Reviews are in and this much-hyped memo that could still land us in a Constitutional crisis is a total effing "dud." But House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes doesn't know it—he's pretty proud of his work and sent out a statement to mark the occasion of his #winning!
"The Committee has discovered serious violations of the public trust, and the American people have a right to know when officials in crucial institutions are abusing their authority for political purposes," Nunes wrote in his statement following the release, adding that he hoped that the memo would lead to "reforms."
Okay, just to be clear, the memo appears to have uncovered nothing of the sort—more on that in future posts. But as flimsy as the material actually is, it's still a fabrication. In fact, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff said of the main contention in the memo, "none of this is true."
“The premise of the Nunes memo is that the FBI and DOJ corruptly sought a FISA warrant on a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, and deliberately misled the court as part of a systematic abuse of the FISA process. As the Minority memo makes clear, none of this is true.”
Schiff went on to say that the document "mischaracterizes highly sensitive classified information that few Members of Congress have seen," including Nunes, and "fails to provide vital context and information contained in DOJ’s FISA application and renewals."
The sole purpose of the Republican document is to circle the wagons around the White House and insulate the President. Tellingly, when asked whether the Republican staff who wrote the memo had coordinated its drafting with the White House, the Chairman refused to answer.
But Trump, who's spent a year now desperately clawing for a way to end the Russia probe and stop Robert Mueller, is already hinting at the idea of removing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein’s ouster appears to have been as baked in as we thought.