The Nunes memo, annotated: 10 things that may not be as simple as they appear

The memo released by the House Intelligence Committee makes several claims that are in dispute. Here are key points in the debate.

Purpose

This memorandum provides Members an update on significant facts relating to the Committee's ongoing investigation into the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Our findings, which are detailed below, 1) raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and 2) represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.


David Lauter Washington Bureau Chief

Notably, this memo by the Intelligence Committee majority staff does not assert that the DoJ and FBI actions were illegitimate or illegal, just that they "raise concerns."

http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-pol-republican-memo-annotated-20180202-htmlstory.html

FBI texts show no evidence of conspiracy, WSJ finds

The Wall Street Journal read through 7,000 text messages from FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who have been intensely criticized after it emerged they had exchanged anti-Trump texts while Strzok was investigating Hillary Clinton and later Donald Trump. WSJ concluded that the "texts critical of Mr. Trump represent a fraction of the roughly 7,000 messages, which stretch across 384 pages and show no evidence of a conspiracy against Mr. Trump."

Why it matters: President Trump has gone so far as to accuse the pair of "treason," heightening the tension between the White House and the FBI. This WSJ's findings follow the release of the controversial Nunes memo, which the White House claims shows wrongful action against Trump on the part of the FBI.

https://www.axios.com/wsj-fbi-texts-1517601011-b7fd96d3-2c08-49b7-921c-96985963a029.html?

The disgrace is our Criminal President....

Exclusive: Conservative group calls for Rod Rosenstein's head

The Tea Party Patriots, a conservative activist group, is launching an advertising campaign calling on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to "do his job, or resign."

Why this matters: The campaign is modest — initially a six-figure spend on digital and TV in Washington D.C. — but the attack is a canary in the right-wing coal mine. I expect other conservative groups to follow. Such attacks have outraged many in the Justice Department and the FBI.

https://www.axios.com/conservative-group-ad-rod-rosenstein-resign-3cd8aec1-af54-49fa-906e-d30cbf19fd0d.html?source=sidebar

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Who could have guessed this would happen..

When you release classified information at least read it first...

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">So Team Nunes is admitting that Papadopoulos triggered the FBI's Russia investigation -- not the Steele dossier? <a href="https://t.co/2A3Mf4P1Of">pic.twitter.com/2A3Mf4P1Of</a></p>— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) <a href="https://twitter.com/mmurraypolitics/status/959478891604783105?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 2, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

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Rick Wilson

Nunes and his little friends
Vowed to bring the pain
But Devin's memo whiffed today
Like a fart in a hurricane

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 people on “the shows”.

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.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/sean-hannity-has-been-advising-donald-trump-on-the-nunes-memo-because-of-course-he-has/?via=twitter_page

Trumps speech ratings were even worse than you might have thought

So we know that President Trump’s claim Thursday morning on Twitter was inaccurate. “45.6 million people watched,” he wrote, “the highest number in history.” It isn’t the highest number in general (there is no highest number), and it isn’t the highest number for a presidential speech (the biggest in the last few decades was from Bill Clinton’s 1993 speech to a joint session of Congress), and it isn’t the highest number for a State of the Union address (Barack Obama’s viewership in 2010 was bigger).

State of the Union addresses — and other presidential addresses to joint sessions of Congress, like Trump’s last year — are fairly popular, by current standards. The viewership generally lands somewhere around where the Oscars are, a good bit above the Grammys. (Especially this year, when Grammy viewership sagged back down to where it had been in the mid-aughts.) It’s not at Super Bowl levels of interest, but, then, few things are.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/01/trumps-speech-ratings-were-even-worse-than-you-might-have-thought/?utm_term=.edd905c2fe48

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.

https://www.axios.com/rising-white-house-fear-nunes-memo-is-a-dud-1517518110-483bac89-a164-4aa9-8841-97f6d3329005.html?

Revelations About the FBIs Delay on Clinton Emails May Be Less Than They Seem

Reports have examined the lag in examining Hillary Clinton’s emails just before the 2016 election. But the question inside the FBI wasn’t whether to reveal the emails quickly — it was whether it was proper to reveal them at all.

Media reports this week have focused fresh attention on how the Federal Bureau of Investigation managed the dramatic discovery — five weeks before the 2016 presidential election — of what seemed to be a fresh trove of Hillary Clinton emails and the delay in investigating them that ensued. The articles are fueling Republican charges of an FBI cabal, intent on protecting the Democratic nominee.

Yet the latter view is contradicted by the evidence gathered in a multi-month ProPublica investigation last year that examined the FBI’s Clinton investigation. That article found that, indeed, crucial weeks dribbled away before the FBI took action — but there was no sign that any particular individual was intentionally stalling or that the delay was politically motivated.

This week’s stories, by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, have zeroed in on the FBI’s then deputy director, Andrew McCabe, who reportedly took three weeks or a month (depending on which account you believe) to order an examination of the new emails after an agent stumbled across them during a sex crimes investigation of Anthony Weiner, then the estranged husband of Clinton deputy Huma Abedin. Both stories report that the Justice Department inspector general — in the midst of a broad investigation of how the FBI and Justice Department managed the probe — is examining McCabe’s role.

https://www.propublica.org/article/revelations-about-the-fbis-delay-on-clinton-emails-may-be-less-than-they-seem#139970