Demo Memo(s)

The House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously Monday to release the Democrat rebuttal to the Republicans’ FISA memo. President Donald Trump will now have five days to decide if he will release it to the public, which he has previously stated he would do. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the author of this rebuttal memo, accused Republicans of seeking to distort the facts with the FISA memo produced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA). Democrats claim that Nunes coordinated with the White House in creating the FISA memo, a charge Nunes has strongly denied.

Meanwhile, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) “leaked” a six-page response to the FISA memo, in which he argues that the FBI’s acquiring of a FISA warrant based on the dubious and unverified Christopher Steele dossier was perfectly fine because of Steele’s solid reputation with the FBI and because the allegations made within the dossier have not been disproven.

Andrew McCarthy of National Review astutely notes that the court is interested in the credibility of eyewitnesses, not the reputation of the agent who collected the information. If the FBI, as the FISA memo alleges, relied heavily on the unverified information from the Steele dossier, then the FBI did not meet the standard necessary to justify receiving a surveillance warrant. McCarthy writes, “So far, the FBI and Justice Department have provided only cause for grave concern that they gave a federal court unverified, highly unreliable information that was essential to the court’s probable-cause finding, and that they did so without being candid with the court about the biases of the information’s purveyor. That being so, the burden is on the FBI and the Justice Department to prove that they did not act improperly in seeking the FISA warrant — especially since they, rather than the rest of us, are in possession of the information that they insist would vindicate them.”

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