The 5 Most Damning Truths From the FISA Memo That Have Dems Reeling
After weeks of discussion about a special memo prepared by the Republicans of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a document that was purported to detail abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by the Department of Justice and FBI, the memo has finally been released to the public, according to the Washington Examiner.
While the entirety of the memo in and of itself is rather damning — it can be read in full right here — there were five key revelations within it that should have Democrats back on their heels and scrambling to find an explanation.
The first truth unveiled by the memo is that the dubious “dossier” compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and political opposition research group Fusion GPS on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign was used by the DOJ and FBI to obtain a FISA warrant from the court.
That warrant obtained in October 2016 specifically targeted Carter Page, an American citizen who briefly served as a volunteer on candidate Trump’s campaign in 2016, and the veracity of the application for the warrant was certified by top officials of the DOJ and FBI.
However, the second major takeaway from the memo is that the FISA warrant application failed to disclose to the court exactly who had financed the dossier that served as the application’s foundation — information that should have been included.
As is now know, the dossier was funded in part by the DNC and Clinton campaign via the law firm Perkins Coie, but that relevant information was omitted from the initial FISA application as well as subsequent renewals of the warrant, despite the DOJ and FBI being aware of the financial origination of the dossier.
Third, the FISA warrant application cited as corroborating evidence an article in Yahoo News written by Michael Isikoff that was published on Sept. 23, 2016 and focused on a trip to Moscow made by Page in July 2016.
But that Yahoo News article couldn’t really be considered “corroboration” of the dossier compiled by Steele, as it was revealed that Steele himself had provided the information upon which this article was based to Isikoff. This tactic is known as circular sourcing, or making a single source of information appear as though it is coming from multiple independent sources.
Fourth, the memo revealed that Steele had been “suspended and then terminated” as a source with the FBI after it was discovered that he had lied to the bureau about previously undisclosed contacts with various members of the media.
Yet, despite Steele proving to the FBI that he was a liar and “less than reliable source” for the FBI, they continued to use his dossier as the foundation of the FISA warrant against Page and the Trump campaign.
Finally, the memo exposed contacts between Steele and then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr — whose wife Nellie was employed by Fusion GPS and participated in compiling the dossier — that occurred both before and after Steele’s relationship with the FBI was terminated. These potential conflicts of interest were not properly disclosed on the FISA warrant application.
That matters because Ohr testified to investigators that Steele had admitted to him that he held a strong bias against Trump and was purposefully working toward preventing him from being elected to the presidency.
The admitted anti-Trump bias of Steele, as well as the repeated contacts between Steele and Ohr, not to mention Ohr’s wife’s employment with Fusion GPS and her role in compiling the dossier, should all have been disclosed in the FISA warrant application. Inexplicably, they were not.
There were a few other incredibly important bits of information revealed in the four-page memo from the House Intel committee, but the five revelations and confirmations of prior suppositions listed above are awfully damning as is.
It will be interesting to see how Democrats and their liberal media allies choose to respond to this incredible bombshell of a memo that significantly undercuts the entire Russian collusion narrative by exposing the weak foundation of the dossier-supported FISA warrant upon which it all rests.
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