A redacted version of the Democratic response memo to the Republican / Nunes memo attacking the FBI has been released. Despite a variety of areas where entire sentences or even paragraphs were blacked out, I think it does a pretty good job of exposing the deep flaws in the Nunes memo. I've only read through it once, and I'll do a second pass and take notes before making a deeper analysis, but here is a brief synopsis and my first impression.
The response memo goes into greater detail then the Nunes memo. It is a bit more than 9 pages long with the last two+ pages being footnotes that support or explain the facts asserted earlier in the text. The main points from the Nunes memo that it refutes are as follows:
- The Nunes memo claims the Carter Page FISA warrant was based largely on the Steele dossier. The response memo refutes that by presenting the much larger body of evidence that was used and pointing out that the Steele dossier was used only in support of one specific claim (Page's trip to Russia and meetings with Russian officials there). Interestingly, the other evidence supporting the Page warrant was heavily redacted. In some cases, entire paragraphs were struck.
- The Nunes memo claims that the FISA judge was not informed of the political funding behind the Steele dossier. The response memo shows that claim to be false, even quoting text from the FISA application that lays bare how Steele was hired, and that the dossier was funded to find "information that could discredit Candidate #1's [Trump's] campaign."
- The Nunes memo claims that the FBI was not transparent about Steele's relationship with the FBI and his eventual removal as a source due to contacts with the press. The response memo lays out the timeline of events, showing that the media contacts and removal did not occur until after the initial FISA application, and that subsequent FISA renewals disclosed those facts about Steele to the court.
- The Nunes memo also makes claims about a Yahoo News article, saying it was improperly used as corroboration for the Steele dossier. The response memo points out that the article was used only to highlight Carter Page's public denials regarding meetings he had with Russian officials, not as corroboration of any assertions in the dossier.
- The response memo further goes on to pick apart other details of the Nunes memo, such as the characterization or relevance of statements made by Bruce Ohr and text messages sent by Steve Strozk and Lisa Page. As these claims always spoke more toward the motives of the FBI rather than the facts within the FISA application, they were always the weakest part of the Nunes memo, but evidently the Democrats felt they needed to respond.
Overall, the response memo mostly hits all the points I expected. The Nunes memo was already verbally criticized by members of the intelligence oversight committee. Their statements and other evidence in the public domain gave some strong hints of what a Democratic response memo might look like. What I find most interesting is not so much what it said, but what was redacted. When the memo gets to laying out the case against Carter Page... the real meat of what justified the FISA warrant to tap his phone... they struck out entire sentences and paragraphs.
One redaction in particular really leaped out at me. At the bottom of the first page of the response memo, we find the following sentence: "As the DOJ informed the court in subsequent renewals, [REDACTED] Steele's reporting about Page's Moscow meetings [REDACTED]."
What was in those two redacted blocks of text, and why leave in the mention of the Steele dossier when the sentence is rendered meaningless by that stripping away of context on either side of it? My first reaction was that it must be a clumsy attempt by the White House to alter the meaning of the sentence to make it seem like the Steele dossier was central to the renewal. But if you've followed any of my previous posts on the Nunes memo and the FISA warrant process, you know that to renew a FISA wire tap, you have to show the judge that it is producing the intelligence you thought it would. Given that fact, it seems likely the redacted text mentions Steele's reporting only to say that it was confirmed by the wire tap. In truth, the redacted portions were negotiated between Democrats and the FBI (not the White House), so this was probably about the FBI’s reluctance to reveal details about what the wire tap produced rather than an attempt distort.
In summary, I found the memo to be an effective refutation of the Nunes memo, one that might have been far more revealing if significant chunks of it had not been blacked out. Hopefully we will eventually learn more about what was redacted.
I’ll eventually post a more in depth analysis of the memo here and at my personal blog.
UPDATED: After some helpful feedback and subsequent research, I’ve changed the title and updated the diary to reflect the fact that redacted portions were negotiated between the Democrats and the FBI.
