memo and Mr. Mueller’s work, the speaker also portrayed Mr. Nunes’s committee as trying to be transparent as it carried out oversight into whether the executive branch had violated civil liberties using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“There’s a very legitimate issue here as to whether or not an American’s civil liberties were violated,” he said.

But Mr. Nunes’s history in Congress undermines the idea that he is motivated by a good-faith concern that law enforcement officials might have conspired to abuse their surveillance powers and trample on civil liberties.

For one thing, Mr. Nunes was a chief architect of Congress’s move this month to extend by six years the government’s power to conduct surveillance without a warrant under certain circumstances. He and his allies turned back a push by reform-minded lawmakers to impose significant new safeguards to protect Americans’ civil liberties against the potential for abuses.

Mr. Nunes also has earned a reputation of being a staunch Trump loyalist — or “Trump’s stooge,” as his hometown newspaper, The Fresno Bee, called him last week. Last year, he dramatically announced that a whistle-blower had shown him materials revealing that Obama administration officials had improperly “unmasked” the identities of Mr. Trump’s associates in intelligence reports based on surveillance, and that he intended to inform the White House about what he had learned. But it later emerged that Mr. Trump’s aides at the White House had shown him those materials, and other Republicans who later examined them concluded no one had been improperly unmasked.

That Mr. Nunes’s actions undermined his credibility does not mean, however, that law enforcement officials made no mistakes in the highly fraught political environment of the day. The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, is finishing an inquiry into the handling of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation, and he is expected to deliver some harsh findings about senior Justice Department and F.B.I. officials in the Obama administration.

As part of its examination, Mr. Horowitz’s team uncovered the texts between two F.B.I. officials who also worked on the Russia investigation in its early stages, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, expressing intense animus for Mr. Trump. Mr. Horowitz brought those messages to the attention of Mr. Mueller, who immediately removed Mr. Strzok from his team; Ms. Page had already left by then. The final inspector general report is expected to sharply criticize both.

For now, however, Mr. Nunes’s memo is coming to define a political landscape already cratered by Mr. Trump’s recurring calls to reinvestigate Mrs. Clinton; his firing of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey; the recent revelation that Mr. Trump ordered the firing of the special counsel last summer but backed off when his White House counsel threatened to resign; and Senate Republicans’ own attempts to discredit Mr. Steele, including two leading senators’ decision recently to ask the Justice Department to investigate whether he committed a crime.

One potential clue to the strategy behind the Republican memo may be lurking in the broadcasts of the Fox News personality Sean Hannity, a close ally of Mr. Trump whose programs often function as a conduit for his messaging.

On the day House Intelligence Committee Republicans revealed the existence of their memo and voted to share it with the House, Mr. Hannity built his evening program around what he said his sources had already told him about its contents — saying Americans would soon learn “beyond any shadow of a doubt that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his band of Democratic witch hunters never should have been appointed and they need to be disbanded immediately.”

And, though it was not yet public that the memo revealed Mr. Rosenstein’s role in extending the surveillance of Mr. Page, Mr. Hannity himself raised the question: “Did Rosenstein sign off on extension of this FISA warrant?” He also emphasized that “I’m very interested about Rod Rosenstein in all of this” — and called for him to be fired.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/30/us/p ... ation.html


earlier in the day Mr. Trey Benghazi Gowdy was actively asking for donations then all of a sudden he decides to quit ...wht happened in that couple of hours?

Democrats have a mole somewhere within Trump’s team, who ratted Nunes out for having made the changes. There are some clues as to who it may be.

.....

Just half a day before the Democrats learned that Nunes had altered the memo, the other Republican leader on the House Intelligence Committee – Trey Gowdy – announced out of nowhere that he’s retiring from Congress. Up to now, Nunes and Gowdy had been acting in concert with regard to this memo. Did Nunes tell Gowdy that he had secretly altered the memo? Did Gowdy then decide that he couldn’t go any further down the rabbit hole, for fear of going to prison? Is this why Gowdy abruptly announced he’s quitting? Is Gowdy the mole?
http://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/mo ... rump/7704/



Jim Himes

11h11 hours ago

In a formal meeting, I asked Chairman Nunes not once, but twice, if his memo would be released precisely as we reviewed it. He said yes. Then altered it.
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It has been reported that FBI Director Christopher Wray will give a rebuttal if the #NunesFakeMemo is released.



Rep. Nunes’s memo crosses a dangerous line

House committee votes to release memo alleging missteps by FBI in Russia probe

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) says the House Intelligence Committee vote to release documents alleging abuse in the FBI’s Russia probe marks a “very sad day.” (The Washington Post)

By Adam B. Schiff January 31 at 2:33 PM
Adam B. Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, represents California’s 28th District.

Even during the most difficult of times, when Congress had seemingly lost the capacity to govern and partisan storms raged across Capitol Hill, the intelligence committees remained largely insulated from the nation’s increasingly self-destructive politics.

No more.

On Monday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) moved to release a memo written by his staff that cherry-picks facts, ignores others and smears the FBI and the Justice Department — all while potentially revealing intelligence sources and methods. He did so even though he had not read the classified documents that the memo characterizes and refused to allow the FBI to brief the committee on the risks of publication and what it has described as “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” The party-line vote to release the Republican memo but not a Democratic response was a violent break from the committee’s nonpartisan tradition and the latest troubling sign that House Republicans are willing to put the president’s political dictates ahead of the national interest.

The reason for Republicans’ abrupt departure from our nonpartisan tradition is growing alarm over special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. In a matter of months, the president’s first national security adviser and a foreign policy adviser have pleaded guilty to felony offenses, while his former campaign chairman and deputy campaign manager have also been indicted. As Mueller and his team move closer to the president and his inner circle, a sense of panic is palpable on the Hill. GOP members recognize that the probe threatens not only the president but also their majorities in Congress.

In response, they have drawn on the stratagem of many criminal defense lawyers — when the evidence against a defendant is strong, put the government on trial. The Nunes memo is designed to do just that by furthering a conspiracy theory that a cabal of senior officials within the FBI and the Justice Department were so tainted by bias against President Trump that they irredeemably poisoned the investigation. If it wasn’t clear enough that this was the goal, Nunes removed all doubt when he declared that the Justice Department and the FBI themselves were under investigation at the hearing in which the memo was ordered released.

This decision to employ an obscure rule to order the release of classified information for partisan political purposes crossed a dangerous line. Doing so without even allowing the Justice Department or the FBI to vet the information for accuracy, the impact of its release on sources and methods, and other concerns was, as the Justice Department attested, “extraordinarily reckless.” But it also increases the risk of a constitutional crisis by setting the stage for subsequent actions by the White House to fire Mueller or, as now seems more likely, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, an act that would echo the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre.

As multiple investigations work to unearth the full truth, the president has lashed out with Nixonian ferocity at the Justice Department, the FBI, congressional investigators and the media.

However, unlike President Richard Nixon, who waged his Watergate fight without the same kind of vocal allies, Trump not only has an entire media ecosystem dedicated to shielding him from accountability but also senior Republicans on the Hill who have cast aside their duty to uphold the law and perform oversight in favor of protecting the Trump presidency — no matter the cost. Nunes may have wielded the committee gavel here, but the ultimate responsibility lies with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who lacked the courage to stop him.


Ryan, who has never served on the Intelligence Committee, seems not to understand the central bargain underpinning the creation of the intelligence committees after Watergate. In exchange for the intelligence community’s willingness to reveal closely guarded national secrets to a select group of members and staff for the purposes of oversight, the committees and the congressional leadership pledged to handle that information responsibly and without regard to politics.

That contract has now been spectacularly broken by the creation of a partisan memo that misrepresents highly classified information that will never be made public. Intelligence agencies can no longer be confident that material they provide the committee will not be repurposed and manipulated for reasons having nothing to do with national security. As a result, they will be far more reluctant to share their secrets with us in the future. Moreover, sources of information that the agencies rely upon may dry up, since they can no longer count on secrecy when the political winds are blowing. This is a grave cost for short-term political gain.

The obscure rule that the majority has relied upon contemplates a responsible president who will consult with the agencies affected and reject a misleading and partisan declassification effort. Sadly, this is not something we can expect from the current occupant of the Oval Office. He will have to answer for his actions. But there will be no avoiding congressional complicity in the shattering of yet another norm of office, check and balance.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... 44c4dacd57



INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT

It Was Worse than You Think: The House Intelligence Meeting on the Nunes Memo

By Quinta Jurecic Wednesday, January 31, 2018, 7:56 PM

On Monday, Jan. 29, the House Intelligence Committee convened to vote on whether to release to the public the much-discussed memo on alleged surveillance abuses prepared by Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. As we now know, the committee’s Republicans—over the Democrats’ objections—did indeed vote to #release it.

The memo itself is not yet available to the public (though it will likely become so at some point over the next few days). But the transcript of the committee’s Jan. 29 meeting is. Notably, in the hours before the transcript was made public, the FBI released a rare statement voicing “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Nunes dismissed the FBI’s comments as “spurious.”

You can read the transcript for yourself here, but below is a quick and dirty summary of what took place.

The meeting begins with Schiff laying out the three motions he intends to introduce:

The motions are as follows: first, a motion to make available to all members of the House a memo prepared by the committee’s minority, rebutting the Nunes memo; second, a motion to allow the Justice Department and FBI to review both memos and brief the committee before the vote on whether to release the Nunes memo; and third, a motion to require that if the Nunes memo is released to the public, the minority memo be released alongside it. Schiff emphasizes that only he and Rep. Trey Gowdy have seen the underlying intelligence on which the Nunes memo is based (only members of the Gang of Eight have access to the intelligence, but Gowdy viewed the intelligence for the majority).
Nunes says he has already introduced Schiff’s first motion, and agrees to allow the full House access to the minority memo. Rep. Mike Conaway (a Republican who has been leading the Russia investigation alongside Schiff in the wake of Nunes’s unofficial recusal) says he will vote in favor only if the minority memo “does not disclose information that would be harmful to national security.”
Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley complains that the memo has distracted the committee from its work on the Russia investigation. Conaway points out that Steve Bannon is scheduled to come in for a second hearing on Wednesday (this hearing has since been canceled), but Schiff notes that the committee has yet to schedule a follow-up hearing with Corey Lewandowski. Nunes chimes in: “This is not a place to discuss the Russia investigation.”
Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell argues that releasing the memo to the public will breach an agreement between the committee and the Justice Department that “there would be limited access to the mostly highly sensitive of materials as relates to Russia.” (Schiff has raised this concern elsewhere.) Swalwell makes the point that Nunes’s memo risks destroying the relationship between the committee and the intelligence community, making it impossible for the committee to function as an oversight body.
Nunes calls a vote on Schiff’s first motion:

The motion asks whether the committee should share the minority memo with the full House. All committee members vote in favor except Republican Rep. Mike Turner, who was reportedly unable to make it back to Washington in time for the vote.
Nunes then reads into the record a letter from Republican Rep. Peter King calling for the Nunes memo’s public release under House Rule X, clause 11(g). Rep. King speaks in favor of the memo’s publication, noting that FBI Director Christopher Wray discussed the memo with Nunes and Gowdy the day before.
In response to King’s comment regarding Wray, Swalwell asks “what did the FBI say as to dissemination to the public?” He does not receive a response.
Democratic Rep. Jim Himes asks Nunes whether his memo will be released in full or whether “references to highly classified information” will be redacted. Nunes does not directly answer, but suggests that the memo will be released without redactions, saying only: “We will make the content available.”
Schiff makes his second motion:

The motion is to postpone the vote until the FBI and Justice Department can review the Nunes memo in full and brief the committee. Nunes announces that “the Department of Justice and the FBI have been under investigation by this committee for many, many months for FISA abuse and other matters … I would urge my colleagues to vote no, we are not going to be briefed by people that are under investigation by this committee.”
None of the Democrats appear to have been aware of this investigation. Quigley argues that Nunes has violated rule 9(a) of the committee’s rules, which requires the committee to conduct investigations “only if approved by the chair in consultation with the ranking minority member”—meaning Schiff. But Schiff says that this is the first he’s been formally notified of it.
Quigley asks Nunes whether he has coordinated the memo with the White House. “As far as I know, no,” says Nunes. Quigley then asks whether any of the majority’s staff have coordinated with the White House. Nunes refuses to answer and cuts him off.
Himes voices his concern that the committee will apparently be releasing the memo unredacted, noting that “an immense amount of classified information will be available to the public.” He warns about the dangers of voting on both memos’ release before any of the committee members beyond Schiff and Gowdy view the underlying intelligence.
Swalwell suggests that, if Nunes insists that the FBI and Justice Department are under investigation, the committee could pass the memo to an inspector general of another agency for review before its release. He suggests the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Nunes does not respond.
Nunes calls a vote on Schiff’s second motion:

Schiff requests a delay of the memo’s release until after a briefing by the FBI and Justice Department. The Republicans vote it down along party lines. All Democrats vote in favor.
Schiff makes his third motion:

Schiff now requests that the minority’s memo be released publicly alongside Nunes’s memo. Conaway says that he will oppose the motion. He would prefer for the minority memo to go through the same process as the Nunes memo: pause for a “time of reflection” after releasing the memo to the House before releasing it to the public.
Schiff argues the majority is behaving hypocritically: the committee’s Republicans criticized Hillary Clinton for what FBI Director James Comey called her “extremely careless” handling of classified information, but they are now planning to vote to release classified information in what the Justice Department called an “extraordinarily reckless” fashion.
The committee votes on Schiff’s third motion requesting the minority memo’s release to the public.

All present Republicans vote against it. All Democrats vote for it, with the exception of Rep. Jackie Speier, who votes present.
Finally, the committee votes on Nunes’s motion to release his memo to the public.

All Republicans present vote in favor—except for Rep. Will Hurd, who has stepped out of the room and will add his “aye” vote retroactively at the end of the meeting. All Democrats vote against making the memo public.
Schiff calls for another vote on his motion to release the minority memo alongside the Nunes memo, now that the committee has voted for the Nunes memo’s release. The vote is the same.
Schiff requests that the transcript of these proceedings be released to the public as soon as possible. Nunes adjourns the meeting.
It’s interesting to compare the unanimous Republican vote to #ReleasetheMemo with the less-than-enthusiastic attitude of much of the committee majority toward the document itself. When Benjamin Wittes and I reached out to the offices of every committee Republican (except Nunes) and asked whether the representatives had faith in the factual conclusions of the memo, only three members of the committee answered in the affirmative (six did not respond to our repeated requests to contact them, and three responded but conspicuously did not answer our question as to the memo’s integrity). But all thirteen Republicans voted for the document’s release. Likewise, of the majority, only Nunes, Conaway and King speak up over the course of the meeting—and Conaway’s points are mostly procedural, not a substantive defense of the memo. Also notable is that Rep. Chris Stewart told us last week that he would support the Nunes memo’s release if sensitive information were redacted, and yet voted for the unredacted memo’s publication. During the meeting, Conaway similarly voiced concerns over publication of classified information—albeit regarding the minority memo—but voted in favor of the unredacted Nunes memo’s release as well.

Update: As of 10pm on Wednesday night, Schiff announced on Twitter that Nunes has shared a different version of the document with the White House than the committee voted on. Schiff argues that this means that the memo has not been properly voted on by the committee—which would presumably mean that the president can't give his approval to make it public. With reports that the White House plans to release the memo tomorrow, it's not clear what happens next.

http://lawfareblog.com/it-was-worse-you ... nunes-memo
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 01, 2018 5:13 pm

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Jonathan Swan 18 mins ago

Rising White House fear: Nunes memo is a dud


Inside the Trump administration, sources who've been briefed on the Nunes memo expect it will be underwhelming and not the “slam dunk” document it's been hyped up to be.

What we're hearing: There is much more skepticism inside the administration than has been previously reported about the value of releasing the memo, according to sources familiar with the administration discussions.

Be smart: Trump still wants to release the memo. But there are a number of people in the White House who are fairly underwhelmed, and there's internal anxiety about whether it's worth angering the FBI director and intelligence community by releasing this information.

What’s next: Trump will almost certainly approve the memo’s release. The internal debate, now, is more around whether to make further changes to the memo — redactions to protect sources and methods — on the advice of the Intelligence Community.
https://www.axios.com/rising-white-hous ... 29005.html



D-DAY
FBI Director Must Be Prepared to Resign Over Nunes Memo, Ex-Agents Warn
As Trump prepares to release a GOP document accusing the FBI of abuses, bureau alums hope Director Chris Wray holds the line—but has to be ready to walk.

Spencer Ackerman

02.01.18 1:29 PM ET
Former FBI agents are warning that FBI Director Christopher Wray has to be prepared to quit, should President Donald Trump assent over bureau objections to the release of a memo calling the FBI’s integrity into question.

The release of the memo, considered imminent, shows no signs of stopping, even as the leader of Democrats in the House called on its Republican author, Devin Nunes, to be removed from his chairmanship of the House intelligence committee. It was the latest move in an extraordinary episode that appears set to spark a crisis over the criminal investigation into Trump’s potential ties to Russia.

At the center of the storm is Wray, Trump’s hand-picked FBI director. Wray got his job after Trump fired James Comey last year for what Comey described as insufficient personal “loyalty” over the Russia investigation.

On Wednesday, Wray’s FBI publicly attacked Nunes’ memo for “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Trump overriding Wray will immediately call Wray’s future in the Trump administration into question six month into his tenure.

Former FBI agents say that they hope Wray can remain in office, and pull Trump and House Republicans back from the precipice of what may be a pivotal moment in the bureau’s history. But they also say Wray needs to show his willingness to walk.

“Given the climate and the recent activities, going as far back as Director Comey’s departure, Wray definitely must be prepared to resign,” said Erroll Southers, a retired FBI special agent now at the University of Southern California.


“I don’t think the director has to resign. He should be prepared to publicly discredit this cherry-picked, fake memo and expose Nunes,” added former FBI counterterrorism special agent Ali Soufan. Soufan cited the bad blood between Director Louis Freeh and President Bill Clinton in the 1990s as a sign that the FBI can continue investigating a president despite their relationship collapsing.

But if Trump “wants to fire Wray, let him fire Wray, like Comey,” Soufan continued. “And then people in Washington should be prepared for a Saturday Night Massacre. Many honorable men and women should be prepared to resign, to walk out over this.”

With Wray under pressure, the FBI Agents Association, the outside advocacy group of bureau retirees, praised him on Thursday for standing “shoulder to shoulder” with the FBI’s rank and file. It came right as CNN reported the White House is afraid Wray will quit.

“As Director Wray noted, FBI special agents have remained steadfast in their dedication to professionalism, and we remain focused on our important work to protect the country from terrorists and criminals – both domestic and international,” association president Thomas O’Connor said in a Thursday statement.

Nunes shows no signs of backing down, prompting Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader, to call Thursday for House Speaker Paul Ryan to remove Nunes from the intelligence committee on which she formerly served. “Congressman Nunes has abused his position to launch a highly unethical and dangerous cover-up campaign for the White House,” Pelosi charged.

“Given the climate and the recent activities, going as far back as Director Comey’s departure, Wray definitely must be prepared to resign.”
— Retired FBI special agent Erroll Southers

But Nunes has the support of Trump, on whose transition team he served. Trump is widely expected to assent to the memo’s release as soon as Thursday, though Fox News is reporting it will come Friday. That is the day when the House of Representatives’ parliamentary rules compel Trump to register any objections to declassification of the memo the FBI considers fundamentally misleading.

Southers expects Wray’s tenure after the memo’s release to be “very tense. The pressure is going to continue mounting. I never thought I’d see the FBI deemed the enemy of the state by anyone, let alone people in this country,” he said.

Should Wray remain in office, Southers continued, “he’s going to have to be a rock going forward, making clear to people that his only objective [will be] to stay focused on the mission. Certain things will be out of his control, and that includes his future, as it relates to the president.”

As Mueller Moves Closer, Trump Takes Aim

Trump appears highly motivated to ignore the FBI’s objections. According to the Washington Post, Trump has told allies that the memo’s accusations will prompt him to “pus[h] out Rosenstein,” the deputy attorney general who is special counsel Robert Mueller’s overseer and a target of the Nunes memo. Though Rosenstein aided Trump in firing Comey in May, Trump has reportedly responded to Rosenstein’s requests for aid in staving off Nunes by asking if Rosenstein was “on my team.”

The senior Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, Sen. Mark Warner, has warned firing Rosenstein, is a prelude to firing Mueller or hiring a new deputy attorney general to restrict Mueller’s inquiry – something Warner said last month “has the potential to be a constitutional crisis.”

Release of the memo, eagerly cheered by House Republicans and Fox News, is coming as Mueller’s probe shows signs of advancing to the White House door.

Mueller wishes to interview Trump himself and the New York Times reported Wednesday night that Mueller is interested in a lie Trump was involved in telling last summer that concealed the true purpose of a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower attended by one of Trump’s sons, now-indicted campaign head Paul Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner. An intermediary had told Donald Jr. that a Russian attorney sought to provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

“Many honorable men and women should be prepared to resign, to walk out over this.”
— Former special agent Ali Soufan
Mueller’s probe is an outgrowth of an FBI investigation that Nunes’ still-secret memo purportedly claims was tainted from the start. In batting back the FBI’s attack on his memo, Nunes confirmed that one of its claims concerns another right-wing bete noire: the salacious dossier, compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, financed at first by Trump’s GOP rivals and then Democrats last year, alleging that Trump allies had been compromised by or complicit with the Kremlin.

“Top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counterintelligence investigation during an American political campaign,” Nunes charged Wednesday, calling the FBI and Justice Department objections “spurious” and self-interested.

That’s a reference to a surveillance application submitted last year for Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy aide with a history of proximity to Russian spies.

But according to ex-Justice Department attorneys who have been involved in the so-called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, information from the Steele dossier could have played little more than a marginal role.

To obtain a surveillance warrant on a specific person under what is known as Title I FISA, a judge on a secret court must find the Justice Department and FBI have probable cause to believe their intended target is an agent of a foreign power. Showing that involves affiants describing the evidence underlying each of their arguments.

But Steele’s dossier cited proprietary and unnamed sources for his claims. While Justice Department lawyers are permitted to cite the FBI’s confidential sources before a FISA Court judge, they would not be in a position to explain why Steele’s unknown sources merit confidence. At most, attorneys say, Steele’s information could bolster submissions for which the FBI and Justice Department already had evidence.

“It’s appalling to see a president attack our nation’s law enforcement institutions that, in my experience, work diligently and tirelessly to protect our citizens, all the while striving to abide by the law,” said Josh Geltzer, an attorney in the Justice Department’s national-security division during the Obama administration.

Last-Minute Fights to Stop the Memo

Release of the memo appeared a foregone conclusion after Nunes prevailed in an internal committee vote Monday to force its release. As The Daily Beast first reported, Nunes dismissed FBI and Justice Department objections as a conflict of interest and elided a pointed question over whether he and his staff had colluded with the White House on a memo attacking Trump’s enemies—something Nunes has a history of doing and concealing.

In a last-minute attempt to derail the memo’s release, the House intelligence committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff, accused Nunes late on Wednesday of materially changing the memo’s contents after the committee voted to release it. Fellow panel Democrat Jim Hines had gotten Nunes to indicate during the contentious Monday vote that the document would not be changed, though Nunes stopped short of promising Hines that.

But a Nunes spokesman dismissed Democratic demands to withdraw the document. Republicans on the panel made only “minor edits to the memo,” spokesman Jack Langer asserted, such as “grammatical fixes and two edits” at the behest of the FBI and the Democrats. “To suggest otherwise is a bizarre distraction from the abuses detailed in the memo, which the public will hopefully soon be able to read for themselves," Langer said.

“It’s appalling to see a president attack our nation’s law enforcement institutions that work diligently and tirelessly to protect our citizens, all the while striving to abide by the law.”
— former Justice Department attorney Josh Geltzer
Democrats did not quantify the changes they say Nunes made to the secret document, but a committee source said they were neither cosmetic nor mitigated the risk of exposing counterintelligence-relevant information for the memo’s release. The changes, according to the committee source, also did not redress the FBI’s now-rebuffed criticism that the memo misstates the surveillance process it purports to describe.

The source also rejected Langer’s claim that Democrats had requested certain changes, saying that they consider the document “fundamentally flawed”—a position they now share with the FBI.

Yet the White House is signalling that those concerns emerge from what they consider hostile actors. Chief of Staff John Kelly rejected Rosenstein and Wray’s concerns about the memo during a White House meeting earlier this week, heralding a potential reckoning with the Justice Department, the FBI, and perhaps the two men themselves after the memo is released.

“We are at a very weird stage of our democracy,” said ex-FBI agent Soufan. “It’s not just about the FBI. It’s about loyalty to the president, or loyalty to the constitution. We are at a crossroads. We need to fight back. It’s probably the most important fight in modern American history.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fbi-direc ... ref=scroll



trump administration has decided to put out heavily redacted version of Nunes memo. In all its glory
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 01, 2018 11:07 pm

HANNIDATE

Sean Hannity Has Been Advising Donald Trump on the Nunes Memo, Because Of Course He Has

Donald Trump continues to get his policy advice from the people on “the shows.”

LACHLAN MARKAY
ASAWIN SUEBSAENG
02.01.18 7:46 PM ET
President Donald Trump is at odds with his own chief law enforcement officers over a controversial memo fueling Republican allegations of a conspiracy against the Trump presidency. But by all indications, the president is less amenable to the concerns of his own FBI than those shared by a less formal, more bombastic adviser.

That adviser is Sean Hannity, who has been hyping the so-called Nunes memo all week, and with whom the president continues to speak regularly.

According to three sources with knowledge of their conversations, Trump has been in regular contact with Hannity over the phone in recent weeks, as the Fox News primetime star and Trump ally has encouraged the prompt release of a controversial four page memo crafted by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Hannity has gone to the wall to push for the public release of the memo, which the Intelligence Committee and its chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), authorized this week in a party-line vote despite the classified information therein.

Sources say Hannity’s persistent advocacy reinforced Trump’s already growing determination to get that memo into the public realm—despite huge potential fallout within the law enforcement and intelligence arms of his own administration.

In their conversations, Trump and Hannity discussed the Nunes memo’s supposed bombshell-level significance, and how it could shed light on the alleged anti-Trump bias and “corruption” at the FBI. On these calls, Trump has directly referenced specific recent Hannity segments related to #ReleaseTheMemo, according to one of three sources with knowledge of their conversations.

The White House press office did not respond to requests for comment, and Hannity declined to comment. Sources, two in the White House and the other an outside adviser, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.


Trump not only deeply values the private, after-hours political and policy advice and gossip from his favorite cable news hosts, but is a notoriously avid consumer of their broadcasts, particularly highly sympathetic shows like Hannity and Fox & Friends. As he has inched closer to publicly releasing the Nunes memo—he has privately said it’s all but a foregone conclusion—cable news and right-wing media have shaped his views on the issue, as they have on many other topics, far more so than the briefings or private intelligence provided by those within his administration, White House officials say.


On Monday afternoon, the day before President Trump’s State of the Union address, the White House summoned some of the president’s most trusted allies and outside advisers to the Entrance Hall in the official residence. The meeting included a who’s who of pro-Trump surrogates and media commentators, including cable-news regulars Jason Miller, Larry Kudlow, and Jack Kingston.

“Man, are you a warrior—you’re a warrior!” Trump told a person in the group, according to three sources present. “We’re all warriors in this fight.”

As the meeting wound down, President Trump made sure to approach people one-on-one to commend them for their performances and appearances on live TV. In some cases, he cited specific TV interviews and segments from the past weeks that he found particularly compelling and fun to watch. Some attendees were surprised at how closely the president of the United States had been watching them. For others, it was simply additional confirmation of “how much of a [TV] addict” Trump is, according to another person at the White House meeting.

Hannity, while not in the room that day, is one of Trump’s top “warriors” on the outside, along with his other Fox colleagues who double as informal advisers to Trump, such as Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham. Among other things, Trump consulted Hannity on the Iran deal late last year shortly before the president strongly weighed killing it.

"Senior counselor to the president, Sean H[annity]," one senior White House official joked to The Daily Beast this week.

Hannity has worked himself into a frenzy this week, promising viewers "the biggest political scandal in American history." On Wednesday evening, Hannity even hinted that he was privy to non-public information. “There's so much more coming, I wish I could share it with you now,” he said.

Fox host and former judge Jeanine Pirro (another part-time Trump adviser) has already determined culpability.

“I have been saying from the beginning, Sean, this guy McCabe needs to be taken out in cuffs,” she told Hannity on Tuesday evening.

For other Fox opinionionators, it’s been a week of pleading with the president to release an unredacted copy of the memo—direct pleading, in some cases, in the hope that Trump happens to be tuned in.

“I know he watches certain shows on this channel, so let’s send a very clear message,” said Sebastian Gorka, current Fox News contributor and former official in the Trump White House, in a Tuesday appearance on Lou Dobbs’s Fox Business show. “Mr. President, the American people need to see the whole memo. Please release the unredacted memo.”

Though Hannity and other Trump-friendly pundits will likely proclaim its vast significance in any case, releasing the memo could produce little tangible upside for a president who hopes to kneecap Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation—even as it results in massive political fallout.

According to CNN, the White House is also concerned that releasing the memo would spur FBI director Christopher Wray to resign in protest. If that happens, former FBI agents told The Daily Beast on Thursday, Wray’s subordinates should consider following his lead.

“People in Washington should be prepared for a Saturday Night Massacre,” said former special agent Ali Soufan. “Many honorable men and women should be prepared to resign, to walk out over this.”

In the end, though, Trump’s favorite media personalities may hold greater sway over the president’s decision than even his own FBI director.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/sean-hann ... ssion=true



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omeJbn-6QfE

Marcy Wheeler on Showdown over Nunes Memo, Mueller Probe & Reauthorization of Mass Surveillance
STORY

FEBRUARY 01, 2018



Marcy Wheeler
independent journalist who covers national security and civil liberties. She runs the website EmptyWheel.net.

A showdown is brewing in Washington as the White House prepares to release a controversial Republican memo despite opposition from the FBI, the Justice Department and Democratic lawmakers. The four-page memo, written by House Intelligence Committee chair, Republican Congressmember Devin Nunes of California, purports to show that the FBI abused its power when it began surveilling Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016 due to his dealings with Russia. Supporters of President Trump claim the memo offers proof that the FBI’s investigation was tainted by politics from the start, in part because the FBI won approval of the wiretap by citing a dossier funded by supporters of Hillary Clinton. On Wednesday, the FBI, which is led by Trump appointee Christopher Wray, issued an unusual statement criticizing the imminent release of the memo, saying, “[W]e have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” We speak to independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, who runs the website EmptyWheel.net.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: A showdown is brewing in Washington as the White House prepares to release a controversial Republican memo despite opposition from the FBI, the Justice Department and Democratic lawmakers. The four-page memo, written by House Intelligence Committee chair, Republican Congressmember [Devin] Nunes of California, purports to show that the FBI abused its power when it began surveilling Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016 due to his dealings with Russia. Supporters of President Trump claim the memo offers proof that the FBI’s investigation was tainted by politics from the start, in part because the FBI won approval of the wiretap by citing a dossier funded by supporters of Hillary Clinton. The memo is expected to lay blame on the actions of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the same man who is the only official with the authority to fire special prosecutor Robert Mueller.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on Wednesday, the FBI, which is led by Trump appointee Christopher Wray, issued an unusual statement, fiercely critical of the imminent release of the memo, saying, quote, “[W]e have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Then, on Wednesday, at night, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, claimed Nunes had made, quote, “material changes” to the secret memo before sending it to the president.

This comes as the White House appears to be preparing to release the memo. On Tuesday night, President Trump was caught on mic at the State of the Union speaking with South Carolina Republican Congressman Jeff Duncan.

REP. JEFF DUNCAN: Let’s release the memo.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Oh, yeah. Oh, don’t worry, 100 percent. Can you imagine that?
REP. JEFF DUNCAN: Oh, yes, sir!
AMY GOODMAN: Duncan asked if he was releasing the memo, and President Trump said, “100 percent.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is not the first time House Intelligence Chair [Devin] Nunes has been at the center of a controversy. In April, he supposedly recused himself from an investigation into Russia’s alleged ties to Trump associates and Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. election, after he illegally made classified information public. This came after The New York Times revealed White House officials had met secretly with Nunes to show him classified U.S. intelligence reports detailing how Trump associates were incidentally swept up in surveillance carried out by American spy agencies as they conducted foreign surveillance. Nunes later walked back his recusal.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Marcy Wheeler. She’s an independent journalist who covers national security and civil liberties, running the website EmptyWheel.net. We’re speaking to her in Lansing, Michigan.

Marcy, explain exactly what this memo is. This is a firestorm in Washington, pitting Trump’s own appointee, the head of the FBI, against Trump himself.

MARCY WHEELER: So, the memo purports to be a review of FISA, they claim, abuses, primarily focused on a FISA warrant targeted at Carter Page, who at one point was a foreign policy adviser of the Trump campaign, although the FISA warrant was not approved until he was off the campaign, which is just one of the ways we already know that this memo is misleading, because it didn’t target the campaign. It targeted somebody the campaign got rid of because of his ties with Russia. So, that’s the first thing.

And it does—it focuses—it is—reportedly emphasizes the fact that the Christopher Steele dossier, which was—that part of the dossier, an opposition research dossier, was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And it complains that that dossier was one of the things used to get the FISA warrant against Carter Page. We can assume that it therefore downplays other things that we already know about, for example, that Carter Page, in 2013, was being recruited by Russians. And FBI kind of kept tracking him in the interim period because they were worried about his ties with the Russians. We assume that there are a number of other sources for the FISA application. And again, those are all going to be downplayed in the four-page memo.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Marcy Wheeler, can you explain a little more why the Republicans and Trump want this memo released?

MARCY WHEELER: Well, they want to find an excuse to fire Rod Rosenstein. But even there, there’s a problem. Rod Rosenstein—there are actually conflicting reports about when the last of these applications was submitted. It was either March or April. New York Times has reported that it was April, after Rod Rosenstein became deputy attorney general on April 26th. But if that’s the case, regardless of which it is, it means that two applications using the dossier had already been approved by the FISA court, one of which came after the dossier was made public. So, either Rod Rosenstein, all he did was sign the last application that had already gone through approval processes in March, right when he came in as deputy attorney general, or he wasn’t involved at all. But they are searching for some excuse, such that they’ll be able to remove Rosenstein, and therefore get to Mueller.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain exactly what that last part is, why they want to get rid of Rod Rosenstein and how that will get them to Mueller.

MARCY WHEELER: So, the only way you can remove Mueller is if his supervisor finds him—not the only way, but the only way that isn’t going to cause a huge firestorm is if his supervisor finds Mueller to have conducted unethical acts or engaged in improper activities. Rosenstein is his supervisor, because Jeff Sessions is recused. And so, you need to, A, remove Rosenstein, and then put in somebody who would be willing to fire Mueller. People talk about the EPA director. No one thinks, for example, that the third in command at DOJ, Rachel Brand, would do it. So, you know, you’ve got to, A, remove Rod Rosenstein, and then, B, put in some partisan hack who would be willing to fire somebody who, by all appearances, is just engaging in a typical investigation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And why, Marcy, do the Democrats not want this memo released?

MARCY WHEELER: Well, they argue two things. One, that it’s misleading. As I laid out, it’s not going—it’s going to misrepresent Rod Rosenstein’s involvement. It’s going to downplay the fact that this application—that applications against Carter Page were approved on at least two occasions before Rod Rosenstein got involved. It’s going to downplay the degree to which Carter Page was already off the Trump campaign. It’s going to misrepresent how centrally this dossier played in the application. So that’s one reason the Democrats don’t want it released.

Another reason they don’t want it released is that they say that the memo itself exposes sources and methods. And so, normally, everybody on the House Intelligence Committee kind of goes overboard protecting sources and methods, protecting the secrets that they learn in the course of their business. And in this case, Nunes has thrown that all out the window. He’s using, by the way, to release it, a kind of a legal measure that Congress has available to them to release classified information. It was discussed with the release of the torture report. It would have been appropriate to use it with the torture report. In this case, it’s probably not an appropriate use of the law. But it hasn’t been used. It is not used, because normally when the intelligence committees want to release something, they go in a back-and-forth discussion with the underlying—with the agencies, in this case, FBI. But FBI is also trying to protect—it’s quite clear from what DOJ said last week—other intelligence agency assets, so probably NSA and CIA, and also foreign—information from foreign partners. So, there was a report last week where the Dutch intelligence was making it quite clear that they’re less and less comfortable sharing intelligence with the Trump administration. That’s one of the reasons you don’t release underlying sources and methods, because then we can’t partner with foreign partners, as well.

There’s one other, I would say illegitimate, reason not to release this memo. And that is because FISA, the law that allows the government to target people in the United States as suspected spies rather than as suspected criminals, it’s been in place for 40 years. When it was passed, Congress envisioned that sometimes defendants who were collected on, using FISA warrants, would get to review the underlying dossier, would get to review whether the application was fair. But no defendant in history has ever gotten that review. And Devin Nunes didn’t care about that until Carter Page was targeted. But it is something that I think Congress should revisit—should have revisited, by the way, in the 702 reauthorization that was just passed a couple weeks ago. But DOJ also doesn’t want this underlying report to be released, because it’s going to make it easier for defendants to see what the—what DOJ uses when it’s targeting people with FISA warrants, and they don’t want that precedent. But the precedent would be, I think, useful.

AMY GOODMAN: So, yesterday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a fierce defender of President Trump, the White House press spokesperson, said Trump hadn’t—she didn’t believe, had read the memo, that he said he’s going to release, when he was caught off mic at the State of the Union talking to a congressman. And I wanted to ask you about the sort of bigger issue here. It seems like the tables are turned. The Democrats, at least progressives, have been fierce questioners of the FBI over the decades and about the national security state going—you know, overreaching, to say the least. Now all the tables are turned, and the Trump administration is going against the FBI and the Justice Department. What do you make of this, in the long run, whether this will limit the intelligence committees’ oversight of things and overreach of things?

MARCY WHEELER: Well, I wouldn’t go overboard in saying the Democrats have always been critical of the FBI. I mean, it’s really important—

AMY GOODMAN: I meant to say progressives.

MARCY WHEELER: Progressives, that’s fair.

But, I mean, as I mentioned, it was just a couple weeks ago when Congress passed the Title VII reauthorization, another part of FISA. And all of the same people pushing to get this memo out, starting with Devin Nunes, Trey Gowdy, the entire Republican side on the House Intelligence Committee, they all pushed to have FISA reauthorized without any reforms. And down the road, I will point out that the memo that they released doesn’t address a FISA problem that probably did affect Carter Page. So, they don’t—they’re not paying attention to FISA closely enough to talk about the thing that probably did affect Carter Page badly. They don’t care that, for example, the government can collect Tor traffic, including entirely domestic communications, and then weed out which Americans aren’t engaged in crime, and get rid of it, but keep the ones that are engaged in eight enumerated crimes. They don’t care that the FBI can access communications collected under 702 warrantlessly, without any kind of suspicion at all. So, you know, these people who are pushing for this memo to come clean—to come out really do not care at all and do not—cannot believe that the FBI is an abusive agency, because if they did, they would not have reauthorized this legislation. This is exclusively about trying to invent a reason to discredit the Mueller—the Mueller investigation.

And, you know, will it affect oversight, going forward? I think one thing that has been made clear with this whole fiasco is that the House Intelligence Committee doesn’t work. And great, I hope that Republicans will be so embarrassed by the time this is done that they cooperate with people—with good government reformers, who have been saying for a long time there are ways to improve the House Intelligence Committee and make it functional, such that Devin Nunes can’t take it hostage and turn it into a mode of obstruction for the president.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I meant to say progressive activists, not even Democratic congressmembers, when it came to being concerned about FBI and intelligence and NSA overreach. But you mentioned Trey Gowdy. And yesterday, the Republican congressman from South Carolina, a chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced he is not going to seek re-election. He was instrumental in crafting the Nunes memo. Can you talk about the significance of him leaving Congress, leader in the Benghazi investigation, attacking Hillary Clinton, etc.?

MARCY WHEELER: Yeah, Trey Gowdy, when he’s in front of a camera, is one of the most blustery Republican partisans. But you can tell, even, for example, from the Carter Page transcript, his interview with House Intelligence Committee, that behind closed doors he actually is a competent prosecutor, which is—you know, he’s got a background in that. And he can hammer Republican witnesses.

So, what’s interesting about Gowdy is that he—the underlying materials—this is another complaint the Democrats have. The only people who have read the underlying materials are Adam Schiff, four staffers—two of Adam Schiff’s and two of Devin Nunes’s—and Trey Gowdy. It would have been Devin Nunes, but Devin Nunes, probably because of the recusal you talked about earlier, had Gowdy do it instead. So, the only people who have actually looked at the underlying materials include Trey Gowdy. Now, he didn’t write the memo, Nunes’s staffers did. So there’s this game of telephone going on already.

On Sunday, on one of the Sunday shows, Trey—I think it was a Fox show—Trey Gowdy said, “You know, this memo should come out. It’s important. But my side should not use it to undermine the Mueller investigation.” And the reason he gave is that what is not being seen about the Mueller investigation is there’s a whole counterintelligence side to it. There’s a whole side of it investigating how the Russians tampered in our election. And according to Gowdy, who has seen these underlying documents, he thinks that’s an important and legitimate investigation.

Now, we don’t know fully why he decided not to run. He did cite yesterday that he’s sick of politics. But what’s interesting is, yesterday morning, he was still fundraising. So, as of yesterday morning, he was still planning on running. There’s also reports that Don McGahn, who is the White House counsel, who has been in this sort of obstructive role for Trump, as well, was discussing with Gowdy a position on the Fourth Circuit as a circuit court judge, which is something Gowdy has been interested in the past, and Gowdy turned that down. So, Gowdy, even though he is this fire-breathing partisan hack—you know, you go back to the Benghazi case—he seems to have seen something in the underlying investigation that troubles him, that his Republican partisan colleagues are not paying attention to. And so, Gowdy may surprise us, going forward. But I do think that that is an interesting development yesterday, that the one guy on the House Intelligence Committee who’s actually seen the underlying intelligence has decided to get out of the Republican partisan hackery rat race.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Marcy Wheeler, we just have 30 seconds, but the whole issue of whether Mueller will be interviewing President Trump, and President Trump saying he’s very willing to testify under oath, and then his lawyer walking that back—but the significance of this?

MARCY WHEELER: Well, people should remember that Trump is not going to be indicted for obstruction. He might be indicted—he might be named as an unindicted co-conspirator. But he’s not, I mean, like—he’s very unlikely to be indicted for anything, because he’s the sitting president. But it is possible that, for example, Hope Hicks—The New York Times had a report on her possibly obstructing justice last night—she could be indicted or forced into a plea deal on obstruction, and Trump could be named in that. And I think that’s what’s really going on. His lawyers don’t want Trump to sit for an interview, because he can’t tell the truth for more than 10 minutes. And I don’t blame them. But that back-and-forth is going to go on for some time and add pressure to the president, I think.

AMY GOODMAN: Marcy Wheeler, we want to thank you for being with us, independent journalist covering national security and civil liberties, running the website EmptyWheel.net. We’ll link to your piece, your latest pieces, and the latest one, “Byron York Confirms That Many Names and Sources Implicated Carter Page as an Agent of a Foreign Power.” Speaking to us from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we go to Kabul, Afghanistan. Stay with us.
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/2/1/m ... over_nunes
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

Postby BenDhyan » Thu Feb 01, 2018 11:09 pm

Trump Jr. claims McCabe was 'fired' due to what was in Nunes memo

By John Bowden - 02/01/18 05:07 PM EST

Trump Jr. claims McCabe was 'fired' due to what was in Nunes memo

Donald Trump Jr. claimed Thursday in two tweets that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was "fired" due to the contents of a yet-to-be-released memo from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that alleges abuses of government surveillance powers.

While McCabe was under pressure to leave the FBI, Trump Jr. in his tweets claims that the information in the memo was "good enough" for the administration to "fire McCabe."

McCabe resigned, the White House denied involvement in his decision and it does not appear that McCabe was pressured to leave because of the memo.

The president's son also made the incorrect assertion that "All of congress has seen it, not just the special committees," despite the Senate not having access to the memo.

"The FBI reaction to the memo is Indicative of a lot. All of congress has seen it, not just the special committees. Also weird that for the first time ever the media wants less info? What are they hiding?" Trump Jr. tweeted.

"It was good enough to fire McCabe, no one argues its factually inaccurate, but now days later they want to protect the names of those involved in a scandal that was big enough to fire a senior official a month before retirement? They don’t deserve a pass on that!"

The White House at a press briefing on Monday specifically denied involvement in McCabe's decision to resign.

President Trump has criticized McCabe publicly, but it appears the deputy director decided to step down early after a conversation with FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Wray and the FBI have been critical of the GOP Intelligence memo, arguing it should not be released. There has been talk that Wray could resign if it is released.

Wray was reportedly worried about a separate internal FBI investigation of the bureau's handling of a case involving Hillary Clinton's private email server. It is expected that the internal report from that probe could be critical of both McCabe and former FBI Director James Comey — whom Trump fired last year.

The FBI deputy chief's resignation came after weeks of pressure from congressional Republicans over his handling of the Hillary Clinton email case.


http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/371899-trump-jr-claims-mccabe-was-fired-due-to-what-was-in-nunes-memo

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