Go Devin

During [a Fox & Friends] appearance, Nunes quite effectively acknowledged that a central tenet of the memo was inaccurate and that he himself appears not to understand critical aspects of the Russia investigation.

  WAPo

Apparently that's not how The Most Notable Loser saw it.

The central argument of Nunes’s memo is that the FISA warrant process was tainted by partisan politics in 2016, resulting in a warrant being obtained to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page based on information presented by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, whose work was funded by a law firm working for the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party — information withheld from the judge evaluating the warrant.

There are just a few problems with that argument. The first is that Steele had been a source for the FBI in the past, as the memo notes, and it’s not clear whether he knew who was funding his work. The second is that by the time that the warrant for Page was issued, he was no longer part of the Trump campaign.

I've also been seeing claims that only pertinent parts of the memo were used, and that, as you would expect, there were various other sources of facts in support of a warrant.

The third is that, as The Washington Post reported Friday, the court was informed of the potential for bias in the information Steele presented.

“Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeade asked Nunes about that.NUNES:

. . .[A] footnote saying that something might be political is a far cry from letting the American people know that the Democrats and the Hillary campaign paid for dirt that the FBI then used to get a warrant on an American citizen to spy on another campaign.

Wait a minute. The memo is complaining about information used to get a FISA warrant. FISA activity is supposed to be secret. Although the Steele dossier had already been leaked and published by Buzzfeed, nothing in those supporting documents for a FISA warrant were ever intended to be seen by the American people. And the GOP had already screamed bloody murder about the Hillary campaign paying for Steele "dirt".

It’s a very dangerous precedent that was set, and what we’re trying to do is just get the American public to understand what happened in this last election and understand we have a responsibility as the House Intelligence Committee to assure the American people that the FISA process is not being abused, and that’s what we did.

In no factual universe is that what they did.

[Nunes is saying] [t]hat this point was inaccurate in the memo is less important than the broader argument that the memo was making — an assertion undercut by the fact that the memo’s argument is dramatically softened by that inaccurate point.

(We’ll briefly note the irony of Nunes, whose committee has been criticized for not focusing on Russian meddling in the 2016 election, saying that “what we’re trying to do is just get the American public to understand what happened in this last election.”)

[...]

Nunes demonstrated a remarkable lack of understanding of one of the unintentionally vital aspects of the memo he released: its admission that New York Times reporting linked the launch of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign to the actions of another campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

[...]

NUNES: Well, I would say if Papadopoulos was such a major figure, why didn’t you get a warrant on him? If Papadopoulos was such a major figure, you had nothing on him — you know, the guy lied.

As far as we can tell, Papadopoulos never even knew who Trump — never even had met with the president.

And look, getting drunk in London and talking to diplomats saying that you don’t like Hillary Clinton is, really — I think it’s kind of scary that our intelligence agencies would take that and use it against an American citizen.

Everyone, except apparently Nunes, knows that Mueller got more than a warrant on Papadopoulos. He got an arrest and an agreement to cooperate. They surely have something on him. And, everyone, with perhaps the exception of Nunes, knows that Papadopoulos famously sat in a meeting with the president, because there's photographic proof that even Trump tweeted out.

Now, did Papadopoulos merely confide in the Australian diplomat that he didn't like Hillary? Right. Everybody but Nunes knows that one, too. What an embarrassment Nunes and Fox & Friends both are.

A former Trump transition team member, [Nunes] was criticized in early 2017 after having been shown classified documents by the White House which he then used to try to publicly defend Trump’s assertion that Trump Tower had been wiretapped in 2016. That effort was unsuccessful, and Nunes was investigated by the House Ethics Committee for having revealed classified information. (That investigation was dropped in December.)

They need to try again. And considering his position on the transition team, it is beyond absurd that he's the chair of a committee investigating that team.

Nunes’s assertions Monday morning were not dismantled by the hosts of “Fox and Friends.”

“He’s taking the fire,” Kilmeade said approvingly after the interview ended.

He's earning the fire.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.