To: Sdgla who wrote (1131059 ) 4/21/2019 4:56:30 PM From: sylvester80 Respond to of 1578230 Nunes is a lying corrupt criminal American traitor: Now We Know For Sure: Devin Nunes Lied About Everything motherjones.com I was busy/sleepy all weekend (they’re sort of the same thing these days) and I didn’t get a chance to dig into the just released FISA surveillance application that the FBI filed in 2016 against Carter Page, the goofball “energy analyst” who worked on the Donald Trump campaign in 2016 and was suspected by the FBI of being a target of Russian recruitment. As you’ll recall, Rep. Devin Nunes theatrically released a memo last February explaining why Republicans were so disturbed about this FISA application—but declined to release the text of the application so that the rest of us could see if Nunes was telling the truth about it. Democrats tried to respond to the Nunes memo, but the White House allowed them to release only a heavily redacted response, and as a result the whole affair was fuzzy enough that lots of people concluded that something funny was probably going on. Well, thanks to a FOIA request, we can now see the entire FISA application submitted by the FBI. Much of it is redacted, but that turns out not to matter very much. We can fairly easily match up the criticisms in the Nunes memo with the various sections of the application, and make some pretty good guesses about the rest of it. So let’s do that. The first excerpt is unrelated to the Nunes memo. It’s merely the starting point of the FISA application, stating that the FBI believes Russia is trying to recruit Page in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 election: Next, Nunes complains that the FISA application mentions George Papadopoulos: Papadopoulos is yet another sketchy member of Trump’s original foreign policy team, and it was his drunken conversation with the Australian ambassador to Britain in May 2016 that kicked off the FBI investigation in the first place. It’s true that there was apparently no cooperation between Page and Papadopoulos, but so what? He was mentioned solely as another member of the Trump foreign policy team—perhaps to draw the court’s attention to the fact that cooperating with Russia wasn’t unusual for Trump team members—and that was that. There’s no reason there should have been more since the FISA application was for surveillance of Page, not anyone else. Generally speaking, Nunes is obsessed with the idea that the entire surveillance operation against Page was justified solely by information in the “Steele dossier,” a collection of tittle tattle that he claims was partisan, untrustworthy, and unreliable. What’s more, he claims the court was never advised that the FISA application was largely based on evidence from the Steele dossier: This is flatly not true. Generally speaking, FISA applications use identifiers (“Source #1,” “Candidate #1,” etc.), and in this application there’s an entire page-long footnote spelling out the details of the information provided by Christopher Steele. A law firm hired Simpson, who hired Steele specifically to perform oppo research on Trump. The FISA court was very much aware of this, and was aware that it was most likely oppo research paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Steele had been a reliable source in the past, and here the FBI is explicitly saying that even though this is a partisan investigation, they believe Steele’s reporting to be credible. This is a reference to an article by Michael Isikoff about Page’s meetings with Russian officials. Nunes is outraged that the FBI doesn’t mention that Isikoff’s article isn’t independent verification of Page’s activities, but merely the same information recycled by Steele through a different outlet. However, that’s not why the FBI included this information. They included it because it was the Isikoff article that prompted Page to deny that he had met with any Russian officials.